The Effect of Intensive Intervention for Children with Incarcerated Parents

Last registered on September 12, 2024
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Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
The Effect of Intensive Intervention for Children with Incarcerated Parents
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0014189
Initial registration date
September 03, 2024

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
September 12, 2024, 5:38 PM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

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Primary Investigator

Name
David Phillips
Affiliation
University of Notre Dame
Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

PI Name
Lindsey Bullinger
PI Affiliation
Georgia Tech
PI Name
Bruce Wydick
PI Affiliation
University of San Francisco

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2023-06-01
End date
2043-05-01
Keywords
Crime, Violence, & Conflict, Education
Additional Keywords
JEL code(s)
Secondary IDs
Prior work
This trial does not extend or rely on any prior RCTs.
Abstract
Children with incarcerated parents are much more likely to underperform in school and experience poverty. Children who move to communities with higher incarceration rates are at much greater risk of being convicted of a felony themselves upon becoming an adult. In short, the children of adults that have so recently been incarcerated at scale will soon be the ones at risk. Effective programming for children of incarcerated parents could potentially short-circuit this cycle, but rigorous research on such programs is very limited.

This study will measure the causal effect of intensive, multi-dimensional services for children with incarcerated parents. We focus on the programming of Kidz2Leaders (K2L), an Atlanta-area program that provides multiple years of faith-based summer camp, internship placements, and holistic family support. The program is intense and of lengthy duration: The median participant attends camp for 6 years. Even outside of camp, K2L spends over a thousand dollars on family support services per camper per year. To measure the effectiveness of this programming, we will implement a prospective randomized controlled trial. The randomized controlled trial relies on the fact that K2L’s initial summer camp has excess demand for spots that are limited by bed space and staffing.

We will enroll 600 participants through K2L’s existing summer camp application process. We will use administrative records to measure educational outcomes and, eventually, contact with the criminal justice system as adults. We will supplement administrative data with sub-sample surveys covering school districts not represented in the available records. Using this combination of outcome data, we expect to be able to detect a 12 percentage point decrease in the likelihood of a school behavior incident within 3 years, a 24% decrease relative to a base rate of 51%.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Bullinger, Lindsey, David Phillips and Bruce Wydick. 2024. "The Effect of Intensive Intervention for Children with Incarcerated Parents." AEA RCT Registry. September 12. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.14189-1.0
Sponsors & Partners
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Those in the treatment group will receive access to Kidz2Leaders’ Camp Hope. Camp Hope is a week-long overnight camp that begins with children of inmates between ages eight and ten. Progressing each summer for up to seven years, Kidz2Leaders’ curriculum teaches basic Christian principles and servant leadership. Growth is expected from each participant every summer, as each year’s lessons build on the years’ prior. The seven-year progression culminates in successful campers being invited to serve as teen counselors to younger children, putting what they have learned into practice. Camp Hope also supports healthy child development by cultivating supportive relationships for campers with peers, teen counselors, and adult counselors to counteract the trauma experienced due to parental incarceration. The camper to volunteer ratio is one-to-one, allowing for careful attention to be paid to each child. A week at Camp Hope is filled with intentional play, including team sports, swimming, horseback riding, rock climbing, creative arts, fishing, biking, boating and more. Camp Hope is offered at no charge to families. After Camp Hope, the broader K2L program supports both the child and the family on multiple dimensions. As teens, the campers move on to become camp counselors and receive job training and internship placements. K2L supports families throughout the year through a social worker who can provide both financial and emotional assistance. They also conduct multiple social events for the families, creating a context for community among the families who are involved, providing emotional support and community-building, and family support services throughout the year.
Intervention Start Date
2023-06-01
Intervention End Date
2036-05-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Any school behavior incident; Any incarceration
Primary Outcomes (explanation)
Any school behavior incident: Dummy variable for whether the participant had any behavior incident in a given school year
-- School administrative records
Defined using incident reports
Limited to categories that indicate incidents of disorderly conduct, violence, threats, substance use, weapons, bullying, gang-related, repeated offenses, incivility, other, and crimes (e.g. burglary)
-- Survey
Defined based on reporting school behavior incidents
Limited to similar categories as administrative records
-- Report if available from at least one source
-- If available in both sources, compute mean

Any incarceration: Dummy for whether the participant was incarcerated during a year, primarily focused on ages 18-25
-- County jail records from Metro Atlanta
-- County court records from Metro Atlanta
-- Outcomes cumulating across all sources, as available

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Parental Resources
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)
We plan to measure the impact of youth summer camp programming on parents’ credit scores and use of credit using data from Experian. LEO has an existing relationship with Experian which we will use to link records in this study with Experian’s credit data.

We also plan to use data from Infutor to measure the effects on housing stability. Infutor holds data on address histories of individuals in the United States. This data will allow us to quantify housing stability via address changes. LEO currently holds the Infutor data and regularly receives data updates.

Given the long-term nature of this study, we anticipate adding additional data sources to this analysis plan after random assignment. Any changes would be registered at that time prior to outcomes occurring.

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
This study will measure causal effects of K2L through a prospective randomized controlled trial (N=660). We will supplement this causal analysis with survey data. In addition to the criminal justice outcomes, we are measuring the effects of the program on educational outcomes (e.g., school suspensions and attendance).
Experimental Design Details
Not available
Randomization Method
STATA random number generator
Randomization Unit
Families
Was the treatment clustered?
Yes

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
330 families
Sample size: planned number of observations
660 applicants
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
300 applicants in treatment and 360 applicants in control
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
The full estimation sample will include about 660 people, 300 in treatment and 360 in control. In a pilot conducted in 2023, 150 people applied, 70 were assigned to control and 80 to treatment, of which 66 attended Camp Hope. Though it was not required to apply, 94% of applicants consented to participate in research. Both demand and capacity at Camp Hope have increased over time, so we project that the study will complete enrolling 660 applicants by spring 2026. We assume 40% coverage in administrative records and a 60% survey response rate, decreasing the sample with outcomes to 264 in school data and 502 when combining school and survey data. Based on the pilot experience, we assume an 85% camp take-up rate. In the data on past referrals to camp, the average care-giver has two children, and some baseline controls (particularly gender) have explanatory power. Based on that data we assume 2 cases per cluster, an intra-cluster correlation coefficient of 0.07, and controls that shrink the MDE by 20%. We conduct all calculations for an 0.05 level test with 80% power. Our primary near-term outcome will be any school behavior incident. We assume a cumulative suspension rate in the control group of 31%, based on the rate in the NLSY for children with an incarcerated parent. Given the assumptions above, in the RCT using a combined sample of administrative and survey records (N=502) we can detect a TOT effect of 11 percentage points, or 36% of the mean. Our long-term outcome will be any incarceration between the ages of 18-25. In past referral data, the control group probability of incarceration in jail or prison in Georgia by age 25 is equal to 9.6 percentage points (pp). Given the other assumptions above, we can detect effects of attending camp on children’s future incarceration greater than or equal to 6.3 pp, or 67% of this control group mean.
Supporting Documents and Materials

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IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
University of Notre Dame Institutional Review Board
IRB Approval Date
2022-02-22
IRB Approval Number
22-01-6980
Analysis Plan

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