Learned Behavior: With Parents in Prison, Do Children Develop Lasting Bad Health Habits?

According to a national survey by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, more than 50 percent of state inmates and more than 60 percent of federal inmates had children under the age of 18. It seems likely that many of these children could be growing up in unstable homes, with so many parents being incarcerated.

Investigating the impact of this problem, Annie Gjelsvik, Dora Dumont, and Amy Nunn co-authored “Incarceration of a Household Member and Hispanic Health Disparities: Childhood Exposure and Adult Chronic Disease Risk Behaviors” in Preventing Chronic Disease. In this study, published in May 2013, the authors investigated the eventual health impact of having a parent or household member incarcerated during an individual’s childhood. They measured this impact by tracking selected health risks, including smoking, heavy drinking, physical inactivity, and unhealthy weight status. Through their research, the authors found an increase in some, but not all, of these risk behaviors.

The authors collected data from the 2009 and 2010 Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System, which is a CDC telephone-based survey administered by the states. From these surveys, they used the data from the jurisdictions that included a series of questions about other adverse childhood experiences, giving data for a total of 81,910 survey respondents of whom 6.5 percent said they had an incarcerated household member during their childhood. From this data, the authors observed the responses to questions about four types of risk behavior: (1) smoking, (2) heavy drinking, (3) overweight or obese weight status, and (4) physical inactivity. The authors included an additional three-level variable, recording whether each respondent engaged in zero to one risk behaviors, two risk behaviors, or three to four risk behaviors. They took this data and ran a regression on the population, and then they separated the population into three groups by ethnicity (non-Hispanic white, non-Hispanic black, and Hispanic) and ran separate regressions on each group. In each regression, the authors controlled for sex, age, level of education, and for separate adverse childhood experiences.

In the full-population regression, respondents who had an incarcerated household member during their childhood were more concentrated among younger age groups. They were much more likely to quit school before finishing high school (17 percent versus 6 percent). They were more than three times as likely to report three or more separate adverse childhood experiences (68 percent versus 19 percent). They were more than twice as likely to smoke (39 percent versus 18 percent). Finally, they were also more likely to report heavy drinking (eight percent versus five percent). However, having an incarcerated household member was not significantly associated with weight or physical inactivity.

In the stratified regression, the three different regressions showed different associations across different ethnic groups. Non-Hispanic white respondents were more likely to smoke, drink heavily, and report two risk behaviors. Hispanic respondents were more likely to smoke, drink heavily, and report three or more of the risk behaviors. Non-Hispanic black respondents did not show any significant differences in risk behavior.

The study showed that children of incarcerated parents are likelier than other children to smoke as adults, drink heavily as adults, and have suffered other adverse events in their childhood. The data was not perfect, as the authors were not able to use the survey data from most states because of the variation in asking about adverse childhood experiences. Also, the survey did not include questions about the respondents’ level of income or about whether the respondents had ever been incarcerated, so the authors were not able to control for these variables. Still, as more and more children grow up with parents in prison, it is important to understand what negative outcomes tend to follow. Further research in this area can lead to a better understanding of the true social cost of criminal punishment over the span of generations. Armed with this greater knowledge, policymakers can then take actions that will help to minimize these costs and close the revolving door of the criminal justice system.

Article Source: Annie Gjelsvik, Dora M. Dumont, and Amy Nunn, “Incarceration of a Household Member and Hispanic Health Disparities: Childhood Exposure and Adult Chronic Disease Risk Behaviors,” Preventing Chronic Disease (2013).

Feature Photo: cc/(wwarby)