Examining the Pathway from Maternal Criminal Involvement to Adolescent Delinquency

As incarceration rates across the United States have continued to rise, there has been growing concern with the unintended consequences that have resulted. This has prompted researchers across multiple disciplines to study the effects of incarceration at the individual, family, community, and societal levels. An important but overlooked factor pertains to extensive multiple social service agency involvement and missed opportunities for intervention. Families involved with the criminal justice system (CJS) are often at risk of involvement with other human service agencies, one agency being the child welfare system (CWS). Little is known about families who fall within these two systems, and neither system is charged with assessing whether families in this group are unique from those involved in either system. The current study aimed to address limitations in previous studies and supplement the literature in relation to families with dual-system involvement. A nationally representative, longitudinal data set was analyzed to examine whether maternal CJS involvement predicted later youth delinquency within the CWS population. The moderating effects of parental monitoring, nonviolent discipline, and timing of maternal arrest were also examined to gain a better understanding of the conditions in which maternal CJS involvement was exacerbated or ameliorated. Maternal CJS involvement was a significant predictor of change in youth delinquency only in the presence of the moderating variables. Youth with maternal CJS involvement experienced decreases in delinquency regardless of monitoring compared to similar youth who experienced more delinquency in the presence of low monitoring. A timing effect was found such that youth whose mothers were arrested 4.5 to 9.5 years ago were more likely to have elevated delinquency scores at the MATERNAL CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT 5 follow-up assessment. The results of the study suggest families with dual-system involvement are distinct from other families in the CWS. Given concerns to the intergenerational transmission of criminality, this study highlights the importance of interagency coordination around policy and interventions so that at-risk families avoid slipping through the cracks of multiple service involvement. MATERNAL CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT 6 Examining the Pathway from Maternal Criminal Involvement to Adolescent Delinquency The prison population in the United States is the largest in the world and continues to grow at the highest rate compared to other countries (Walmsley, 2009). Reforms in U.S. criminal justice policies in the 1980s and 1990s, including mandatory sentencing laws, have increased the number of people coming into contact with the criminal justice system (CJS) and lengthened prison sentences (Phillips et al., 2010). An estimated one in thirty-two adults in the United States is under some form of correctional supervision, including parole (Bureau of Justice, 2010). This expansion of the CJS has been associated with unintended consequences for children and families (Travis & Waul, 2003). Rates of parental incarceration have increased 79% between 1991 and 2007 (Glaze & Marushak, 2008). In 1999, nearly 3.6 million parents were under some form of correctional supervision (Mumola, 2000), with 1.1 million having been incarcerated at the local, state, or federal level (Parke & Clarke-Stewart, 2002). Approximately 2.3% of American children have been affected by the incarceration of a parent (Glaze & Marushak, 2008). This is 3.5 times more children than those affected by autism spectrum disorders (Dallaire & Wilson, 2010). These children are five times more likely than other children to become incarcerated in the future (Seymour & Hairston, 2000). The growing trend of parental involvement within the CJS poses a serious public problem, given the intergenerational transmission of crime and incarceration (Dallaire 2007; Huebner & Gustafson 2007; Murray& Farrington 2005). MATERNAL CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT 7 Many of the factors that have put families at risk of CJS involvement have also put them at risk of involvement with other systems, as many issues cut across human service agency boundaries (Ross, 2011). One system in particular that has shared many of the risk factors with CJS involvement is the child welfare system (CWS). Many of the adversities associated with criminal activity, such as economic hardship, family instability, parental substance abuse, maternal mental illness, have also been associated with child maltreatment and neglect. Alternatively, parental involvement in the CJS may have disrupted family functioning, such as parenting practices, which may have called attention to the CWS authorities. For these reasons, it would be expected that some degree of overlap exists within these two systems. The high rates of parental arrest history in the CWS population compared to the general population has suggested there is indeed an overlap. One-third of the families in the CWS population have had a parent arrested at least once, with 1 in 8 families having had a parent arrested in the past 12 months (Bureau of Justice, 2010; Phillips et al., 2010). Little is known of families that fall into both systems. It is possible that these families are distinct from others in either system, although they might share similar adversity. If this is the case, they might require specialized services that neither system has been giving them. It is imperative that researchers investigate these families in greater detail to know whether their needs are being met. Parental Incarceration and Youth Delinquency A relationship has been repeatedly demonstrated between parental incarceration and child delinquency across multiple studies and meta-analyses MATERNAL CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT 8 (Giordano, 2010; Murray, Farrington, & Sekol, 2012; Swisher & Roettger, 2011). Furthermore, parental incarceration and arrest have been identified as independent risk factors accounting for unique variability in the prediction of youth delinquency even after statistically controlling for other risk factors (Kinner et al., 2007; Murray & Farrington, 2005). Murray and Farrington (2005) examined whether parent-child separation due to parental incarceration predicted boys' antisocial problems. They used longitudinal data from the Cambridge Study in Delinquent Development to compare 411 males separated from their parents because of parental incarceration with four control groups: males whose parents were not incarcerated and did not experience any kind of parental separation of 1 month or more from age 0 to 10; males who experienced separation in their first 10 years due to parental hospitalization or death; males separated for other reasons (mainly divorce) in their first 10 years; and males whose parents were incarcerated only before their birth. Individual and family risk factors were gathered at baseline in 1961 when the boys were 8-11 years old, and outcome data were collected at ages 18 and 32 years. The majority of the sample was Caucasian (97%) and of British origin. The results showed that separation due to parental incarceration predicted the boys' antisocial problems later in life, even after controlling for individual, parenting, and family risk factors. This suggested that parental incarceration was not only a proxy of parental criminality but also a risk factor predicting youth antisocial problems over and above parental criminality and disadvantages commonly associated with incarceration. Further, the group with parental incarceration occurring during the first 10 years of a child's life had MATERNAL CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT 9 significantly higher levels of antisocial problems later in life than the other groups, which pointed to a potential sensitive period for exposure to parental arrest. Maternal incarceration has also been linked with offspring involvement with the CJS. Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth 1979, researchers examined whether maternal incarceration predicted adult offspring antisocial problems (Huebner & Gustafson, 2007). Data were collected from adults yearly from 1979 to 1994 and biannually from 1996 to 2000. Analysis focused on 1697 adult offspring and their mothers (n = 1258). Adult offspring of incarcerated mothers were significantly more likely to have been convicted of a crime or been on probation than the adult offspring of mothers who were not incarcerated. A series of logistic regression models showed that maternal absence increased the chance of conviction by 75 percent and that males were 3.5 times more likely to have been convicted of a crime or served time on probation. Although parental incarceration has been identified as an independent risk factor for youth delinquency, others have argued that the risk for delinquency reflects socio-demographic risk experiences that may not be teased apart easily in bivariate relationships but emerge longitudinally (Eddy & Reid, 2003; Hagan & Foster, 2011). Some longitudinal research has suggested that parental incarceration fails to predict change in delinquency over time when controlling for sociodemographics risks. In a national birth cohort study of Australian youth sampled at birth and studied at 14 years of age (n = 2399), parental imprisonment failed to predict youth externalizing behavior after controlling for risks for MATERNAL CRIMINAL INVOLVEMENT 10 deviancy and parental incarceration (Kinner, Alati, Najman, & Williams, 2007). Research is needed that takes advantage of rigorous and longitudinal design to examine the unique effect of parental incarceration. Although experimental designs remain elusive, studies are needed that account for many of the factors associated with parental incarceration as well as adverse youth outcomes. Factors that have been most strongly associated with parental incarceration and youth delinquency are poverty, neighborhood quality, parental marital status, parental substance abuse, parenta