SBEE Seminar Series: Mike Mueller-Smith

Measuring Intergenerational Exposure to the U.S. Justice System: 
Evidence from Longitudinal Links between Survey and Administrative Data 

Abstract: 

We leverage over a terabyte of administrative and survey data linked with the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS) to estimate the share of recent U.S. birth cohorts with intergenerational criminal justice exposure, addressing three primary shortcomings in the literature: (1) non-incarceration sources of exposure, (2) cumulative exposure over childhood, and (3) non-parental sources of exposure. We find that among children born between 1999 and 2005, 9% were intergenerationally exposed to prison, 18% to a felony conviction, and 39% to any criminal charge; notably higher rates are observed for minority children. To gauge the severity of these newly quantified types of exposure, we estimate fixed effects models correlating exposure measures with an array of child wellbeing variables. We find limited evidence of diminishing harms from non-prison, non-parent, and non-contemporaneous exposures, suggesting our new broader estimates may be as important as the smaller, more narrowly defined measures from the literature.

Speaker bio: 

Mike Mueller-Smith is an assistant professor in the Department of Economics at the University of Michigan and faculty associate at the Population Studies Center. His research focuses on measuring the scope and prevalence of the criminal justice system in the U.S. as well as its broadly defined impact on the population. He is the director of the Criminal Justice Administrative Records System (CJARS), a new data infrastructure project joint with the U.S. Census Bureau that seeks to collect and link extensive amounts of criminal justice microdata with social and economic data held at the Census Bureau. He received his PhD in economics from Columbia University in 2015, and completed a NICHD Post-Doctoral Fellowship at Michigan’s Population Studies Center between 2015-2017.

Subscribe to the SBEE mailing list to receive Zoom invitations and login information along with venue info for hybrid seminars.