Falling racial inequality and rising educational inequality in US prison admissions for drug, violent, and property crimes.

Using administrative and survey data, we show that there has been a sea change in the contours of American imprisonment. At the end of the twentieth century, inequality in the prison admission rates of Black and White Americans was comparable to inequality in the prison admission rates of people with and without a college education. However, educational inequality is now much greater than racial inequality in prison admissions for all major crime types.

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

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 cumulative risk of imprisonment for the 21st century.

Long-Term Trends and Ethnoracial Inequality in U.S. Foster Care: A Research Note.

This study combines and standardizes multiple sources of administrative data to calculate rates of children in foster care in the United States from 1961 to 2018, more than tripling the length of previously available time series. Results yield novel insights about historical, geographic, and ethnoracial variation in children's experience of living without parents under state supervision. National rates of children in foster care rose from 3 per 1,000 in 1963 to a peak of almost 8 per 1,000 in 1997 before declining to just under 6 per 1,000 in 2018.