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10 Criminology & Pub. Pol'y 819 (2011)
The Incarceration Ledger: Toward a New Era in Assessing Societal Consequences

handle is hein.journals/crpp10 and id is 829 raw text is: POLICY ESSAY MASS IMPRISONMENT AND CHILDHOOD BEHAVIORAL PROBLEMS The incarceration ledger Toward a new era in assessing societal consequences Robert J. Sampson Harvard University It is not much of an oversimplification to say that criminologists once focused almost exclusively on the deterrent and incapacitation effects of imprisonment (what I will call Era 1), whereas in the last decade the tide has turned to a widespread focus on the negative or criminogenic effects of imprisonment (what I will call Era 2).' The shift in attention from selective incapacitation to what is now labeled mass incarceration has been sharp, with a large recent literature asserting that the effects of imprisonment on societal well-being are corrosive. Era 1 was about crime control, in other words, whereas the current Era 2 is about crime production.2 Wakefield and Wildeman (2011) are firmly trained in the logic of Era 2. Their contribution to the debate is to focus on the intergenerational effects ofparents' incarceration on the individual-level outcomes of their children. Using two longitudinal data sets, the paper estimates that having a father incarcerated produces harmful effects on children's behavioral and mental health problems. Thus their innovation is twofold: the paper goes well beyond crime outcomes and estimates the reach of incarceration into the next generation. These are important moves givcn the lessons that. life-course criminology has taught us. Children are the future, after all, so we can ill afford to set aside how our social policies, of which crime is a central player, influence early development. Having claimed the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage due to impris- onment itself, the authors take the further step of using cohort differences in the risk of Direct correspondence to Robert J. Sampson, Department of Sociology, Harvard University, William James Hall, 33 Kirkland Street Cambridge, MA 02138 (e-mail: rsampson@wjh.harvard.edu). 1. Exemplars of each era are Blumstein et al. (1978) and Western (2006), respectively. 2. I should disclose that I am on record as having argued for the criminogenic effects of imprisonment at both the individual and macro levels (Sampson, 1995; Sampson and Laub, 1997; Sampson and Loeffler, 2010). DOI:10. 111 1/j.1745-9133.2011.00756.x © 2011 American Society of Criminology 819 Criminology & Public Policy * Volume 10 * Issue 3

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