“What Mass Incarceration Means for American Children,” a Conversation with Christopher Wildeman, Cornell University

ISPS POLICY LAB EVENT

Abstract: In the last 40 years, parental incarceration has shifted from an incredibly rare experience affecting only the most unfortunate children to an experience that roughly one in two African American children (but only one in thirty White Children) will experience at some point. In this talk, I discuss the implications of this sea change in the risk of parental incarceration, focusing on the individual-level consequences of having a parent incarcerated for children and the macro-level consequences of mass parental incarceration for social inequality.

Christopher Wildeman is an Associate Professor of Policy Analysis and Management (PAM) in the College of Human Ecology at Cornell University, where he is also co-director of the National Data Archive on Child Abuse and Neglect (NDACAN) and a faculty fellow at the Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research (BCTR), the Center for the Study of Inequality (CSI), Court-Kay-Bauer Hall, and the Cornell Population Center (CPC). Since 2013, he has also been a Visiting Fellow at the Bureau of Justice Statistics in Washington, D.C. Since 2015, he has also been a Senior Researcher at the Rockwool Foundation Research Unit in Copehagen, Denmark. Prior to joining Cornell’s faculty in 2014, Christopher was an Associate Professor of Sociology, a faculty fellow at the Center for Research on Inequalities and the Life Course (CIQLE), and a faculty fellow at the Institution for Social and Policy Studies (ISPS) at Yale University, as well as the co-director of the New Haven Branch of the Scholars Strategy Network (SSN).

His research and teaching interests revolve around the consequences of mass imprisonment for inequality, with emphasis on families, health, and children.