Estimating the number and percentage of children who experience parental incarceration in Canada using whole population administrative and vital statistics data

Background There is a lack of systematic data on children who experience parental incarceration in Canada. Objective To use linked data to estimate the number of children who experienced parental incarceration in five Canadian provinces from 2015 to 2021, and to describe parent and child characteristics. Methods We accessed data from the Canadian Correctional Services Survey, a Statistics Canada survey that included person-level administrative data for all people incarcerated in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Nova Scotia provincial correctional facilities between 2015 and 2021. We identified their children using three methods: children with a person in the Canadian Correctional Services Survey listed as a parent on their birth certificate, children of people in the Canadian Correctional Services Survey who had received child tax benefits, and children of females in the Canadian Correctional Services Survey with a live birth in hospital discharge records. We calculated the number and percentage of children <18 who experienced parental incarceration, and described parent and child characteristics. Results For 2015–2021, we identified 93,090 incarcerated parents of children <18 and 169,740 children <18 who experienced parental incarceration. We found that per day in the included provinces, 0.23% of children <18 in 2016 and 0.27% in 2017 experienced parental incarceration, and per year, 1.2% of children <18 in 2016 and 1.3% in 2017 experienced parental incarceration. For children who experienced parental incarceration, 87.4% had one and 12.0% had two parents who experienced incarceration during the study period, and 5.9% had at least one Black parent and 30.5% at least one Indigenous parent. Children who experienced parental incarceration had a median of 60 (IQR 11–208) and a mean of 166.5 (SD 256.5) total days of parental incarceration during the study period. For parents who experienced incarceration, 22.6% were female, 77.4% were male, 6.0% were Black, and 31.6% were Indigenous. Significance This is the first Canadian study to systematically estimate the number and percentage of children who experience parental incarceration. Given data limitations, our findings of the number and percentage of children should be treated as minimum estimates. While further research is needed to fully quantify the prevalence and burden of this adverse childhood experience, these minimum estimates can be used to raise awareness of the issue of parental incarceration in Canada. Evolving evidence, including this study, is instrumental to advancing work to measure, prevent, and mitigate the harms associated with parental incarceration for children and families.