Despite growing attention to the unintended intergenerational consequences of incarceration, little is known about whether and how paternal incarceration is related to children’s food insecurity, an especially acute and severe form of deprivation. In this article, I use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a cohort of urban children born to mostly unmarried mothers, to examine the relationship between paternal incarceration and food insecurity among young children. Results from the most rigorous modeling strategy, propensity score matching models that further adjust for all covariates, indicate that recent paternal incarceration is associated with an increased likelihood of current food insecurity (at age five), an increased likelihood of onset into food insecurity (between ages three and five), and a decreased likelihood of exit from food insecurity (between ages three and five), but only among children living with fathers prior to incarceration. These associations are partially explained by changes in the parental relationship occurring after the onset of paternal incarceration. Taken together, the findings highlight the salience of parental relationships in linking paternal incarceration to children’s food insecurity and have a number of implications for public policy.
Research
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DP2014-12_turney.pdf