Every year, millions of Americans experience the incarceration of a family member. Using 30 years of administrative data from Ohio and exploiting differing incarceration propensities of randomly assigned judges, this paper provides the first quasi-experimental estimates of the effects of parental and sibling incarceration in the US. Contrary to conventional wisdom, parental incarceration has a net positive effect on some important outcomes for children, reducing their likelihood of incarceration by 4.9 % points and improving their adult neighborhood quality. While estimates on academic performance and teen parenthood are imprecise, we reject large positive or negative effects. Sibling incarceration leads to similar reductions in criminal activity. Covered 1973 – 2018 -- Children of incarcerated parents in Cuyahoga County, Franklin County, and Hamilton County (Ohio).
