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

Christopher Wildeman, Yale University

The share of the homeless population composed of African Americans and children has grown since the early 1980s, but the causes of these changes remain poorly understood. This article implicates mass imprisonment in these shifts by considering the effects of recent paternal and maternal 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 recent parental incarceration and child homelessness, and include information about prior housing. Results show substantial effects of recent paternal (but not maternal) incarceration on the risk of child homelessness. Furthermore, these effects are concentrated among black children. Thus, findings suggest that mass imprisonment may have played a role in the growth of the population of homeless children even during the economic boom of the late 1990s.