Vicarious and Contingent Consequences of Adolescent Police Exposure

Police stops are a pervasive form of criminal justice contact among adolescents that have adverse repercussions for mental health. Yet the mental health consequences of adolescent police stops likely proliferate, vicariously, to parents of adolescents exposed to this form of criminal justice contact. In this article, I conceptualize adolescent police stops as a stress or, drawing on the stress process perspective to examine how and under what conditions adolescent police stops damage the mental health of adolescents’ mothers. The results, based on data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, suggest three conclusions. First, the mental health consequences of adolescent police stops proliferate vicariously, increasing depression and anxiety among adolescents’ mothers. This relationship persists across a series of modeling strategies that progressively adjust for observed confounders, including potentially endogenous adolescent characteristics including delinquency, substance use, and other forms of criminal justice contact. Second, the relationship between adolescent police stops and mothers’ mental health is contingent, especially concentrated among mothers with prior exposure to the criminal justice system (either via themselves or their adolescents’ fathers). Third, mothers’ emotional support buffers the relationship between adolescent police stops and mothers’ mental health. Taken together, this research highlights the role of police exposure as a stressor with both vicarious and contingent consequences and, accordingly, documents the expansive and proliferating repercussions of police contact.