Liminal Men: Incarceration and Relationship Dissolution Kristin Turney University of California, Irvine ABSTRACT Incarceration, now a rite of passage for many economically disadvantaged minority men entailing an involuntary removal from families, places these marginal men in a liminal state where they are simultaneously members of families and isolated from families. Despite a burgeoning literature documenting the collateral consequences of incarceration for family life, as well as evidence that the deleterious consequences of incarceration for maternal and child well-being stem from resultant relationship dissolution, much less is known about the direct link between incarceration and relationship dissolution. I consider this association with data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal survey uniquely positioned to understand the consequences of incarceration for family life. Results show that paternal incarceration is associated with relatively immediate relationship dissolu- tion among parents, the association is concentrated among parents living together prior to incarceration, and is explained by both incarceration duration and changes in relationship quality. And, for couples that survive this initial period, incarceration is inconsequential for relationship dissolution. Taken together, these findings link the literature on the collateral consequences of mass incarceration with the literature on demographic changes in family life, and, given the well-known deleterious consequences of parental relationship dissolution for children, have important implications for intergenerational inequality. KEYWORDS : incarceration; inequality; propensity score matching; relationship dissolu- tion; relationship quality. Family instability in the United States has increased dramatically since the 1970s. Demographic changes in family life—including the postponing of marriage and the increasing number of short-term cohabit- ing unions—mean that considerable numbers of adults experience the dissolution of romantic relation- ships (Cherlin 2010). The consequences of relationship dissolution for adults are profound, as dissolution and the often resultant instability impedes parenting practices (Beck et al. 2010; Tach, This article was supported by grant number AE00102 from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation (ASPE), which was awarded by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA). Its contents are solely the responsibility of the author and do not necessarily represent the official views of ASPE or SAMHSA. Funding for the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study was provided by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) through grants R01HD36916, R01HD39135, and R01HD40421, as well as a consor- tium of private foundations (see www.fragilefamilies.princeton.edu/funders.asp for the complete list). The author is grateful to Jacob Avery, Janel Benson, Lonnie Berger, Marcy Carlson, Corina Graif, Jessica Hardie, Michael Massoglia, Dan Meyer, Tim Smeeding, Christopher Wildeman, and Anita Zuberi, as well as participants at the Institute for Research on Poverty (IRP) Emerging Scholars Program grantee workshops, for helpful discussions and feedback on earlier versions of this article. Direct correspondence to: Kristin Turney, University of California, Irvine, 3151 Social Science Plaza, Irvine, CA 92697-5100. E-mail: kristin.turney@uci.edu. V C The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com  499 Social Problems, 2015, 62, 499–528 doi: 10.1093/socpro/spv015 Advance Access Publication Date: 27 September 2015 Article by guest on March 10, 2016 http://socpro.oxfordjournals.org/ Downloaded from