Estimating the number and percentage of children who experience parental incarceration in Canada using whole population administrative and vital statistics data

BACKGROUND: There is a lack of systematic data on children who experience parental incarceration in Canada. OBJECTIVE: To use linked data to estimate the number of children who experienced parental incarceration in five Canadian provinces from 2015 to 2021, and to describe parent and child characteristics. METHODS: We accessed data from the Canadian Correctional Services Survey, a Statistics Canada survey that included person-level administrative data for all people incarcerated in British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, and Nova Scotia provincial correctional facilities between 2015 and 2021. We identified their children using three methods: children with a person in the Canadian Correctional Services Survey listed as a parent on their birth certificate, children of people in the Canadian Correctional Services Survey who had received child tax benefits, and children of females in the Canadian Correctional Services Survey with a live birth in hospital discharge records. We calculated the number and percentage of children