Here is a new study by Christopher Wildeman (pdf):
This article estimates the effects of imprisonment on infant mortality using data from the United States, 1990-2003. Results using state-level data show consistent effects of imprisonment rates on infant mortality rates and absolute black-white inequality in infant mortality rates. Estimates suggest that had the American imprisonment rate remained at the 1973 level—the year generally considered the beginning of the prison boom—the 2003 infant mortality rate would have been 7.8% lower, absolute black-white inequality in the infant mortality rate 14.8% lower. Results using micro-level data from the Pregnancy Risk Assessment Monitoring System (PRAMS) show that recent parental incarceration elevates early infant mortality risk, that effects are concentrated in the postneonatal period, and that partner violence moderates these relationships. Importantly, results suggest that recent parental incarceration elevates the risk of early infant death by 29.6% for the average infant in the sample. Taken together, results show that imprisonment may have consequences for population health and inequality in population health and should be considered when assessing variation in health across nations, states, neighborhoods, and individuals.
What is the identification strategy? Including a “full set of controls” seems unlikely to control for most of the unobservables correlated with crime…
It’s described in the paper. The usual controls, plus an index of stressful events. Unexamined variable bias strikes me as likely, though to be fair the author does state that the purpose of the paper is to demonstrate a relation, and not to prove a particular mechanism.
Seems to me that the obvious thing to do is to see whether infant mortality predicts parental imprisonment as well as parental imprisonment predicts infant mortality. Since causality only goes one way in time, we would expect the correlation between prior imprisonment and later infant mortality to be stronger than the reverse, if there’s truly a causal effect in play.
On my reading, the paper absolutely claims causality. In the abstract (quoted above) the author claims that infant mortality would be lower if the imprisonment rate was lower. There is no basis for making this and other claims if he has merely “demonstrated a relation”. Similar causal claims are made in the conclusion, as well. He does hedge his bets a little bit when mentioning the study’s limitations, but treats that as a minor point.
I agree that confounding is probably a big problem with this paper. I like your suggestion for further study.
WHY ARE WE PUTTING INFANTS IN PRISON!!?
LOL!
Clearly we need to put more people in prison to control the population.
It’s worth noting that parental imprisonment here does not mean maternal imprisonment exclusively. Paternal imprisonment is also considered.
If you lock up the bad buggers so that, for the time being, they can’t breed, that leaves fewer infants and babes exposed to their bad buggerhood. Seems to me that that might improve infant mortality figures for the nation. Did the authors comment on that?
Only the Evil Francis of Galton (may his memory be forever cursed!) believed that. St. Charles of Darwin proved that couldn’t possibly be true (I can’t remember where exactly, but everybody knows it.)
I don’t mean this to be cruel, but how is this worse than Levitt’s abortion theory?
The King Herod theory of crime control.
Just to be clear, I’m not a fan of Levitt’s theory.
Because liberals are in favor of legal abortion.
“that effects are concentrated in the postneonatal period, and that partner violence moderates these relationships”
Wait, what?
It’s bad for Baby when you lock up Daddy, unless Daddy beats Mommy. The locking up Daddy eliminate one risk to Baby.
*Then* locking up Daddy . . .
The reported result is plausible. Mostly, we’re talking about fathers. Except for abusive partners, locking up fathers creates a risk to the health of their infant children. Now that seems only reasonable. They aren’t there to help any more, to keep away men interested in the mother but not the baby, to put food on the table and buy clothes, and so on. That’s an injustice to the child. If the father was locked up on a three strikes offense or for nonviolent crimes such as drug use, the injustice is all the greater. Note the disparate racial impact, which creates a further injustice. Why does the US have 5% of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s prisoners? Does that fact matter? If so for whom? The study’s author shows that it matters for the infant children of incarcerated men.
Sure, but it’s also plausible that the kind of women who allow criminals to impregnate them tend to have low compliance when it comes to perinatal best practices. It’s quite possible that both factors play a role here. Additional research would be needed to determine how much of the relation can be attributed to each of these factors.
Nah. We always need more research. There are always multiple possibilities. Sure. That true for more or less any interesting question, isn’t it? But the best evidence currently available suggests a causal relationship between incarceration and infant mortality, and the explanation for it is plausible and consistent with economics and social science in general. If I have not misunderstood, you say that the women might be inferior mothers from the start. Their bad judgment in men correlates to mistakes in childrearing. Maybe. Oh, probably in some degree. But what is the size of the effect? And it is not so obvious who will and who will not be headed to prison 1, 2, or 5 years forward. So the causal mechanism you are suggesting seems a bit strained to me, particularly in light of the huge problem of over-incarceration.
I could see some danger from interloper men, but the idea that babies are starving or cold because of a lack of fatherly money for food and clothes strains credulity. I could also see motherly neglect if taking care of that baby was no longer necessary to please its father. But naively, it’s kind of hard to see why cause would run from incarceration to baby death.
Let me see if I have this straight: The women who allow themselves to be impregnated by men headed to prison tend to be less effective at keeping their babies alive than women who choose more law-abiding fathers for their children.
Okay, makes sense.
So over-incarceration is bogus issue your humble opinion? The fact that records show that the US locks up more persons per capita than any other nation does not suggest any injustice to you. They are all just criminals who get what they deserve? If not, then mightn’t it be the imprisonment that *causes* the increased risk? It is uncomfortable to think that you may be complicit in a system that locks many people up for no good reason. Deal with it.
Steve has a good point. It seems difficult to separate effects of (a) apparently poor social skills of a mother who chooses a criminal for the father from (b) the fact of the father’s incarceration. One way to do it would be to study what happens when the father returns after incarceration. A skim of the article tells me that the data was not available for that level of analysis. The available data was whether the father (in one period) or either parent (in a second period) had been incarcerated in the year prior to birth. That makes it tough to differentiate between (a) and (b) through no fault of the author. (That said, there was some stuff on the tables that I didn;t fully understand, so maybe I missed something.)
On your rhetorical point, the fact of high incarceration rates doesn’t necessarily say anything about injustice. I think you have to look at the reasons that they are incarcerated. (And, just to be clear, I tend to agree with you on issues like three strikes leading to long prison terms for victimless offenders. I just think you shouldn’t jump there from the statistics.)
Also, North Korea locks up 100% of its population. (Not relevant, just sayin’.)
Max
The US locks up more persons per capita because it is efficient at finding people who violate the law, prosecuting them, and putting them behind bars. That said, not everyone who is in prison needs to be in prison to be monitored-some of them would do well in work-release programs, or with GPS tracking.
But yeah, they are all criminals who get what they deserve.
Actually, the US isn’t that efficient at finding criminals, just better at making far more people criminals. If the US were efficient at locking up criminals, Mexico would not be suffering from crimes committed by drug cartels delivering drugs to tens of millions of US criminals eagerly seeking out drugs brought in from Mexico. If the US locked up all the criminals, there would be no drug cartels in Mexico, nor would there be an unemployment problem, and probably a much smaller financial sector.
Neither actually. It’s better at putting them there for much longer periods of time when the gavel has come down.
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