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Christopher Wildeman

Professor of Sociology
Sociology
417 Chapel Drive, Box 90088, Durham, NC 27708
417 Chapel Drive, Box 90088, Durham, NC 27708

Selected Publications


Pediatric Health and System Impacts of Mass Incarceration, 2009-2020: A Matched Cohort Study.

Journal Article Academic pediatrics · November 2024 ObjectiveThe US has the highest incarceration rate in the world; incarceration's direct and indirect toll on the health and health care use of youth is rarely investigated. We sought to compare the health of youth with known personal or family jus ... Full text Cite

The consequences of sibling criminal legal system contact for family life

Journal Article Journal of Marriage and Family · August 1, 2024 Objective: To consider whether one sibling's criminal legal system contact influences another's material conditions, social support, and mental health and behavioral problems. Background: Sibling incarceration is both the most common form of familial incar ... Full text Cite

Adult Children of the Prison Boom: Family Troubles and the Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Justice Contact.

Journal Article Demography · February 2024 Intergenerational transmission processes have long been of interest to demographers, but prior research on the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact is relatively sparse and limited by its lack of attention to the correlated "family tr ... Full text Cite

Desistance as an Intergenerational Process

Journal Article Annual Review of Criminology · January 26, 2024 Nearly 35 years ago, Sampson and Laub popularized the concept of desistance from crime and isolated core factors that promote and inhibit this process. In this article, we introduce the concept of intergenerational desistance and provide guidance on measur ... Full text Cite

How Does Visitation Affect Incarcerated Persons and Their Families?: Estimates Using Exogenous Variation in Visits Driven by Distance between Home and Prison

Journal Article Journal of Human Resources · January 1, 2024 Tens of millions of people in the world are incarcerated, which may negatively affect them and their families. Visitation may mitigate the negative consequences, but there is little causally identified evidence on its efficacy. To generate plausibly causal ... Full text Cite

The Cumulative Prevalence of Congregate Care Placement for U.S. Children by Race/Ethnicity, 2019.

Journal Article Child maltreatment · November 2023 Congregate care placement is among the most consequential forms of foster care placement that youth can experience, as it means a removal from both the family of origin and a family setting more broadly. Unfortunately, little research has estimated how com ... Full text Cite

Introducing a new data resource for comparative child welfare research: The ROCKWOOL-Duke global child welfare database

Journal Article Children and Youth Services Review · September 1, 2023 The Rockwool–Duke Global Child Welfare Database (RDGCWD) is a cross-national aggregate longitudinal data resource created to facilitate comparative research on children's involvement with child welfare systems (CWS) and child protective services (CPS) acro ... Full text Cite

State-Level Variation in the Cumulative Prevalence of Child Welfare System Contact, 2015-2019.

Journal Article Children and youth services review · April 2023 BackgroundPrior estimates of the cumulative risks of child welfare system contact illustrate the prominence of this system in the lives of children in the United States (U.S.). However, these estimates report national data on a system administered ... Full text Cite

Lifetime risk of imprisonment in the United States remains high and starkly unequal.

Journal Article Science advances · December 2022 How likely are U.S. males and females of different ethnoracial groups to be imprisoned over the course of their lives, and how have these risks changed in recent decades? Using survey and administrative data, we update 20th-century estimates of the cumulat ... Full text Cite

Are the Average Effects of Foster Care Placement Really Close to Zero?

Journal Article Research on social work practice · July 2022 In their provocative article, Barth and colleagues interrogate existing research on a series of claims about the child welfare system. In this reply, we focus on just one of their conclusions: that foster care placement does little, on average, to cause th ... Full text Cite

Sticky Stigma: The Impact of Incarceration on Perceptions of Personality Traits and Deservingness

Journal Article Social Forces · June 1, 2022 Stigma is often cited as a mechanism driving the consequences of incarceration for formerly incarcerated people and their families. Few studies, however, provide quantitative evidence of the nature and strength of stigma stemming from direct and indirect i ... Full text Cite

Indebted by Proxy: How Women Are Faring Under the Carceral State

Chapter · January 1, 2022 This chapter explores the common trope that people must “pay their debt to society” when individuals are convicted of crimes. What is generally meant by this trope is that an individual should suffer prison or jail incarceration, state supervision after re ... Full text Cite

Family Visitation Patterns during Incarceration in Denmark

Journal Article Journal of Family Issues · December 1, 2021 While qualitative evidence has highlighted psychological benefits of visitation during incarceration, and quantitative evidence has linked visitation to better post-release outcomes for inmates, we know little about heterogeneity in visitation patterns and ... Full text Cite

Reply to Putnam-Hornstein et al.: On honest mistakes and raceless children.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · December 2021 Full text Open Access Cite

Putnam-Hornstein et al. Respond.

Journal Article American journal of public health · December 2021 Full text Cite

Erratum: Contact with Child Protective Services is pervasive but unequally distributed by race and ethnicity in large US counties (Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. (2021) 118 (e2106272118) DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2106272118)

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · October 19, 2021 The authors wish to note the following: "Shortly after the publication of our article we were contacted by another team of researchers (Emily Putnam-Hornstein, Eunhye Ahn, John Prindle, and DanielWebster) who have access to privately funded data from Calif ... Full text Open Access Cite

Assessing mass incarceration's effects on families.

Journal Article Science (New York, N.Y.) · October 2021 In this Review, we assess how mass incarceration, a monumental American policy experiment, has affected families over the past five decades. We reach four conclusions. First, family member incarceration is now common for American families. Second, individu ... Full text Cite

Paternal Jail Incarceration and Birth Outcomes: Evidence from New York City, 2010-2016.

Journal Article Maternal and child health journal · August 2021 ObjectivesTo examine population-level associations between paternal jail incarceration during pregnancy and infant birth outcomes using objective measures of health and incarceration.MethodsWe use multivariate logistic regression models a ... Full text Cite

Contact with Child Protective Services is pervasive but unequally distributed by race and ethnicity in large US counties.

Journal Article Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · July 2021 This article provides county-level estimates of the cumulative prevalence of four levels of Child Protective Services (CPS) contact using administrative data from the 20 most populous counties in the United States. Rates of CPS investigation are extremely ... Full text Cite

Women's Health in the Era of Mass Incarceration.

Book · July 2021 Dramatic increases in criminal justice contact in the United States have rendered prison and jail incarceration common for US men and their loved ones, with possible implications for women's health. This review provides the most expansive critical discussi ... Full text Cite

Cumulative Rates of Child Protection Involvement and Terminations of Parental Rights in a California Birth Cohort, 1999-2017.

Journal Article American journal of public health · June 2021 Objectives. To document the cumulative childhood risk of different levels of involvement with the child protection system (CPS), including terminations of parental rights (TPRs).Methods. We linked vital records for California's 1999 birth coh ... Full text Cite

Exposure to Family Member Incarceration and Adult Well-being in the United States.

Journal Article JAMA network open · May 2021 ImportanceMore than half of the adult population in the United States has ever had a family member incarcerated, an experience more common among Black individuals. The impacts of family incarceration on well-being are not fully understood.Obje ... Full text Cite

Long-term consequences of being placed in disciplinary segregation

Journal Article Criminology · August 1, 2020 Being placed in restrictive housing is considered one of the most devastating experiences a human can endure, yet a scant amount of research has been conducted to test how this experience affects core indicators of prisoner reentry such as employment and r ... Full text Cite

Estimating and explaining ethnic disparities in the cumulative risk of paternal incarceration in Denmark

Journal Article Demographic Research · July 1, 2020 BACKGROUND Paternal incarceration is a well-known risk factor for poor child outcomes. Although existing research documents the prevalence of paternal incarceration and racial/ethnic disparities in this risk, research in this area is still sorely limited i ... Full text Cite

Even better data on solitary confinement are needed.

Journal Article The Lancet. Public health · July 2020 Full text Cite

Cumulative Prevalence of Confirmed Maltreatment and Foster Care Placement for US Children by Race/Ethnicity, 2011-2016.

Journal Article American journal of public health · May 2020 Objectives. To estimate the cumulative prevalence of confirmed child maltreatment and foster care placement for US children and changes in prevalence between 2011 and 2016.Methods. We used synthetic cohort life tables and data from the Adopti ... Full text Cite

Solitary confinement placement and post-release mortality risk among formerly incarcerated individuals: a population-based study.

Journal Article The Lancet. Public health · February 2020 BackgroundWith more than 10 million people incarcerated worldwide, some of whom will have experienced solitary confinement, a better understanding of health and mortality after release is needed. The aim of this study was to assess the relationshi ... Full text Cite

The Cumulative Prevalence of Termination of Parental Rights for U.S. Children, 2000-2016.

Journal Article Child maltreatment · February 2020 Recent research has used synthetic cohort life tables to show that having a Child Protective Services investigation, experiencing confirmed maltreatment, and being placed in foster care are more common for American children than would be expected based on ... Full text Cite

The Intergenerational Transmission of Criminal Justice Contact

Journal Article Annual Review of Criminology · January 13, 2020 This article provides a critical overview in five stages of roughly 50 years of research on the intergenerational transmission of criminal justice contact. In the first stage, I document that research on the intergenerational transmission of crime and crim ... Full text Cite

Exposure to the US Criminal Legal System and Well-Being: A 2018 Cross-Sectional Study.

Journal Article American journal of public health · January 2020 Objectives. To assess the association between exposure to the US criminal legal system and well-being.Methods. We used data from the 2018 Family History of Incarceration Survey, a nationally representative cross-sectional study of family inca ... Full text Cite

Editorial: How Badly Do We Undercount Chronic Maltreatment, and How Much Should Clinicians Care?

Journal Article Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry · December 2019 Child maltreatment is both common1-4 and costly5,6 for children, communities, and society. Recent estimates suggest that roughly 1 in 8 American children will experience confirmed maltreatment,4 and the average lifetime cos ... Full text Cite

Age-Standardized Mortality of Persons on Probation, in Jail, or in State Prison and the General Population, 2001-2012.

Journal Article Public health reports (Washington, D.C. : 1974) · November 2019 ObjectivesThe number of adults in the United States being held on probation-persons convicted of crimes and serving their sentence in the community rather than in a correctional facility-approached 4 million at the end of 2016 and continues to gro ... Full text Cite

Can alternatives to incarceration enhance child well-being?

Chapter · September 13, 2019 In this chapter, we consider how alternatives to parental incarceration such as probation and community service could influence child well-being. As an increasing number of studies document a variety of negative outcomes for children with incarcerated pare ... Full text Cite

Parental Incarceration and Child Overweight: Results From a Sample of Disadvantaged Children in the United States.

Journal Article Public health reports (Washington, D.C. : 1974) · July 2019 ObjectivesRates of childhood obesity and parental incarceration have been increasing in the United States since the 1970s. We examined whether parental incarceration was associated with child overweight at age 9 and whether that association differ ... Full text Cite

Measuring Exposure to Incarceration Using the Electronic Health Record.

Journal Article Medical care · June 2019 BackgroundElectronic health records (EHRs) are a rich source of health information; however social determinants of health, including incarceration, and how they impact health and health care disparities can be hard to extract.ObjectiveThe ... Full text Cite

Health Consequences of Family Member Incarceration for Adults in the Household.

Journal Article Public health reports (Washington, D.C. : 1974) · May 2019 Full text Cite

What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated?: Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS)

Journal Article Socius · January 1, 2019 What percentage of Americans have ever had a family member incarcerated? To answer this question, we designed the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS). The survey was administered in the summer of 2018 by NORC at the University of Chicago using ... Full text Cite

Conditions of confinement in American prisons and jails

Book · October 13, 2018 Research on the consequences of incarceration for inmates and ex-inmates, their families, and their communities has proliferated in just the last 20 years. Yet little of this research has documented variation across facilities in conditions of confinement ... Full text Cite

Parental Incarceration and Child Health in the United States.

Journal Article Epidemiologic reviews · June 2018 Mass incarceration has profoundly restructured the life courses of not only marginalized adult men for whom this event is now so prevalent but also their families. We examined research published from 2000 to 2017 on the consequences of parental incarcerati ... Full text Cite

Characteristics of the front-line child welfare workforce

Journal Article Children and Youth Services Review · June 1, 2018 In this study, we provide new national- and state-level estimates of workload and workforce instability among child welfare agencies using previously unavailable data that includes unique identifiers for US child welfare caseworkers in 46 states and superv ... Full text Cite

Can foster care interventions Diminish justice system inequality?

Journal Article Future of Children · March 1, 2018 Children who experience foster care, write Youngmin Yi and Christopher Wildeman, are considerably more likely than others to have contact with the criminal justice system, both during childhood and as adults. And because children of color disproportionatel ... Full text Cite

Maternal incarceration and the transformation of urban family life

Journal Article Social Forces · March 1, 2018 Incarceration intensely alters the family lives of incarcerated men and the women and children connected to them. Yet women increasingly spend time behind bars and, accordingly, they absorb direct consequences of incarceration in addition to the more commo ... Full text Cite

Emergency Department and Hospital Use Among Adolescents With Justice System Involvement.

Journal Article Pediatrics · November 2017 ObjectivesAdolescents with justice system involvement have high rates of physical and behavioral health disorders and are potentially high users of costly health care services. We examined emergency department (ED) and hospital use among a nationa ... Full text Cite

Mass Imprisonment across the Rural-Urban Interface

Journal Article Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · July 1, 2017 Academic work on crime and punishment has focused mostly on urban centers, leaving rural communities understudied, except for acknowledgement that rural communities warehouse a large number of prisoners and that rural prisons provide jobs and economic deve ... Full text Cite

Mental Health Among Jail and Prison Inmates.

Journal Article American journal of men's health · July 2017 Previous studies provide insight into the mental health of jail and prison inmates, but this research does not compare the two groups of inmates. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, this article examines how the association betw ... Full text Cite

Mass incarceration, public health, and widening inequality in the USA.

Journal Article Lancet (London, England) · April 2017 In this Series paper, we examine how mass incarceration shapes inequality in health. The USA is the world leader in incarceration, which disproportionately affects black populations. Nearly one in three black men will ever be imprisoned, and nearly half of ... Full text Cite

Lifetime Prevalence of Investigating Child Maltreatment Among US Children.

Journal Article American journal of public health · February 2017 ObjectivesTo estimate the lifetime prevalence of official investigations for child maltreatment among children in the United States.MethodsWe used the National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System Child Files (2003-2014) and Census data to ... Full text Cite

Adverse childhood experiences among children placed in and adopted from foster care: Evidence from a nationally representative survey.

Journal Article Child abuse & neglect · February 2017 Despite good reason to believe that children in foster care are disproportionately exposed to adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), relatively little research considers exposure to ACEs among this group of vulnerable children. In this article, we use data ... Full text Cite

PATERNAL INCARCERATION AND CHILDREN'S RISK OF BEING CHARGED BY EARLY ADULTHOOD: EVIDENCE FROM A DANISH POLICY SHOCK*

Journal Article Criminology · February 1, 2017 In this article, we exploit a Danish criminal justice reform that dramatically decreased the risk of incarceration for individuals convicted of some types of crimes to isolate how having a father who was eligible for a noncustodial sentence under the refor ... Full text Cite

The effect of lowering welfare payment ceilings on children's risk of out-of-home placement

Journal Article Children and Youth Services Review · January 1, 2017 Although much research considers the relationship between family income and child maltreatment, contact with child protective services (CPS), and out-of-home placement, little research provides a strong causal test of these different relationships. And, as ... Full text Cite

Complicating Colorism: Race, Skin Color, and the Likelihood of Arrest

Journal Article Socius · January 1, 2017 Both conventional public beliefs and existing academic research on colorism presuppose that variation in skin color predicts social outcomes among minorities but is inconsequential among whites. The authors draw on social psychological research on stereoty ... Full text Cite

Paternal Incarceration and Teachers’ Expectations of Students

Journal Article Socius · January 1, 2017 In the past 40 years, paternal imprisonment has been transformed from an event affecting only the most unfortunate children to one that one in four African American children experience. Although research speculates that the stigma, strain, and separation r ... Full text Cite

Mortality among white, black, and Hispanic male and female state prisoners, 2001-2009

Journal Article SSM - Population Health · December 1, 2016 Although much research considers the relationship between imprisonment and mortality, little existing research has tested whether the short-term mortality advantage enjoyed by prisoners extends to Hispanics. We compared the mortality rates of non-Hispanic ... Full text Cite

Mental and Physical Health of Children in Foster Care.

Journal Article Pediatrics · November 2016 Background and objectivesEach year, nearly 1% of US children spend time in foster care, with 6% of US children placed in foster care at least once between their birth and 18th birthday. Although a large literature considers the consequences of fos ... Full text Cite

Geographic Variation in the Cumulative Risk of Imprisonment and Parental Imprisonment in the United States.

Journal Article Demography · October 2016 This article reports estimates of the cumulative risk of imprisonment and parental imprisonment for demographic groups in four regions and four states. Regional and state-level cumulative risks were markedly higher for African Americans and Latinos than fo ... Full text Cite

Incarceration and population health in wealthy democracies

Journal Article Criminology · May 1, 2016 Everywhere you look, incarceration seems to be doing harm. Research has implicated incarceration not only in worse outcomes for individuals, their families, and their communities but also in growing inequality. Yet incarceration may not always harm society ... Full text Cite

Paternal Incarceration and Family Functioning: Variation across Federal, State, and Local Facilities

Journal Article Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · May 1, 2016 This article extends research on the association between paternal incarceration and family functioning by differentiating between families with fathers who have been incarcerated in local jails, state prisons, federal prisons, and unknown types of faciliti ... Full text Cite

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

Journal Article Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · May 1, 2016 Full text Cite

State-level variation in the imprisonment-mortality relationship, 2001-2010

Journal Article Demographic Research · January 1, 2016 BACKGROUND Most research on the imprisonment-mortality relationship has focused exclusively on non-Hispanic black males and non-Hispanic white males at the national level in the United States. OBJECTIVE To document variation in this relationship across sta ... Full text Cite

Measuring the Effect of Probation and Parole Officers on Labor Market Outcomes and Recidivism

Journal Article Journal of Quantitative Criminology · December 1, 2015 Objectives: Use a unique dataset to pair probation and parole officers and their clients in Denmark in 2002–2009 to identify causal effects of these officers on labor market outcomes and recidivism. Methods: To identify these effects, we rely on data from ... Full text Cite

Self-Reported Health Among Recently Incarcerated Mothers.

Journal Article American journal of public health · October 2015 ObjectivesWe examined self-reported health among formerly incarcerated mothers.MethodsWe used data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (n = 4096), a longitudinal survey of mostly unmarried parents in urban areas, to estima ... Full text Cite

The Effect of Medical Treatment of Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) on Foster Care Caseloads: Evidence from Danish Registry Data.

Journal Article Journal of health and social behavior · September 2015 Since the early 2000s, foster care caseloads have decreased in many wealthy democracies, yet the causes of these declines remain, for the most part, a mystery. This article uses administrative data on all Danish municipalities (N = 277) and a 10% randomly ... Full text Cite

Mass imprisonment and the life course revisited: Cumulative years spent imprisoned and marked for working-age black and white men.

Journal Article Social science research · September 2015 Over the last 40 years, imprisonment has become a common stage in the life-course for low-skilled and minority men, with implications not only for inequality among adult men but also for inequality more broadly. Unfortunately, all research documenting how ... Full text Cite

An empirical assessment of the "healthy prisoner hypothesis".

Journal Article Social science & medicine (1982) · August 2015 Lower mortality among inmates, compared to the general population, is typically ascribed to access to health care during incarceration and the low risk of death due to homicide, accidents, and drug overdose. In this study, we test an alternative explanatio ... Full text Cite

RACIAL INEQUALITIES IN CONNECTEDNESS TO IMPRISONED INDIVIDUALS IN THE United States

Journal Article Du Bois Review · May 20, 2015 In just the last forty years, imprisonment has been transformed from an event experienced by only the most marginalized to a common stage in the life course of American men - especially Black men with low levels of educational attainment. Although much res ... Full text Cite

Detrimental for Some? Heterogeneous Effects of Maternal Incarceration on Child Wellbeing

Journal Article Criminology and Public Policy · February 1, 2015 Research Summary: We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 3,197) to consider the heterogeneous effects of maternal incarceration on 9-year-old children. We find that maternal incarceration has no average effects on child wellbe ... Full text Cite

Cumulative risks of paternal and maternal incarceration in Denmark and the United States

Journal Article Demographic Research · January 1, 2015 Background No research has estimated the cumulative risk of paternal or maternal incarceration in any country other than the U.S., so it remains unclear how much more likely U.S. children are to be exposed to parental incarceration than children living in ... Full text Cite

Tragic, but not random: the social contagion of nonfatal gunshot injuries.

Journal Article Social science & medicine (1982) · January 2015 This study investigates the concentration of nonfatal gunshot injuries within risky social networks. Using six years of data on gunshot victimization and arrests in Chicago, we reconstruct patterns of co-offending for the city and locate gunshot victims wi ... Full text Cite

Incarceration, maternal hardship, and perinatal health behaviors.

Journal Article Maternal and child health journal · November 2014 Parental incarceration is associated with mental and physical health problems in children, yet little research directly tests mechanisms through which parental incarceration could imperil child health. We hypothesized that the incarceration of a woman or h ... Full text Cite

The effect of paternal incarceration on children's risk of foster care placement

Journal Article Social Forces · September 1, 2014 Research on the relationship between parental incarceration and foster care placement is limited in three ways: (1) it focuses solely on maternal imprisonment and provides neither (2) strong causal tests nor (3) tests of mediation. In this article, we addr ... Full text Cite

The prevalence of confirmed maltreatment among US children, 2004 to 2011.

Journal Article JAMA pediatrics · August 2014 ImportanceChild maltreatment is a risk factor for poor health throughout the life course. Existing estimates of the proportion of the US population maltreated during childhood are based on retrospective self-reports. Records of officially confirme ... Full text Cite

Termination of medicaid policies and implications for the Affordable Care Act.

Journal Article American journal of public health · August 2014 Full text Cite

Positive, negative, or null? The effects of maternal incarceration on children's behavioral problems.

Journal Article Demography · June 2014 We use data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to consider the effects of maternal incarceration on 21 caregiver- and teacher-reported behavioral problems among 9-year-old children. The results suggest three primary conclusions. First, chi ... Full text Cite

High incarceration rates among black men enrolled in clinical studies may compromise ability to identify disparities.

Journal Article Health affairs (Project Hope) · May 2014 In 1978 the federal government restricted research on prison and jail inmates in medical studies, the result of decades of unethical research in correctional institutions. We evaluated the impact this policy has had on studies of health outcomes in minorit ... Full text Cite

A heavy burden: the cardiovascular health consequences of having a family member incarcerated.

Journal Article American journal of public health · March 2014 ObjectivesWe examined the association of family member incarceration with cardiovascular risk factors and disease by gender.MethodsWe used a sample of 5470 adults aged 18 years and older in the National Survey of American Life, a 2001-200 ... Full text Cite

Parental incarceration and child mortality in Denmark.

Journal Article American journal of public health · March 2014 ObjectivesWe used Danish registry data to examine the association between parental incarceration and child mortality risk.MethodsWe used a sample of all Danish children born in 1991 linked with parental information. We conducted discrete- ... Full text Cite

The hedonic consequences of punishment revisited

Journal Article Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology · February 12, 2014 In recent years, legal scholars have become acutely concerned with the hedonic consequences of incarceration. Despite this interest, no research has simultaneously tested (1) whether current incarceration and recent incarceration lead to declines in happin ... Cite

Cumulative risks of foster care placement for Danish children.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2014 Although recent research suggests that the cumulative risk of foster care placement is far higher for American children than originally suspected, little is known about the cumulative risk of foster care placement in other countries, which makes it difficu ... Full text Cite

Somebody's children or nobody's children? How the sociological perspective could enliven research on foster care

Book · January 1, 2014 Social scientists have long been concerned about how the fortunes of parents affect their children, with acute interest in the most marginalized children. Yet little sociological research considers children in foster care. In this review, we take a three-p ... Full text Cite

Cumulative risks of foster care placement by age 18 for U.S. children, 2000-2011.

Journal Article PloS one · January 2014 Foster care placement is among the most tragic events a child can experience because it more often than not implies that a child has experienced or is at very high risk of experiencing abuse or neglect serious enough to warrant state intervention. Yet it i ... Full text Cite

Network exposure and homicide victimization in an African American community.

Journal Article American journal of public health · January 2014 ObjectivesWe estimated the association of an individual's exposure to homicide in a social network and the risk of individual homicide victimization across a high-crime African American community.MethodsCombining 5 years of homicide and p ... Full text Cite

Detaining Democracy? Criminal Justice and American Civic Life

Journal Article Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · January 1, 2014 Full text Cite

Parental Incarceration, Child Homelessness, and the Invisible Consequences of Mass Imprisonment

Journal Article Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · January 1, 2014 This article presents research on the consequences of mass imprisonment for childhood inequality. I investigate average and race-specific effects of paternal and maternal incarceration on the risk of child homelessness, using data from the Fragile Families ... Full text Cite

Redefining Relationships: Explaining the Countervailing Consequences of Paternal Incarceration for Parenting

Journal Article American Sociological Review · December 1, 2013 In response to dramatic increases in imprisonment, a burgeoning literature considers the consequences of incarceration for family life, almost always documenting negative outcomes. But effects of incarceration may be more complicated and nuanced. In this a ... Full text Cite

A new vulnerable population? The health of female partners of men recently released from prison.

Journal Article Women's health issues : official publication of the Jacobs Institute of Women's Health · November 2013 BackgroundDespite a growing literature on the consequences of having a romantic partner incarcerated on women's risk of contracting sexually transmitted infections, little research considers the broader health profile of the female partners of eve ... Full text Cite

Things Fall Apart: Health Consequences of Mass Imprisonment for African American Women

Journal Article Review of Black Political Economy · January 1, 2013 In this article, we examine the possible impact of mass imprisonment on the physical health of African American women. Specifically, we focus on a variety of mechanisms through which mass imprisonment may increase the risk of having three major chronic hea ... Full text Cite

Punishment and inequality

Chapter · January 1, 2013 Full text Cite

Mass imprisonment and inequality in health and family life

Book · December 1, 2012 In response to drastic increases and enduring disparities in American imprisonment, researchers have produced an expansive literature on the effects of mass imprisonment on inequality in America. We discuss this literature in three parts. First, we conside ... Full text Cite

Those They Leave Behind: Paternal Incarceration and Maternal Instrumental Support

Journal Article Journal of Marriage and Family · October 1, 2012 As the American imprisonment rate has risen, researchers have become increasingly concerned about the implications of mass imprisonment for family life. The authors extend this research by examining how paternal incarceration is linked to perceived instrum ... Full text Cite

Social Networks and Risk of Homicide Victimization in an African American Community

Journal Article · September 19, 2012 This study estimates the association of an individual’s position in a social network with their risk of homicide victimization across a high crime African American community in Chicago. Data are drawn from five years of arrest and victimization incidents f ... Cite

Imprisonment and infant mortality

Journal Article Social Problems · May 1, 2012 This article extends research on the consequences of parental incarceration for child well-being, the effects ofmass imprisonment on black-white inequalities in child well-being, and the factors shaping black-white inequalities in infant mortality by consi ... Full text Cite

Despair by association? the mental health of mothers with children by recently incarcerated fathers

Journal Article American Sociological Review · April 1, 2012 A burgeoning literature considers the consequences of mass imprisonment for the well-being of adult men and-albeit to a lesser degree-their children. Yet virtually no quantitative research considers the consequences of mass imprisonment for the well-being ... Full text Cite

As fathers and felons: explaining the effects of current and recent incarceration on major depression.

Journal Article Journal of health and social behavior · January 2012 Dramatic increases in the American imprisonment rate since the mid-1970s have important implications for the life chances of minority men with low educational attainment, including for their health. Although a large literature has considered the collateral ... Full text Cite

Imprisonment and (inequality in) population health

Journal Article Social Science Research · January 1, 2012 This article extends research on the consequences of mass imprisonment and the factors shaping population health and health inequalities by considering the associations between imprisonment and population health-measured as life expectancy at birth and the ... Full text Cite

Invited commentary: (Mass) Imprisonment and (Inequities in) Health.

Journal Article American journal of epidemiology · March 2011 The US imprisonment rate has increased dramatically since the mid-1970s, precipitating tremendous interest in the consequences of having ever been imprisoned for the marginal men for whom contact with prisons and jails has become commonplace. The article b ... Full text Cite

Commentary on Roettger et al. (2011): confronting the elephant in the room.

Journal Article Addiction (Abingdon, England) · January 2011 Full text Cite

Paternal Incarceration and Children's Physically Aggressive Behaviors: Evidence from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study

Journal Article Social Forces · September 1, 2010 This study extends research on the consequences of mass imprisonment and the causes of children's behavioral problems by considering the effects of paternal incarceration on children's physical aggression at age 5 using data from the Fragile Families and C ... Full text Cite

Incarceration in fragile families.

Journal Article The Future of children · January 2010 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 conce ... Full text Cite

Associations of childhood religious attendance, family structure, and nonmarital fertility across cohorts

Journal Article Journal of Marriage and Family · December 1, 2009 This article considers associations among childhood family structure, childhood religious service attendance, and the probability of having a nonmarital first birth before age 30 for non-Hispanic White women born 1944 to 1964 using data from the 1988 and 1 ... Full text Cite

Parental imprisonment, the prison boom, and the concentration of childhood disadvantage.

Journal Article Demography · May 2009 Although much research has focused on how imprisonment transforms the life course of disadvantaged black men, researchers have paid little attention to how parental imprisonment alters the social experience of childhood. This article estimates the risk of ... Full text Cite

The black family and mass incarceration

Journal Article Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science · January 1, 2009 Released in 1965, the Moynihan Report traced the severe social and economic distress of poor urban African Americans to high rates of single-parenthood. Against Moynihan's calls for social investment in poor inner-city communities, politics moved in a puni ... Full text Cite

Soliciting prayer for the absent, measuring their social worth: Prayer requests for the deployed and the incarcerated

Journal Article Poetics · October 1, 2008 This article uses novel data - online prayer requests for incarcerated and deployed individuals - to investigate how individuals evaluate the social worth of absent loved ones. Results from overdispersed Poisson regression models show that describing incar ... Full text Cite

Facilitators and advocates: How mainline Protestant Clergy respond to homosexuality

Journal Article Sociological Perspectives · September 25, 2008 This article analyzes how thirty mainline Protestant clergy who addressed homosexuality in their local congregations positioned themselves within their congregations on the issue. Regardless of their positions, all of the pastors first situated the root ca ... Full text Cite

Conservative protestantism and paternal engagement in fragile families

Journal Article Sociological Forum · September 1, 2008 Research consistently shows that married conservative Protestant fathers are more engaged with their children than otherwise comparable married fathers. Unfortunately, no research examines the relationship between conservative Protestantism and paternal en ... Full text Cite

How denominational resources influence debate about homosexuality in mainline protestant congregations

Journal Article Sociology of Religion: A Quarterly Review · January 1, 2008 A growing body of research examines national conflicts over homosexuality in mainline Protestant denominations, but few studies have explored the concrete ways individual congregations are responding. We focus on thirty mainline Protestant congregations (i ... Full text Cite

Becoming a dad: Employment trajectories of married, cohabiting, and nonresident fathersn

Journal Article Social Science Quarterly · January 1, 2008 Objectives. This article considers how becoming a father affects men's employment levels and tests whether the effects of fatherhood differ by the relationship of the father to the child's mother at the time of the birth. Methods. We use data from the Frag ... Full text Cite

Bridging the denomination-congregation divide: Evangelical lutheran church in america congre-gations respond to homosexuality

Journal Article Review of Religious Research · March 1, 2007 A growing body of research examines conflicts over homosexuality in national religious organizations, but little research explores variation in how local congregations are responding to the issue. We focus on twenty-one congregations in the northeastern an ... Cite