In last winter’s issue of @CityJournal, I questioned the contention that incarceration is, in most cases, harmful to families—a claim that assumes prisoners are capable of being emotionally supportive guardians and reliable sources of economic stability.
city-journal.org/fathers-famili…
city-journal.org/fathers-famili…
In addition to other suggestive evidence (e.g., prevalence of antisocial personality disorder in prisons), I pointed to a paper (which at the time was still a working paper) whose recent publication by the American Economic Review has caused quite a stir: aeaweb.org/articles?id=10…
As I concluded in that essay: “While not definitive, the evidence on whether and to what extent incarceration harms children and families runs counter to the arguments of decarceration advocates... What to do about kids facing these situations is a debate very much worth having.”
But having that debate is difficult in a space in which reactions to research are based entirely on political priors. The recent reactions to the paper out of Ohio makes me less optimistic about the prospects for a reasonable public discourse on this important question. /end/
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