Stereotype‐based judgments of child welfare issues in cases of parent criminality

Approximately 2.5 million children in the European Union and the United States have incarcerated parents, the vast majority of which are fathers. Three experiments modeled on real legal cases (total N = 881) investigated how parent gender affects decisions regarding contact between incarcerated parents and their children. Results showed that measures facilitating relationship maintenance in relevant domains (sentence length, visitation rights, and alleviating postsentencing conditions) were supported less when they involved a father despite identical prior information about the legal case. Mediation analyses suggest two distinct processes explaining these disparities: participants' crime‐related attributions, and their stereotypical expectations about the different familial roles of mothers and fathers. Practical implications of these findings and directions for future research are discussed.