The rapid growth of the prison system over the last three decades represents a critical institutional intervention in the lives of American families, which may have far-reaching and unintended consequences for demographic processes. In this paper, we investigate how exposure to the criminal justice system affects the fertility of men. Using propensity score matching methods and data from multiple sources, we show that incarceration constrains the ferility of men and that these reductions would not have been due to individual choice in the absence of incarceration. Although incapacitation lowers the parity of men while incarcerated, we find that these parity reductions are offset by catch-up fertility when released. Spending time in prison significantly lowers the parity of male inmates by as much as one birth. Our findings are robust to different model specifications and data sources.

https://faculty.washington.edu/blsykes/Publications_files/fertility_incarceration_v8-1.pdf

The Demographic Implications of the Prison Boom

Choice or Constraint? Mass Incarceration and Fertility Outcomes Among American Men ∗

Most graduate students in American politics are familiar with Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Yet few political scientists know that Tocqueville initially came to the United States in the early 19 th century to study its prisons, not its democratic institutions and civil society. Tocqueville and his traveling companion Gustave de Beaumont came to study the American penitentiary, which had become world famous by the 1830s. Tocqueville collected notes for his classic study of the social and political conditions of the new republic as he and Beaumont traveled from prison to prison, interviewing wardens and prisoners and collecting information about everything from living conditions to disciplinary practices. Tocqueville’s paeans to democracy in Democracy in America are widely cited. Yet his and Beaumont’s dark observations about the connection between the penal system and American democracy are seldom noted. Tocqueville and Beaumont warned nearly 200 years ago: “While society in the United States gives the example of the most extended liberty, the prisons of the same country offer the spectacle of the most complete despotism” (1979, 79). Their dark observations are even truer today. Throughout American history, politicians and public officials have exploited public anxieties about crime and disorder for political gain. Over the last three decades, these political strategies and public anxieties have come together in the perfect storm. They have radically transformed U.S. penal policies, spurring an unprecedented prison boom. Since the early 1970s, the U.S. prisoner population has increased by more than sixfold (Manza and Uggen 2006, 95). The emergence and consolidation of the U.S. carceral state is a major milestone in American political development that arguably rivals in significance the expansion and contraction of the welfare state in the postwar period. The government began to exercise vast new controls over millions of people, resulting in a remarkable change in the distribution of authority since the 1970s in favor of law enforcement and corrections at the local, state, and federal levels. The United States has built a carceral state that is unprecedented among industrialized countries and in U.S. history. 1 Today the United States is the world’s warden, incarcerating a higher proportion of its people than any other country. Nearly one in every 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison today (Pew Center on the States, 2008). The U.S. incarceration rate is five to

The Demographic Implications of the Prison Boom

Citations

Choice or Constraint? Mass Incarceration and Fertility Outcomes Among American Men ∗

City on a Hill, City Behind Bars : Criminal Justice, Social Justice, and American Exceptionalism

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