Surveys, Records, and the Study of Incarceration in Families

More than 2 million American children have a parent incarcerated, making the consequences of parental incarceration for families critical to understand. A growing literature documents significant challenges not only among incarcerated men, but also among their spouses, partners, and children. Much remains to be learned about these experiences; however, and the data available for doing so are limited. This analysis takes steps to improve the quality of available data on paternal incarceration by supplementing a leading population-based survey of families with administrative criminal history records from a state criminal justice agency. While this administrative supplement provides only a lower-bound on the extent of criminal justice involvement in our sample, it increases the number of fathers identified with criminal histories by more than 20%. Building upon such a supplement, in our current survey or future ones, stands to improve the identification of justice-involved fathers on a broader scale.