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Journal Article Background: The role that fathers play in the lives of their families, particularly, the lives of children, is vitally important. Research has found positive associations between father involvement and factors, such as infant cognitive outcomes, children's schoolreadiness where levels of mothers' supportiveness are low, better socioemotional, and academic functioning in children. Black males, many who are fathers, are disproportionately overrepresented within the criminal justice system. High incarceration rates have significant economic and social impacts on families and communities.…
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Journal Article Largely overlooked in the theoretical and empirical literature on the crime decline is a long tradition of research in criminology and urban sociology that considers how violence is regulated through informal sources of social control arising from residents and organizations internal to communities. In this article, we incorporate the “systemic” model of community life into debates on the U.S. crime drop, and we focus on the role that local nonprofit organizations played in the national decline of violence from the 1990s to the 2010s. Using longitudinal data and a strategy to account for the…
The evaluation of the Community-Centered Responsible Fatherhood Ex-Prisoner Reentry Pilot Projects (“Fatherhood Reentry”) documented the implementation of six programs designed to help stabilize fathers and their families, help move fathers toward economic self-sufficiency, and reduce recidivism. This report presents the findings from the evaluation and provides an overview of the activities implemented by the programs, describes their various approaches to implementation, and identifies the implementation challenges they faced and the solutions they used to overcome those challenges. We…
Relationships between children and their parents are the foundation on which children learn how to form and sustain healthy relationships. Disrupting those relationships—by losing a parent to incarceration, for example—can have long-term effects on children and may lead to antisocial behavior, poor school performance, and physical and mental health problems. To mitigate the risks of parental incarceration for children, some correctional agencies offer parent-child visits in prisons or jails. There are several types of parent-child visits, but many experts believe contact visits, where the…
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Journal Article Impoverished and African American fathers are often criticized by policy makers for lack of involvement in their children's lives. These criticisms are limited to defining responsible fatherhood as providing economic support while ignoring other forms of nurturing. Recent studies provide a broader perspective on how impoverished and African American fathers nurture their children. This article analyzes data from five studies carried out in Syracuse, New York, between 1996 and 2011. The studies support the contention that structural violence, inherent in the disproportionate incarceration of…
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Journal Article The present study is a replication of the Creating Lasting Family Connections Fatherhood Program (CLFCFP) using a randomized controlled trial (RCT). CLFCFP has been shown in prior studies to have a positive impact on relationship skills and recidivism using weaker quasi-experimental designs (McKiernan et al., 2013). Survey data on relationship skills and recidivism data came from 280 men in prison reentry. Findings for relationship skills were replicated in this RCT, suggesting CLFCFP participants had larger sustained improvements in relationship skills. Policy changes occurring shortly…
“Ban-the-Box” (BTB) policies restrict employers from asking about applicants’ criminal histories on job applications and are often presented as a means of reducing unemployment among black men, who disproportionately have criminal records. However, withholding information about criminal records could risk encouraging racial discrimination: employers may make assumptions about criminality based on the applicant's race. To investigate BTB’s effects, we sent approximately 15,000 online job applications on behalf of fictitious young male applicants to employers in New Jersey and New York City…
