Parental Incarceration, Child Homelessness, and the Invisible Consequences of Mass Imprisonment

Although the share of the homeless population composed of African Americans and children has grown since at least the early 1980s, the causes of these changes remain poorly understood. This article implicates mass imprisonment in at least the second of these shifts by considering the effects of parental incarceration on child homelessness using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. These are the only data that simultaneously represent a contemporary cohort of the urban children most at risk of homelessness, establish appropriate time-order between parental incarceration and child homelessness, and control for prior housing, which is vital given the imprisonment-homelessness nexus. Results show strong effects of recent but not distal parental incarceration on the risk of child homelessness. They also show that effects are concentrated among African American children. Taken together, results suggest that mass imprisonment exacerbates marginalization among disadvantaged children, thereby contributing to a system of stratification in which the children of the prison boom become virtually invisible.