Giving Compass' Take:

• Research from Cornell University found that 45 percent of Americans have incarcerated family members. 

• The article notes that experts in the field were surprised by the study's findings. How can more research drive change and remove the stigma associated with incarceration? What support programs exist for families experiencing hardship due to mass incarceration?

• Read more about the impact of mass incarceration. 

The new study illuminates the extensive scope of mass incarceration in the US. It is the first to accurately measure the share of Americans—45 percent—who have ever had an immediate family member jailed or imprisoned for one night or more. The researchers had assumed they would find half that rate.

“The core takeaway is family member incarceration is even more common than any of us—all of whom are experts in the field—had anticipated,” says study co-author Christopher Wildeman, professor of policy analysis and management at Cornell University.

The figures are even higher for African Americans and people with low education levels; for those groups, nearly 3 in 5 have had an immediate family member incarcerated, the team found. Siblings were the most common immediate family member to face incarceration, the researchers say—another surprise finding—and a trend about which not much is known.

“Having an immediate family member in prison instead of in the home can have a major effect on a person and can be extremely disruptive,” says Enns.

“That breaks pretty sharply from the standard narrative that we’ve heard in the research community and in popular discourse, about how white, college-educated folks are completely insulated from those risks,” says Wildeman. “And, indeed, this provides further evidence that mass incarceration is a profoundly American phenomenon and something that we as a society must confront together.”

“I hope that it will help folks see that this is more a structural issue than a behavioral one,” Wildeman says. “And I hope that it would drive home just how much more we can learn when we do the work to get surveys that explicitly focus on crime and criminal justice contact.”

Read the full article about family in prison by Susan Kelley-Cornell at Futurity.