Public Safety, Family Safety? The Reciprocal Relationship Between Mothers’ IPV Victimization and Fathers’ Incarceration

Families living in heavily policed and incarcerated communities bear a disproportionate burden of intimate partner violence (IPV), with serious consequences for children. Incidents of IPV may bring parents into contact with the criminal legal system, but parents’ criminal legal system contact (whether for IPV or other charges) may also precipitate IPV. This study examines the bidirectional relationship between inter-parental IPV and fathers’ contact with the criminal legal system, using data collected from young parents in the Future of Families and Child Well-being Study ( N = 4,898) when their children were ages 1, 3, 5, and 9. Autoregressive cross-lagged model results indicate that paternal incarceration (for any charge) predicts later maternal IPV victimization and that maternal IPV victimization predicts later paternal incarceration. Observed effects diminish over the child’s early years and are statistically insignificant by age 9. Beta values indicate that incarceration is a stronger predictor of later IPV than IPV is of later jailing or imprisonment. Extending prior empirical work on IPV and the legal system—traditionally focused more on outcomes of domestic violence calls for service, protective orders, and domestic violence criminal adjudication than on IPV-impacted families’ broader encounters with the legal system—this study suggests that in a time of mass incarceration, fathers’ broader criminal legal system contact may exacerbate early childhood IPV exposure.