Abstract: This article explores intergenerational implications, specifically the troubled transitions of the children of incarcerated fathers from adolescence to adulthood. Although crime rates have decreased annually since the early 1990s, the social exclusion of fathers through imprisonment has increased, as has the further exclusion of young adults through homelessness, health-care uninsuredness, and political nonparticipation. Our latent class analysis indicates that 15 percent of youth are socially excluded, an estimate similar to administrative estimates of severely “disconnected” youth. We combine the logic of a cumulative disadvantage theory and the status attainment paradigm with three waves of the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health) to examine the effects of father’s imprisonment on the social de tainment and exclusion of children during the transition to adulthood. Problems of socialization and strain associated with the incarceration and absence of biological fathers, as well as state sanctioning of youth from these disrupted families, are important aspects of the cumulative process of disadvantage that we identify in these data; however, the interconnected roles of father’s incarceration and intergenerational educational detainment are pivotal in producing exclusionary outcomes for children in emerging adulthood. Although there is much evidence that the effects we examine are generic across gender, there is also more specific evidence that the absence of biological fathers from households associated with incarceration leaves daughters at special risk of abuse and neglect by nonbiological father figures and through homelessness during the transition to adulthood. Keywords: parental incarceration, social exclusion, life course, cumulative disadvantage, emerging adulthood. Family background indisputably matters for children, although our understanding of this is limited. Robert M. Hauser, Jennifer T. Sheridan, and John Robert Warren (1999) report that the effect of family background on occupations is cumulative and indirect: operating most prominently through education, but also through other institutions from infancy through adulthood. David L. Featherman (1971) found that effects of father’s status origins are funneled through son’s education. Warren, Sheridan and Hauser (2002) recently extended confidence in this finding, but they also warned that a “remaining direct effect of family background may be due to factors like direct inheritance of business or farms, social networks of information exchange, and affinities between employers and employees from similar socioeconomic backgrounds” (p. 433). These residual concerns are about private sector advantages in intergenerational