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Text on screen: Vera Institute of Justice
Vera Voices Podcast Series
From the Neil A. *** Research Speaker Series.
"Incarceration and Population Health in Wealthy Democracies"
With Christopher Wilderman, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Yale University
Siobhan Carney: Welcome to Vera Voices, a podcast series from the Vera Institute of Justice.
I'm Siobhán Carney, Associate Research Director,
and I've here today with Christopher Wilderman, Assistant Professor of Sociology at Yale University,
and we're going to speak about his research on mass incarceration and the effects on families, health, and children.
Professor Wilderman, thank you for joining us today. So, let me start with a general question:
Why is it important to look at the issue of mass incarceration through a public health lens?
Christopher Wilderman: So, I think there are three key reasons that we need to do this.
So, the first is just that there's been a huge amount of research on the consequences of incarceration for crime
or for family life or for all these other sorts of outcomes. But for the most part, we've just cast health to the wayside.
So, the fact that we haven't looked at it at all, despite the fact that there could be effects there, is a big reason.
A second reason is just that health is a huge field of research.
We don't have a National Institute of Family Studies, for instance, but we have a National Institute of Health.
And so those are outcomes that are incredibly important to thinking about national wellbeing and sort of where we're going as a society.
The third reason, and maybe the most important, is that black-white especially but racial disparities more broadly,
and infant mortality, life expectancy at birth, age-specific mortality rates, and especially homicide rates,
have not decreased much in the last 25 years or so.
And so it does seem like the huge shifts in incarceration rates for African-Americans especially could be explaining, sort of,
the stubbornness of those inequalities.
Siobhan Carney: So, tell us about the implications of your work on mass incarceration and population health on wealthy democracies.
Christopher Wilderman: So, the first big finding from this research project is that incarceration
has no negative consequences for population health outside of the United States, in other wealthy democracies.
In the U.S., or, when we include the United States in the model, what you see is that incarceration
has a devastating effect on life expectancy at birth and the infant mortality rate.
And so you see a totally different picture.
Because it's only when you reach this very high rate of incarceration that you have all these negative spillover effects.
But when you're at a moderate rate of incarceration, 80, 100, even maybe 150 per hundred thousand,
you don't see these spillovers that we see otherwise.
Siobhan Carney: So, what does the U.S. picture look like?
Christopher Wilderman: If the U.S. incarceration rate had stayed at the 1980 level, life expectancy at birth
would have increased another year and a half in the United States.
And, of course, these effects are concentrated among low-income and minority populations
where the incarceration rate is also concentrated.
But, so, not only would the total life expectancy at birth in America have been much higher absent big shifts in incarceration,
but the racial disparities in life expectancy at birth also would have been much smaller if we hadn't experienced this huge increase.
Siobhan Carney: So, why are the effects of incarceration on health so different in the U.S.?
Christopher Wilderman: At higher rates, we get worse and worse at focusing on people who are involved in high levels
of really destructive criminal behavior, essentially.
And those are the folks who are worst for the health of everyone around them, right?
And so at very high rates, it's the types of people who are more likely to be contributing to society or families or their communities.
Whereas at very low rates, it's people who might fit more with sort of the stereotypical image of a criminally active guy
who's, you know, on the margins of society and doing all these sorts of things.
Siobhan Carney: And what are you learning about the effects of incarceration on families?
Christopher Wilderman: So, there are a couple of key findings that we've come up with.
The first is that paternal incarceration is an incredibly common experience for African-American children.
So about 1 in 4 African-American children born in 1990 had their father imprisoned at some point.
When you restrict it to African-American children whose fathers didn't finish high school, it's about 1 in 2.
So, it's an incredibly common experience.
The second is that having your father go to prison has negative effects on a whole range of child outcomes
beyond poverty or parental criminality or family structure; all these other pre-existing risk factors that these children had.
So, it increases a whole host of behavioral and mental health problems, from internalizing behaviors to externalizing behaviors
to the physically aggressive behaviors that are often precursors to criminal activity in adulthood.
It also increases the risk of infant mortality, increases the risk of child homelessness. So it has these negative direct effects on children.
Because it's so much more common for African-American children than for white children
and has such substantial negative effects on individual children, what we've shown is that mass incarceration
actually has very large effects on inequality among children.
In terms of children's total behavioral problems, infant mortality, homelessness, all these other sorts of outcomes,
the effects on racial inequality are actually much larger than they are for adults.
And so what we think that suggests is that the real large effects of mass incarceration on inequality
won't actually be felt now, but will be felt in the future.
Siobhan Carney: So, lastly, what key questions remain in your research?
Christopher Wilderman: To what degree do we need to treat these criminal justice issues as social welfare problems instead of criminal justice problems?
So, maybe by shifting the focus away from the criminal justice side of the issue and shifting it more toward the social welfare
side of the issue we'll make more progress in terms of thinking about how to minimize the consequences of mass incarceration.
But that, I think, is the real; sort of the next wave of figuring out what we need to do.
Text on screen: Vera Institute of Justice
Vera Voices Podcast Series 0:06:37.000. 0:06:38.000 From the Neil A. *** Research Speaker Series.
"Incarceration and Population Health in Wealthy Democracies"
With Christopher Wilderman, Assistant Professor of Sociology, Yale University
Vera Institute of Justice Research Department, www.vera.org/research