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Annual Review of Criminology

Volume 3, 2020

The Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Justice Contact

Abstract

This article provides a critical overview in five stages of roughly 50 years of research on the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact. In the first stage, I document that research on the intergenerational transmission of crime and criminal justice contact focused primarily on crime until the mid-1990s, at which point research rapidly shifted in the direction of criminal justice contact (specifically, incarceration). In the second stage, I document that research on the intergenerational transmission of crime and the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact tended to use the same measures—i.e., self-reported and administrative indicators of criminal justice contact with minimal information on criminal activity—but discussed them in different ways. In the third stage, I review research on the broader effects of incarceration to highlight mechanisms through which parental criminal justice contact may independently influence children's criminal activity. In the fourth stage, I review research on the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact. In the final stage, I conclude by calling for new data collection efforts that provide high-quality measures of both crime and criminal justice contact of both parents and children.

Keyword(s): crime in families, criminal justice contact, intergenerational transmission, measurement error, parental incarceration
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2020-01-13
2024-04-26
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/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-011419-041519
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The Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Justice Contact
Annual Review of Criminology 3, 217 (2020); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-criminol-011419-041519
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-011419-041519
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-criminol-011419-041519
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