• October 13, 2015

  • Research on how incarceration affects families earns sociologist more than $500K in grant funding and ASA award

Kristin Turney, sociology associate professor, is an expert on a tough topic that is unfortunately becoming more and more relevant due to the nation’s climbing prison population. Since arriving at UCI in 2011, she’s focused her research efforts on how incarceration affects family life. She’s looked at educational outcomes for children, availability of food for families, and overall childhood inequality and discovered some interesting findings – most notably that a prison sentence may not always have negative consequences for families connected to incarcerated men – that have been published widely in Social Science Research, the Journal of Marriage and Family, the American Sociological Review, the Journal of Health and Social Behavior and several others.

Her current work, published in the August issue of the American Journal of Public Health, found that recently incarcerated mothers have an increased likelihood of depression and struggle with even more health conditions than expected due to disadvantages they experienced before time in prison.

“Women’s incarceration rates have increased even faster than men’s incarceration rates but women’s incarceration has received comparably less research attention. Understanding the consequences of incarceration for women is important for designing effective policy and practice interventions,” she says.

She’s received more than $500,000 in funding to support her research; most recently, she was awarded $334,000 from the National Science Foundation to focus on intergenerational consequences of incarceration. With a team of graduate students, she is collecting her own longitudinal primary data from 100 families in Orange County through in-depth interviews with fathers in jail and their family members—romantic partners, children, and mothers—and follow up interviews upon dad’s release.

“We are only at the beginning stages of data collecting but are already learning so much about the complex and myriad ways father’s incarceration affects families and children—both during their jail stay and after release,” she says.

Previous work has been supported by the National Academy of Education, the American Educational Research Association and the University of Kentucky Center for Poverty Research.

In August, the American Sociological Association section on Children and Youth recognized Turney with the Distinguished Early Career Award for her research on the topic. She accepted the award at the association’s annual meeting held in Chicago where she was also elected a council member on the section on Children and Youth and the section on the Family.

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