Incarceration and unwed fathers in Fragile Families

Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare, Sept, 2007 by Charles E. Lewis, Jr., Irwin Garfinkel, Qin Gao

That the combined reports of the mothers and fathers--38%--is seven percentage points higher than mothers reports alone suggests that mothers also under-reported the incarceration experience of their partners. Note also that, as expected, the combined estimate in the full mother sample--39%--is higher than the combined estimate in the father-interviewed sub-sample, but only by a small margin.

In the full sample, 57 percent of the mothers reported the father had never been incarcerated, while 62 percent of the mothers in the father sample reported the father was never incarcerated. Just 4 percent of the fathers in the full sample and 1 percent of the fathers in the smaller sample had unknown incarceration histories.

Given that our principal concern is the relationship between incarceration and post-incarceration labor market experience, a second advantage of Fragile Families data is that they provide additional control variables other than age, education, and ethnicity--all included in previous studies on incarceration. Fragile Families data also include measures on the subject's physical and mental health, drug and alcohol use and problems, and relationship with his biological father.

Because slightly more than a quarter of the fathers were not interviewed, we use mother-reported data about the father's incarceration history and labor market experience to analyze the full sample (N=3,293) allowing for the largest possible number of cases and eliminating potential selection bias if we limited the sample to interviewed fathers. However, the mothers' surveys only allow us to analyze one employment outcome--whether or not the father worked for pay the previous week. The sub-sample of fathers (N=2,406)--though smaller than the full mother interview sample--allows for an evaluation of a richer array of dependent variables for employment and earnings.

Using the smaller father sample raises questions of selection bias because it is likely fathers who made themselves available for interview are more attached to their children or to the mothers of their children. We expect the men in the fathers' sub-sample to work more and to have experienced less incarceration. Thus, limiting the study to these fathers may lessen the expected negative effects of incarceration on outcome variables.

Data Analysis

Descriptive statistics on the dependent and independent variables in our analysis are presented in Table 1. Presented in the first column are data for all fathers in the sub-sample. The next two columns compare fathers who were incarcerated to fathers who were never incarcerated. The fourth column presents data for the full mother sample.

Just over 10 percent of our sample of unwed fathers is white, nearly 60 percent of the sample is non-Hispanic black, and slightly less than 30 percent is Hispanic. Nearly 40 percent of the fathers did not complete high school, another 40 percent have only a high school diploma, and less than 5 percent earned a college degree. Furthermore, 17 percent of fathers reported drug or alcohol problems that interfered with their work or family, 16 percent reported some symptoms of depression, 17 reported poor or bad health, and 33 percent grew up without their father. These statistics are consistent in both the full sample and the smaller sample of fathers.