Facing the System: Navigating Institutions as Young Adult Children of System-Impacted Parents

A growing body of scholarship explores the impact of carceral and surveillance systems on U.S. Americans’ trust in and engagement with institutions. “System avoidance” theories demonstrate that adults who experience contact with the criminal justice system (CJS) and/or child protective services (CPS) are less likely to subsequently engage with institutions, including the labor market, medical, or financial institutions. Our goal in this project is to extend prior research by examining the collateral consequences of system contact. Specifically, we will explore the role of parental system contact on children during emerging adulthood using a novel mixed-methods approach. By relying on a combination of existing survey, interview, and administrative data, this study will explore, in-depth, the reverberating implications of system avoidance on subsequent generations. Specific aims include: 1) exploring the extent of how a young adult’s institutional engagement is shaped by the institutional participation of their fathers and mothers after CJS or CPS involvement; 2) examining the roles of race, ethnicity, and gender in children’s institutional engagement in young adulthood; and 3) identifying potential mechanisms that lead young adult children of system-impacted parents to avoid or engage with institutions. Given the disproportionate concentration of parental incarceration and CPS involvement among families of color, addressing this topic is important for advancing scholarly understanding of the role of CJS and CPS involvement in fostering inequality and the intergenerational endurance of social exclusion - manifesting as low participation in conventional social institutions - among already marginalized families. We anticipate that our findings will foster theory development and engage with policy-relevant conversations on inequality and institutional contact and trust.