What’s the extent of children’s exposure to a relative who is charged or jailed?

A study led by a Northeastern University law professor explores how prevalent U.S. children’s exposure is to a family member’s criminal charge, conviction or incarceration beyond just a parent’s arrest. Illustration by Renee Zhang

When someone is charged with a crime, convicted or jailed, the impact often reaches the children left behind.

Beyond the stigma of having a family member involved in the criminal justice system, it can also create tangible hardships for children – such as unstable housing, lost income or disrupted education that may follow them the rest of their lives. 

Now, research led by Northeastern University assistant teaching law professor Naoka Carey shows just how widespread it is for a child in America to have a relative who comes in contact with this system. The study found that over a 22-year period, one in seven U.S. children had a family member who was criminally charged within the previous five years.

Carey said the results came with some surprises.

“It has almost become a normative experience,” she said. “The U.S. is a huge outlier in the number of people we put through the criminal system.”

The existing literature on children’s exposure to the criminal justice system typically focuses on parents who are jailed or imprisoned, which has been found to be a social determinant of health – or a health factor related to a person’s environment or socioeconomic status – linked to behavioral concerns, unmet healthcare needs and more, the study said. 

But this research sought to evaluate those exposures beyond incarceration, like charges and convictions, and to encompass other household members – including siblings, aunts, uncles and grandparents – as extended families may contribute to the household in various ways.

“Parents are super important, obviously, in children’s lives, but parents aren’t the only important people,” she said. “If a household is relying on different family members’ income and you lose one of those, or the whole household faces eviction because somebody gets a record or even just an arrest, in public housing, that can happen.”

The idea for this study came out of Carey’s Ph.D. dissertation, when she was studying applied developmental and educational psychology. She was interested in longer term consequences of what happens in a household when family members are touched by the criminal legal system. Documenting the prevalence and how it changed over time was the first step.

The study, published recently in JAMA Open Network, used a dataset built on state criminal justice data and U.S. Census Bureau information from the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System. It included more than 76 million children across 24 states between 2000 and 2021, and took 20 months for the study authors to sift through.

The data was presented in two ways: encounters with the criminal justice system in the same year and within the previous five years to also include those cases that are ongoing or have impacts that last longer than a single instance, Carey said.

The results showed 11.6% of children — or a little more than 1 in 10 — had a family member with any kind of conviction in the past five years. Additionally overall, 3.6% of children had a family member with a felony conviction and 1.4% of children had a family member who was incarcerated. Parents made up about three-quarters of these family members.

Each year, 5.4% of children in the study dataset had a family member who was charged with a crime and 3.8% had a family member convicted.

While the number of children whose parents were charged declined as the children got older, the proportion of children who had a family member facing a charge stayed the same through their youth. But the share of children who had a family member charged, convicted or incarcerated increased from 6% in 2000 to 19% in 2019.

This increase, Carey said, means that something can be done about it.

Patrice Collins, assistant professor at Northeastern’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice who was not part of the study, said the work shows “the true toll of incarceration” and “helps make an invisible population visible.”

“It’s not just the person who is incarcerated, or even someone who has come home after serving their time, who experiences the weight of it. Their children carry it. Their partners carry it. Their siblings and communities carry it too. I describe them as the forgotten victims of the criminal legal system because their lived experiences are often left out of the public conversation about legal punishment,” she said.

The findings could help shine a light on how society – including policymakers, educators, family advocates and practitioners, Collins added.

“We must name these adversities and measure them so we can provide the supports, policies and interventions that communities and families need,” she said.

At the same time, the study had some limitations that “suggest that our results may underestimate children’s family (criminal legal contact) exposure,” the authors wrote. This includes the lack of access to data for people who were jailed before trial, youth who were jailed or federal cases.