The purpose of this study is to estimate whether fathers involved in the criminal justice system contribute toward determining their children’s criminal activities. We use a unique dataset for Italy, which follows the antisocial behavior of a representative cohort of young criminals aged 14 to 24. Our correlation estimates indicate that fathers involved in criminal activities predict significant recidivism rates by their children. When the transmission mechanisms of fathers were proxied to include a set of observable individual and family variables, our regression estimates showed that almost half the father–child correlation is not explained by the controls. More importantly, estimating the father–child association restricting to fathers in prison, we find that this correlation is significantly large for “theft and drugs,” which suggests that this forced absence acts as a potential determinant of children’s criminal careers.
