The external effects of black-male incarceration on black females

Still, according to Hagan and Dinovitzer (1999), little work has been done on the effects of imprisonment on family structure.5 Looking into the contribution of economics to crime and policy issues, most of the work has focused on the criminals themselves, whether on the determinants of criminal activity, the deterrence effectiveness of various policies, or the labor market consequences of incarce [...] The interpretation of the interaction term coefficient is then the pure differential effect of incarceration between Blacks and Whites, and the race-specific coefficient becomes mechanically the incarceration coefficient for the White group only. [...] Yet, after the slight decline of the 1980s, the proportion of Black women with a four-year degree or enrolled in college picks up again in the early 1990s, not long after an increase in the growth rate of male incarceration in the late 1980s. [...] I provide the illustrative example of Texas in Graph 7. It shows the concomitant dramatic increase in prison capacity and Black-male incarceration starting in the mid-1990s, as well as the decrease in the number of adult offenders on parole during that same period. [...] This is driven by the increase in teenage fertility that characterized the mid-1980s to early 1990s and hides the more general pattern of secular decline over the second part of the 20th century.