Incarceration and Stratification

“The effects of poverty or inequality on crime are similarly complex (e.g., Blau & Blau 1982, Bushway & Reuter 2002, Cantor & Land 1985, Hagan & Peterson 1995), but prisons are most certainly filled with the poor (Wheelock & Uggen 2008).”

“Figure 5 Differences in male incarceration by race, ethnicity, and education (Source: Western 2006, p. 19). by these differences and placed onto differing tracks (see, e.g., Gamoran & Mare 1989).”

“An emerging research literature is now examining these intergenerational costs, with many hypothesizing strong negative effects (e.g., Hagan & Dinovitzer 1999, Nurse 2004, Travis et al. www.annualreviews.org • Incarceration and Stratification 397 A nn u.”

“The employment disadvantages of individuals with a criminal history are partially explained by lower levels of education, skills, credentials, and weaker work histories (Goffman, 1963; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“In this section, we highlighted how the systematic concentration of incarceration among disadvantaged racial and ethnic groups may maintain or exacerbate social inequality among those in the criminal justice system, as well as those connected to the incarcerated (Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“As noted in prior research (Clear, 2009; wakefield & Uggen, 2010), maintaining familial support during incarceration is challenging and must be addressed throughout the reentry process.”

“For example, being unemployed may lead to greater participation in the informal economy that can then lead to incarceration which reduces one’s work experience and employability (Western 2002; Gangl 2006; Pager et al. 2009; Wakefield and Uggen 2010).”

“…institutions, compounding and exacerbating other social ills, the US prison system now stands beside the labor market and IJCJ&SD 80 Online version via www.crimejusticejournal.com © 2015 4(4) the education system as an important stratifying institution in US society (Wakefield and Uggen 2010).”

“…of mass incarceration— which separates parents from children, can limit employment options after release, and has disproportionately affected low-education Black and Latino men (Wakefield and Uggen 2010; Western 2006)—as well as long-term declines in the male labor force participation rate.”

“Prisoners have limited interaction choices and the pool of available interactants are likely to be demographically heterogeneous (Wakefield & Uggen, 2010) yet criminally homogenous.”

“Second, a growing body of research demonstrates that incarceration has few positive effects on individual change, community stability, or public safety (Durose, Cooper, & Snyder, 2014; Pattillo, Weiman, & Western, 2004; Travis, Western, & Redburn, 2014; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“…psychological, and developmental well-being ( Johnston 1995; Brooks-Gunn andDuncan 1997; Argys et al. 1998; Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999; Travis and Waul 2003; Swisher and Waller 2008; Geller et al. 2009; Poehlmann 2009; Western andWildeman 2009; Wakefield and Uggen 2010; Geller et al. 2011).”

“As a consequence, former prisoners can experience difficulties in family formation and dissolution and a decrease in social networks and social capital (Apel et al. 2009; Hagan and Dinovitzer 1999; Lopoo and Western 2004; Rose and Clear 2002; Wakefield and Uggen 2010).”

“In fact, given drastic inequities in imprisonment between US states and other wealthy democracies (4), mass imprisonment might have even more far-reaching consequences for health inequities (26).”

“As shown in several interview and audit studies (e.g., Kirschenman and Neckerman 1991; Pager et al. 2009; Waldinger 1993), racial projections with regard to soft skills constitute a formidable barrier to employment for less-educated Black men.”

“We encourage future research to consider how race-based selection processes [25] influence education and health in prisons.”

“…the impact of a criminal history on employment has been long documented in the literature (Henry & Jacobs, 2007; Pager, 2003; Stoll & Bushway, 2008; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010; Western, 2002), with unemployment post-incarceration leading to re-incarceration, thus contributing to the “revolving door”…”

“Pac Rim Law Policy J 2011;20(1):179e209.”

“To measure political threat, I compute the black-white voting ratio by dividing the black voting rate by the white voting rate (e.g., Wang and Mears 2010).”

“Copious evidence from national, state, and local jurisdictions has repeatedly shown that criminal justice involvement disproportionately affects people of color, particularly African Americans, and the poor (Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“…advantaged social categories … such as the …educational system … and the formal labour market ... [which] …reflect and create inequality by differentially conferring access and opportunity across social groups’ (Wakefield and Uggen, 2010: 388; Hatton, 2017; see also Wilkinson and Pickett, 2010).”

“Such communities have for decades suffered social ills including poverty and disproportionate incarceration of men, with enormous moral costs for these communities as well as the nation in general (Roberts 2004, Wakefield and Uggen 2010).”

“Criminal record stigma impacts low-income people more heavily because they typically do not have adequate resources to overcome reentry obstacles (Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“Prison has therefore been described as a “major stratifying institution” (Wakefield & Uggen, 2010, p. 388) and mass incarceration increases the likelihood that social inequalities will be transmitted across generations (Western & Pettit, 2010).”

“Persons suffering from mental disorders and minorities, including Latinos, are overrepresented in the US criminal justice system (Brewer & Heitzeg, 2008; James & Glaze, 2006; Small, 2001; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“Research indicates that FIIs encounter challenges securing employment due to shorter work histories, lower educational attainment, and fewer credentials than those without a criminal background (Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“They disproportionately house the poor and disenfranchised (Alexander 2010), groups with higher than average rates of preexisting health conditions (Wakefield and Uggen 2010).”

“prisons, gangs, recidivism, arrest, conviction, and incarceration, discretetime survival models The dramatic rise in the use and consequences of imprisonment in the United States is well-documented (Clear 2007; National Research Council 2014; Wakefield and Uggen 2010).”

“Whereas the free world is fraught with conflict between middle-class managers and working-class employees (Burawoy 1979) or workers and the nonworking poor (Newman 1999), the prison population is largely made up of poor labor market under-or nonparticipants (Wakefield and Uggen 2010).”

“…2005) as well as to oppress or exclude minority populations from participation in political action, formal labor markets, and other segments of civic society (Blackmon, 2008; Goffman, 2009; Uggen and Manza, 2002; Van Cleve, 2016; Wacquant, 2009; Wakefield and Uggen, 2010; Western and Pettit, 2010).”

“Mass imprisonment disproportionately targets marginalized segments of the population (Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“…adolescent delinquency, parent–offspring relationship quality, childhood sexual abuse, residential mobility, nativity, offspring low birth weight, mother’s age at offspring’s birth, and neighborhood disorder (Fingerman et al., 2009; Suitor et al., 2006; Swartz, 2009; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“…socio-economic stratification increases the odds that poor and uneducated segments of our population become incarcerated (Western 2006; Pager 2009; Wakefield and Uggen 2010; Wheelock, Uggen, and Hlavka 2011), the collateral civil penalties associated with a criminal conviction also contribute to…”

“…and posttrial incarceration, rates of criminal legal system contact in the United States are higher among the poor and marginalized racial and ethnic minorities than among the nonpoor and Whites, respectively (Brame et al., 2014; Spohn, 2008a; Travis et al., 2014; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“They are representationally more likely to be placed behind bars (Pettit and Western, 2004; Wakefield and Uggen, 2010), subject to police brutality (Krieger, 2015) and be in poor health or die an early death (National Center for Health Statistics (US), 2016).”

“…jobs, transportation (Sung, Mahoney, & Mellow, 2011), problems getting identification documents, family and relationship issues (Fishman, 2003; Pettit & Western, 2004; Siennick, Stewart, & Staff, 2014; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010), and poor physical and mental health (Travis, Western, & Redburn, 2014).”

“Survey and demographic research attests to the ways in which these interactions shape the urban poor’s participation in the labor market, healthcare, and political incorporation (Wakefield and Uggen 2010; Clear 2007; Pager 2007; Massoglia 2008).”

“Prisoners are likely to be unhealthy when they enter prison, have the potential to see their health degrade while incarcerated (Wakefield and Uggen, 2010), and when they are released into the community, their health problems follow them.”

“Therefore, romantic partner jail incarceration is an especially pervasive stressor among families navigating related adversities such as systemic racism, economic instability, substance abuse, and under-resourced neighborhoods (Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“…physical, educational, and socioeconomic problems as well as a higher likelihood of exposure to violence and the criminal justice system (Eddy & Poehlmann-Tynan, 2019; Foster & Hagan, 2015; Smyke et al., 2017; TenEyck et al., 2021; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010; Western, 2018; Wildeman & Turney, 2014).”

“All of these factors combine to place recent arrestees in the lowest ranks on the socioeconomic ladder with fairly low annual income levels relative to the general population (Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“…of crime desistance (Bushway and Reuter, 1997; Freeman, 1995; LeBel et al., 2008; Solomon et al., 2004; Uggen and Staff, 2001), ex-offenders have limited employment opportunities (Holzer et al., 2002; Pager, 2007; Travis and Petersilia, 2001; Wakefield and Uggen, 2010; Wheelock et al., 2011).”

“Having a felony carries with it a “formidable and virtually indelible legal stigma” ( Wakefield & Uggen, 2010 ) that participants described, in effect, as keeping them down both emotionally and socioeconomically.”

“While much research finds that incarceration has far reaching consequences on social and political life (see Wakefield and Uggen, 2010 for a review), we find that unequal political representation is a perhaps more insidious consequence of hyperincarceration that shifts political power away from…”

“The late 1970s/1980s were marked by the beginning of the era of mass incarceration and a regime of punitiveness that persisted through the 1990s (Clear, 2007; National Research Council, 2014; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“…led scholars to theorize the criminal legal system as an inequality-making institution that can shape—or flatly determine—how an individual participates in other major societal domains (Pager 2003, 2007; Western 2006; Wakefield and Uggen 2010; Brayne 2014; Miller and Stuart 2017; Lageson 2020).”

“Recent Themes Incarceration changes the lives of the families and communities of incarcerated people and is associated with a wide variety of social harms that, taken together, implicate the criminal justice system in maintenance and exacerbation of inequality (Wakefield and Uggen 2010).”

“Each year approximately 650,000 to 700,000 people are released from a penal system with challenges of re-entering society in a healthy, meaningful, and productive capacity (Geiger, 2006; Pager, Western, & Sugie, 2009; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010).”

“A number of excellent reviews of the incarceration-employment relationship already exist and are essential reading for scholars in this tradition (Uggen, Wakefield, & Western, 2005; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010; Western, Kling, & Weiman, 2001; Wildeman & Muller, 2012).”

“Incarceration has been studied as a major transition that causes permanent effects on individuals’ trajectories (Pettit & Western, 2004; Wakefield & Uggen, 2010), including negative consequences for labor market success and overall wage rates (Huebner, 2005; Pager, 2008; Western et al., 2001), the…”

“The rise in mass incarceration since the 1970s has removed many fathers from their families and communities (Wakefield and Uggen 2010) and has increased “churning” within partner relationships (Turney and Halpern- Meekin 2021).”

“In this way, the conceptualization of risk-based practices as distributive processes makes insightful how risk-based justice works to include or exclude marginalized individuals—and how criminal justice policies and practices shape and produce social inequality more generally (Western 2006; Wakefield and Uggen 2010; W…”

“Although individuals entering into prisons or jails already exhibit several markers of disadvantage including low levels of human, financial and social capital, contact with the correctional system can alter one’s life course and exacerbate disadvantage((23)).”

“For instance, recent scholarship views incarceration as a major force of social stratification and whose effects on intimate relationships persist after incarcerated partners are released from prison.(25,26) The absolute-level measure for housing was based on whether the participants had spent a night in their own hom…”

“The literature has also shown that having an incarcerated partner reduces the likelihood of healthy family relationships and increases the likelihood of child maltreatment as well as separation and divorce (Apel et al. 2010; Comfort 2008; Edin et al. 2004; Hairston 2002; Lopoo and Western 2005; Massoglia et al. 2011;…”