Sara Wakefield

TRACING THE TIMING OF “CAREER” ACQUISITION IN A CONTEMPORARY YOUTH COHORT

Contemporary youth typically experience considerable floundering and uncertainty in their transition from school to work. This article examines patterns of schooling and working during adolescence and the transition to adulthood that hasten or delay an important subjective marker of transition to adulthood: acquiring a job that is recognized as a “career.” We use Youth Development Study data, obtained from a prospective longitudinal study of 9th graders. Estimation of discrete-time logit models shows that adolescent work patterns during high school, as well as the cumulative investments they make in work and schooling in the years following, significantly influence this milestone. Time-varying predictors, including job characteristics and parenthood, also affect the process of movement into “careers.”

Prisoner Reentry and Crime in America: WORK AND FAMILY PERSPECTIVES ON REENTRY

Employment and marriage play central roles in standard analyses of recidivism, and a long line of research suggests that ex-offenders who find good jobs and settle down in stable marriages threaten public safety much less than those who remain single and unemployed. Successful prisoner reentry thus involves the linked processes of reintegration into social institutions such as work and family and desistance from crime. Therefore, research on reentry and recidivism often aims to identify factors that place people at risk of joblessness and marital disruption – low education, impulsive behavior, drug abuse and so on. From this perspective, the job of public policy is to remedy these preexisting defects in ex-offenders, thereby promoting employment, marriage, and ultimately reducing crime. In this chapter we reexamine the roles of employment and marriage in prisoner reentry. Although we certainly agree that good jobs and strong marriages assist successful reentry and reduce recidivism, we try to extend the usual analysis in three ways. First, we adopt a life course perspective in which the timing of work and marriage emerge as critical for desistance from crime. This perspective suggests that age-graded public policy interventions are needed to normalize the life course trajectories of ex-offenders. Second, we consider whether the criminal justice system – particularly corrections – might negatively affect the employment opportunities and marriage prospects of ex-offenders. In this case, public policy should also work to remedy the damage caused by official criminal justice processing or to seek alternatives to incarceration that may be less costly to public safety in the long term.

What have we Learned from Longitudinal Studies of Work and Crime

This review paper considers the connection between employment and criminal behavior. We first examine theories that suggest a link between work and crime at different life course stages. Next, longitudinal studies and statistical approaches to specifying the relationship are discussed. Results of existing studies are organized into discussions of work intensity and adolescent delinquency, job characteristics and crime, and unemployment and crime rates.We then offer a more focused discussion of ex-offenders and reentry. The paper concludes with a brief summary of what has been learned, suggesting that investments in longitudinal investigations have yielded important new knowledge about when and how work matters for crime and delinquency.

Toward a Criminology of Inmate Networks

The mid-twentieth century witnessed a surge of American prison ethnographies focused on inmate society and the social structures that guide inmate life. Ironically, this literature virtually froze in the 1980s just as the country entered a period of unprecedented prison expansion, and has only recently begun to thaw. In this manuscript, we develop a rationale for returning inmate society to the forefront of criminological inquiry, and suggest that network science provides an ideal framework for achieving this end. In so doing, we show that a network perspective extends prison ethnographies by allowing quantitative assessment of prison culture and illuminating basic characteristics of prison social structure that are essential for improving inmate safety, health, and community reentry outcomes. We conclude by demonstrating the feasibility and promise of inmate network research with findings from a recent small-scale study of a maximum-security prison work unit.

Tough on Crime, Tough on Families? Criminal Justice and Family Life in America

Sara Wakefield is an assistant professor in the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. Her research interests focus on the consequences of mass imprisonment for the family, with an emphasis on childhood well-being and racial inequality. She is coauthor of Children of the prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality (with Christopher Wildeman; Oxford University Press 2013). Related work examines the social networks and conditions of confinement of inmates and social/family ties during reentry.

Distinguishing Petty Offenders from Serious Criminals in the Estimation of Family Life Effects

Prior research on the consequences of imprisonment for the family suggest that incarceration of so-called petty offenders is most harmful for families, yet few studies provide a clear description of who is and is not a petty offender and how best to make such distinctions. We compare various ways of categorizing inmates (using preprison family involvement and characteristics related to criminality and child well-being) to better understand heterogeneity in the consequences of paternal incarceration for children. In our analysis, we find that differentiating between “harmful” and “helpful” fathers is rather difficult, and reform efforts that are overly reliant on criminal offense categories may not be the most gainful policy approach in terms of benefit to children. We also describe a small population of children who appear to benefit from paternal incarceration: children of fathers with severe substance abuse problems. The pattern of results suggests that providing alternative interventions to incarceration, rather than no intervention at all, is critical to improving outcomes for all children of incarcerated parents.

Criminal Justice and the Life Course

In this essay, we use Elder’s core concepts of context, timing, interdependency, and agency to examine the influence of the Criminal Justice System on the life course. In our review, we place the modern criminal justice system in historical context, examine the role it plays in driving life course outcomes and in the creation of social inequality. In so doing, we argue that the expansion of the criminal justice system since the 1970s in the United States has placed it alongside other important social institutions, such as the family, schools, and the labor market, in powerfully structuring not only the lives of former felons and inmates, but also those connected to them.

Social Networks and Health in a Prison Unit

Although a growing body of research documents lasting health consequences of incarceration, little is known about how confinement affects inmates’ health while incarcerated. In this study, we examine the role of peer social integration and prisoners’ self-reported health behaviors (smoking, exercise, perception of health, and depression) in a prison unit. We also consider whether inmates with similar health characteristics cluster within the unit. Drawing on a sample of 132 inmates in a “good behavior” unit, we leverage social network data to ask: In prison, is it healthier to become friends with other prisoners or keep your head down and “do your own time”? Using exponential random graph models and community detection methods, findings indicate that social integration is associated with better health outcomes. However, race-ethnicity, religious identity, and exercise intensity emerge as key factors sorting inmates into social groups and likely shaping the distribution of health behaviors observed in the unit.

Effects of state education requirements for substance use prevention

We provide the first evidence on the effects of state laws requiring students to receive education about alcohol, tobacco, and other drugs using data on over a million youths from the 1976-2010 Monitoring the Future study. In difference-in-differences and event-study models, we find robust evidence that these laws significantly reduced recent alcohol and marijuana use among high school seniors by 1.6-2.8 percentage points, or about 8-10% of the overall decline over this period. Our results suggest that information interventions can reduce youth substance use.