The Effect of Eviction on Maternal Criminal Justice Contact

Background/Purpose: Because of stagnating wages, increased rental prices, and inadequate public housing support, the U.S. is currently experiencing its worst affordable housing crisis in generations. As a result, millions of individuals each year experience eviction, with low income women being particularly at risk. In response to the growing prominence of eviction, scholarship has increasingly sought to understand what the implications of eviction are for families. In general, this scholarship has shown that eviction is not just caused by poverty but that it contributes to disadvantage in a number of ways which include: increasing material hardship, reducing neighborhood quality, increasing employment instability, and increasing depression and other negative health indicators. In this paper, we draw on revised strain and differential association theories, as well as theories asserting that the criminal justice system is a tool used to control marginalized communities, to argue that eviction and criminal justice contact may be phenomenon that are connected. Specifically, we seek to answer two questions: 1) Does experiencing eviction increase the likelihood that mothers are charged with a crime? And 2) are mothers who experience eviction at multiple time points especially at risk of being charged with a crime? 

Methods: The data for our analyses come from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (Fragile Families), a longitudinal survey of approximately 5,000 mothers in 20 large cities (population >200,000) who gave birth between 1998 and 2000. After the initial interview, follow-up interviews were conducted when the child was 1, 3, 5 and 9 years old. Our final analytic sample consists of the 2899 mothers with complete data on our outcome variable (whether a mother was charged with a crime between the year 5 and 9 surveys), our key independent variables (whether a mother was evicted between the baseline and year 5 surveys and the number of survey waves a mother experienced eviction), and control variables capturing preexisting disadvantage.  For our statistical analyses, we employ logistic regression, since our dependent variable is a dichotomous measure

Results: Our results lead to two broad conclusions. First, mothers who ever experienced eviction are significantly more likely to be charged with a crime than mothers who did not even after including a wide range of covariates. Second, we find that mothers who experienced eviction at multiple time points were at particularly great risk of being charged with a crime.

Conclusions and Implications: Although more men are incarcerated than women, the female prison population has actually been growing at a faster rate than the male prison population in recent years. On a micro level, this study’s findings suggest that interventions aimed at mitigating the consequences of eviction may help to reduce the influence that the criminal justice system has on the lives of women. On a macro level, the results suggest that policies aimed at preventing eviction and increasing housing stability, such as expanding access to housing vouchers, also have the potential to reduce the number of women who enter into the criminal justice system.