Socius recently published a study including research done in partnership with FWD.us examining the impact mass incarceration has on families. Late last year, FWD.us issued the Every Second report, based on the same underlying survey, which found that nearly half of all adults in the United States have an immediate family member who is either formerly or currently incarcerated. The research was conducted by FWD.us and an academic research team based out of Cornell University.

This groundbreaking study was the first to quantify the impact of mass incarceration on families and expose the millions of people who have felt the the blow of having a loved one behind bars. Responses were collected from communities that are often overlooked in national surveys – including millennials, impoverished families, and Spanish speakers.

“These new findings bring to light the staggering scale of the United States’ incarceration crisis, as nearly 1 in 2 American adults has an immediate family member who is currently or has previously spent time behind bars,” said FWD.us President Todd Schulte. “This research corroborates what too many families have known for too long: our current criminal justice system is harming our economy, communities, and families and undermining the promise of what America can and should be.”

View the full Socius article here.

More coverage on Every Second below.

Gizmodo // George Dvorsky // Upsetting Research Shows Nearly Half of Americans Have a Family Member Who’s Been Imprisoned

Upsetting Research Shows Nearly Half of Americans Have a Family Member Who’s Been Imprisoned

The United States puts more people in prison than any other country in the world, yet little is known about the ways this sad reality impacts the immediate family members of those who are incarcerated. An alarming new study is revealing the extent of the issue, showing that 45 percent of all Americans have had a close family member sent to jail at some point.

A new study published this week in the science journal Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World opens with a rather straightforward query:

What percentage of Americans have ever had a family member incarcerated?

It’s a valid question, given that over 2 million Americans are in jail at any given point in time—around 714 per every 100,000 U.S. residents. The new research, led by sociologist Peter Enns from Cornell University, was an effort to quantify this mass incarceration rate in terms of the immediate family members involved, namely fathers, mothers, spouses, brothers, sisters, and children.

Results of the study—considered the most thorough of its kind to date—shows that 45 percent of U.S. residents have had a close family member jailed or imprisoned for one night or more. This figure increases for African-Americans and individuals with lower levels of education.
These statistics were pulled from an extensive survey involving over 4,000 people, and the results came as a surprise even to the researchers who predicted figures at “half that rate,” according to a press release. Consequently, the effects of mass incarceration on American families, as this new research suggests, are largely unknown and under-appreciated.

For the study, Enns and his colleagues devised a questionnaire they called the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS), which was administered during the summer of 2018. A central focus of the survey was to include as wide a cross section of people as possible, making issues of accessibility, inclusivity, and a willingness to participate in the survey a major priority. The researchers also made sure Americans who often get excluded from similar surveys were not forgotten; to that end, a field staff was used to conduct in-person recruitment, and they reached out to young adults, Spanish-speaking individuals, people of lower socioeconomic status, households without internet, and other hard-to-reach households. Also, all respondents were assured their answers would remain confidential.

The authors claim their new study is the most thorough investigation of this issue to date, saying previous approaches made it “impossible” for sociologists to estimate the rate of family member incarceration, as Christopher Wildeman, a professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell and a co-author of the study, told Gizmodo.

“We think that much of this lag in focus on the criminal justice system is driven by the fact that it has historically been considered and is still sometimes considered something unusual,” said Wildeman. “Using a nationally representative survey and questions designed specifically to gauge the level of family member incarceration, we were able to show definitively that family member incarceration is quite common. So the survey mechanism was not unique for generating these sorts of estimates, but the questions themselves.”

Over 4,000 people completed an initial screener survey asking if a family member had ever been incarcerated (a family member being a spouse, partner, co-parent, biological, step, or adoptive parent, sibling, or child). Those who answered yes were then asked to complete a second, more detailed, survey.

Overall, 45 percent of U.S. residents surveyed said they have had an immediate family member put in jail or incarcerated. Among African Americans, this figure was considerably higher and closer to 63 percent. For Hispanics it was 48 percent and for whites it was 42 percent. Around 60 percent of individuals who didn’t compete high school had an immediate family member incarcerated, regardless of ethnicity. Siblings were the most common type of family member to be incarcerated, an unexpected result that will require further research.

Among college-educated whites, family incarceration was just slightly above 15 percent. As the level of education increased, however, the chance of a white person having a family member incarcerated decreased. Such was not the case for African Americans, for whom the chances remained the same regardless of their level of education. Around 70 percent of African Americans who didn’t complete high school had a family member incarcerated, a figure that crept up marginally to 71 percent for African Americans who had finished high school.

“We are very confident in the data,” said Wildeman, “We used a top survey firm—NORC at the University of Chicago—a well-regarded nationally representative sample, and got advice on the survey from a broad range of criminal justice experts and polling experts.”

The only limitation worth mentioning, he said, was that the survey did not include individuals who are currently in prison or jail.

In terms of where to go next, Wildeman and his colleagues would like to figure out how incarceration affects family members.

“We have some additional questions in the dataset—on health, feelings about the criminal justice system, and political involvement, to name a few domains—that will provide some preliminary evidence,” he said. “But we really do need to get out and figure out just how this affects family members.”