Becky Pettit

Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration

Although growth in the U.S. prison population over the past twenty-five years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at different levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born between 1965 and 1969, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks had served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born during this period, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.

Black-white wage inequality, employment rates, and incarceration

The observed gap in average wages between black men and white men inadequately reflects the relative economic standing of blacks, who suffer from a high rate of joblessness. The authors estimate the black‐white gap in hourly wages from 1980 to 1999 adjusting for the sample selection effect of labor inactivity. Among working‐age men in 1999, accounting for labor inactivity—including prison and jail incarceration—leads to an increase of 7%–20% in the black‐white wage gap. Adjusting for sample selectivity among men ages 22–30 in 1999 increases the wage gap by as much as 58%. Increasing selection bias, which can be attributed to incarceration and conventional joblessness, explains about two‐thirds of the rise in black relative wages among young men between 1985 and 1998. Apparent improvement in the economic position of young black men is thus largely an artifact of rising joblessness fueled by the growth in incarceration during the 1990s.

Incarceration & social inequality

In the last few decades the institutional contours of American social inequality have been transformed by the rapid growth in the prison and jail population. America’s prisons and jails have produced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. As an outcast group, the men and women in our prisons and jails, have little access to the social mobility available to the mainstream. Social and economic disadvantage, crystallizing in penal confinement, is sustained over the life course and transmitted from one generation to the next. This is a profound institutionalized inequality that has renewed race and class disadvantage. Still the scale and empirical details are largely an unknown story. In this paper we describe some new research outlining several of the latest trends in incarceration and their social and economic impact. Though the rate of incarceration is historically high, perhaps the most important social fact is the inequality in penal confinement, producing extraordinary rates of ∗We gratefully acknowledge Bryan Sykes, Deirdre Bloome, and Chris Muller helped conduct the research reported in this paper.

Incarceration and Racial Inequality in Men's Employment.

To estimate employment-population ratios for black and white men with an adjustment for incarceration—a factor overlooked by most research on employment inequality—the authors combine data from surveys of prisons and jails with data from the Current Population Survey. This adjustment significantly reduces estimated employment rates for African Americans, young workers, and young high school dropouts. The authors find that employment among young black male high school dropouts steadily declined between 1982 and 1996 despite periods of very low unemployment in the labor market as a whole. Standard labor force data, which include no incarceration data, understate black-white inequality in employment among young dropouts by about 45%.

Residential Mobility and Children's Social Capital: Evidence from an Experiment

This article examines the effects of residential mobility on social connections that are likely to affect childrens well-being. Copyright (c) 2003 by the Southwestern Social Science Association.

Mass Incarceration, Family Complexity, and the Reproduction of Childhood Disadvantage

In this article we examine the link between family complexity—measured by noncustodial parenthood and multiple-partner fertility—and incarceration. In 2012, close to 2.6 million children, or roughly one in twenty-five minors, had a parent in jail or prison. The risk of having a parent currently or ever incarcerated is disproportionately concentrated among black children and children of high school dropouts, many of whom are noncustodial parents. Variation in question wording, differences in length of exposure to parental incarceration, and the measurement of residential parenthood in household-based sample surveys converge to produce different estimates of race and class inequality in having a parent currently or ever incarcerated, when compared to similar estimates of parental incarceration from inmate surveys. Drawing on data from multiple sources and the development of a new method for the estimation of multiple-partner fertility among inmates, we consider how race and class inequality in parental incarceration may contribute to family complexity and the reproduction of childhood disadvantage.

Beyond Crime and Punishment: Prisons and Inequality

Changes in government policy on crime and punishment have put many poor minority men behind bars, more than their arrest rates would indicate. The growth of the penal system has also obscured the extent of economic inequality and sowed the seeds for greater inequality in the future.

Employment Gains and Wage Declines: The Erosion of Black Women's Relative Wages Since 1980

Public policy initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s, including Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity law, helped mitigate explicit discrimination in pay, and the expansion of higher education and training programs have advanced the employment fortunes of many American women. By the early 1980s, some scholars proclaimed near equity in pay between black and white women, particularly among young and highly skilled workers. More recent policy initiatives and labor market conditions have been arguably less progressive for black women’s employment and earnings: through the 1980s, 1990s, and the first half of the 2000s, the wage gap between black and white women widened considerably. Using data from the Current Population Survey Merged Outgoing Rotation Group (CPS-MORG), this article documents the racial wage gap among women in the United States from 1979 to 2005. We investigate how demographic and labor market conditions influence employment and wage inequality among black and white women over the period. Although shifts in labor supply influence the magnitude of the black-white wage gap among women, structural disadvantages faced by black women help explain the growth in the racial wage gap.

The Degree of Disadvantage Incarceration and Inequality in Education

This article examines how the rise in incarceration and its disproportionate concentration among low-skill, young African American men influences estimates of educational attainment in the United States. We focus on high school graduation rates and the persistent gap in attainment that exists between young black and white Americans. Although official statistics show a declining racial gap in high school dropout in recent years, conventional data sources exclude the incarcerated population from sample data. We show how those exclusions underestimate the extent of racial inequality in high school graduation and underestimate the dropout rate among young black men by as much as 40 percent. America’s prisons and jails have become repositories for high school dropouts, thereby obscuring the degree of disadvantage faced by black men in the contemporary United States and the relative competitiveness of the U.S. workforce.

Resources for studying public participation in and attitudes towards the arts

Abstract This paper is an evaluative inventory of 29 data sets containing information on public participation in and attitudes towards the arts collected from cross-sectional samples of local, state, and national populations in North America. This paper reviews surveys focused on participation in the arts, and omnibus social surveys that include a selection of questions about participation in, or attitudes towards, the arts. Descriptive, evaluative, and contact information is provided for each of the surveys along with a study-by-data element matrix.