Incarceration & Inequality
This line of research is focused on how the criminal legal system (and adjacent systems like child protective services) create, maintain, and amplify inequality in American society. While strongly related to my other lines of research on mass incarceration more generally, the major works below situate the criminal legal system within broader patterns of inequality in American life. Articles inaccessible because of paywalls can be requested here.
On the prospects of criminal justice reform for the reduction of inequality: Wakefield, Sara. 2022. “Criminal Justice Reform and Inequality.” American Journal of Criminal Justice 47: 1186-1203.
Commentary on how childhood maltreatment histories combine with structural racism, poverty, and sexism to produce unequal criminal justice responses: Wakefield, Sara and Christopher Wildeman. 2021. “Structural Racism, Poverty, and Sexism Shape the History of and Response to Maltreatment Among Incarcerated Individuals.” American Journal of Public Health e1-e3.
On the pervasive racial and ethnic inequalities in child protective services contact: Edwards, Frank, Sara Wakefield, Kieran Healy, and Christopher Wildeman. 2021. “Contact with Child Protective Services is Pervasive but Unequally Distributed by Race and Ethnicity in Large US Counties.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, 30, e2106272118.
• “Reply to Putnam-Hornstein et al.: On Honest Mistakes and Raceless Children.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 118, 49, e2116225118
Special issue on Criminal Justice Contact & Inequality, edited by Kristin Turney and Sara Wakefield, for the RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences (open-access). Included papers reflect on the relationship between various forms of criminal legal system contact on the maintenance and reproduction of social inequality.
On the unequal distribution of criminal records: Sarah Shannon, Christopher Uggen, Jason Schnittker, Melissa Thompson, Sara Wakefield, and Michael Massoglia. “The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People with Felony Records in the United States, 1980-2010.” Demography 54, 5: 1795-1818.
On criminal justice and the maintenance and creation of inequality: Wakefield, Sara and Christopher Uggen. 2010. "Incarceration and Stratification." Annual Review of Sociology.
On parental incarceration and the intergenerational transmission of disadvantage: Wakefield, Sara and Christopher Wildeman. 2013. Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality. New York: NY: Oxford University Press.
On parental incarceration and racial disparities in child wellbeing: Wakefield, Sara and Christopher Wildeman. “Mass Imprisonment and Racial Disparities in Childhood Behavioral Problems.” Criminology & Public Policy 10, 3: 793-817.
On the concentration of incarceration in families by race: Wildeman, Christopher and Sara Wakefield. “The Long Arm of the Law: The Concentration of Incarceration in Families in the Era of Mass Incarceration." Journal of Gender, Race, and Justice 17: 367-389.