Father incarceration and infant death in Syracuse, NY

Public health social workers employed in jails and prisons can help to ameliorate the impact of negative birth outcomes of newborn children whose fathers are incarcerated. Disproportionate rates of incarceration, in which African Americans face jail and prison up to seven times more frequently than Caucasians, leads to significant social problems. Among the problems include poorer health outcomes. We used three levels of analysis – individual-level data, neighborhood-level data, and ethnographic data to investigate the impact of father's name on the birth certificate, an indirect measure of father involvement at the time of birth. Among births in Syracuse, NY a key reason why fathers' names did not appear on the child's birth certificate in a data base compiled immediately following the birth was incarceration. We found that when controlling for maternal race and age, and receipt of public assistance and Medicaid, if the father's name is missing from the birth certificate, the post neonatal infant mortality rates are significantly higher than infants whose fathers' names are on the birth certificate. Removing the attributable portion of post-neonatal mortality associated with the father's name missing from the birth certificate completely eliminated the racial disparity in post neonatal infant death.