Anne Sofie Tegner Anker: Crime, Incarceration, and the Family. Five Empirical Essays.

In five empirical essays, the dissertation examines descriptive and causal questions that center on the intersection of crime, incarceration, and the family. Building on the premise that the lives of family members (in particular, parents and children) tend to be interdependent and closely linked, the dissertation directs attention to the presence of family members in the lives of convicted or incarcerated individuals. The essays in the dissertation examine patterns of intergenerational transmission of crime, the prevalence and consequences of paternal incarceration, and patterns of family visitation during incarceration using rich administrative data from Denmark. The data are uniquely suited to shed light on these topics as they hold information on conviction histories and incarceration spells of all Danish residents and enable the linkage of family members. Some key findings from the dissertation are a) that the intergenerational transmission of crime depend on family complexity, b) that there are significant disparities in the risk of experiencing paternal incarceration across ethnic groups in Denmark, and c) that paternal incarceration has negative consequences for children’s educational outcomes. Overall, the dissertation highlights the salience of considering family ties in the study of crime and incarceration, and that neither crime nor criminal justice responses to crime play out in isolation from the families in which individuals are embedded.