The incarceration of fathers creates hurdles for Black youths’ college aspirations.

Most Gen Z youth are ambitious and progressive, who believe that all things are possible. But what if you are a teen whose parent is or has been in prison? How does that affect your outlook on life? How does this affect your optimism about attending college and completing your degree?

University of Notre Dame professors Anna Haskins and assistant professor of sociology Andrew F. Tax and associate director of the Notre Dame Initiative on Race and Resilience, and Joel Mittleman, assistant professor of sociology, along with Wade Jacobsen of the University of Maryland, used data from the Families Future and Child Wellbeing Study (FFCWS) to determine how 15-year-olds of incarcerated parents view to their educational future.

In the study, “Optimism and Obstacles: Racial Limitations in College Attitudes and Expectations Among Adolescents in Prison Thrive,” recently published in the journal Sociology of EducationResearchers found that although teens with incarcerated parents were optimistic about their future and fully committed to the importance of earning a college degree, they had lower expectations of actually completing college—and this was particularly true for affected black youth.

Of the 3,205 youth who responded to the FFCWS survey, about 60 percent of the teens in the sample who experienced father incarceration reported that graduating from college was very likely, 37 percent reported that it was somewhat likely, and 3 percent said that it was unlikely.

Their findings, the researchers said, point to the complexity of contemporary adolescents’ attitudes regarding college in the aftermath of the “prison boom,” the era of mass incarceration in the United States between 1970 and 2010. This 40-year period resulted in nearly half of Americans reporting Reports of having an immediate family member in jail or prison, including the more than 2 million children who currently have an incarcerated parent and the 10 million children whose parent has been incarcerated at some point in their lives.

Scientists estimate that 1 in 4 black children, 1 in 10 Hispanic children, and 1 in 25 white children experience parental incarceration in their early teens, the study said. The researchers’ work focused primarily on incarcerated fathers because 93 percent of incarcerated fathers are men.

“This research is looking at a sample of children that I have followed since birth,” Haskins said. “I’ve looked at the impact of paternal incarceration on them at ages 3, 5, 9 and now 15. We know the effects on them as children, but we wanted to see if and how those effects continue. And what? What we’re seeing is that the effects continue to continue until early adulthood.”

Mittleman added that research has already shown that parental incarceration has negative effects on children’s academic performance starting at a very young age. “What our study shows is that – even after accounting for all of these negative effects – the stigma of incarceration itself seems to limit the kind of academic future that black teens can imagine for themselves,” he said.

Haskins explained that most educational research focuses on the concrete consequences of parental incarceration, such as graduation rates and graduation rates. “This study examined psychosocial measures — in other words, how parental incarceration might affect the way adolescents see their future,” she said.

“Because our criminal legal system is so racist, it’s not surprising to find this kind of calibration down to one’s expectations of oneself,” Haskins said. “But this limits (the student’s) potential and cuts off the educational path for the next generation of young people, without doing anything wrong. This is not what we want for them as a society.

“The pervasive stigma of family confinement can lead to severe stunting of young people,” Haskins said. “And when you think about it, a college education has huge implications for social mobility and success later in life.”

Haskins said the effects of the prison boom are long-lasting and affecting life’s most important educational decisions. I suggested two things to help reduce this impact: more research and additional resources geared towards the most affected population.

“We need to encourage more research to be done that takes into account the role of the criminal legal system and how it affects educational trajectories,” Haskins said. “And if we have black students with a parent who is incarcerated, high school counselors or college counselors can do more work trying to support other avenues or other types of supports that can support them, to help them see their educational futures differently.”

This is something Haskins hopes her research – and her further research – will do to help encourage the next generation of students to attend college, regardless of what their parents did or the time they spent in prison.

Haskins concluded, “Our mission at Notre Dame to promote justice and address inequality—to walk with those who struggle—is really important to me.” “It speaks to families who have been affected by the criminal legal system in all its humanity.”