New article alert: Parental incarceration, mental health, and neighborhood disorder

Doctoral student MK Kitzmiller's Masters Thesis was recently published in Psychology, Public Policy, and Law, titled Parental incarceration and the mental health of youth in the justice system: The moderating role of neighborhood disorder. Youth who were arrested for the first time were interviewed longitudinally to test whether neighborhood disorder moderated the relation between parental incarceration and anxiety/depression symptoms. The results suggest that parental incarceration is associated with significantly higher GAD and MDD scores among White youth in non-disordered neighborhoods only. The results speak to the contextual mechanisms that inform youths’ experience of parental incarceration, and support prior research that neighborhood disorder mitigates the psychological distress of parental incarceration because the residents of disordered neighborhoods may be more equipped to address the collateral challenges associated with incarceration.