Epidemiology of Incarceration

The Effect of Paternal Incarceration

Widespread use of incarceration in the US, coupled with high rates of inmate fatherhood, has raised concerns for the wellbeing of more than two million affected children. The deleterious and long term effects of incarceration on men's financial and relationship stability are well-established. Incarceration also compromises family material wellbeing, and partners are at risk of hardship and stre...

the social costs of incarceration

Incarceration and Stratification

In the past three decades, incarceration has become an increasingly powerful force for reproducing and reinforcing social inequalities. A new wave of sociological research details the contemporary experiment with mass incarceration in the United States and its attendant effects on social stratification. This review first describes the scope of imprisonment and the process of selection into pris...

Racialized Mass Incarceration

This essay maintains that the United States has developed a new, decidedly punitive law and order regime that at its core features racialized mass incarceration. We will show that over the past thirty years the United States has gone on an incarceration binge, a binge that has fallen with radically disproportionate severity on the African American community. The rise of the racialized mass inca...

Incarceration in fragile families.

Since the mid-1970s the U.S. imprisonment rate has increased roughly fivefold. As Christopher Wildeman and Bruce Western explain, the effects of this sea change in the imprisonment rate--commonly called mass imprisonment or the prison boom--have been concentrated among those most likely to form fragile families: poor and minority men with little schooling. Imprisonment diminishes the earnings o...