The long-term impact of debt relief for indigent defendants in a misdemeanor court.

US courts regularly assess fines, fees, and costs against criminal defendants. Court-related debt can cause continuing court involvement and incarceration, not because of new crimes, but because of unpaid financial obligations. We conducted an experiment with 606 people found guilty of misdemeanors in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma.

Clustering of health burdens in solitary confinement: A mixed-methods approach.

Research on the mental health consequences of solitary confinement has contributed to restrictions on its use, particularly for people with serious mental illness. However, solitary confinement continues to isolate people with physical and mental health problems, even where its use has been restricted. This mixed-methods analysis seeks to evaluate the practice of solitary confinement on mental and physical health using data from a sample of 99 men in Pennsylvania.

The population prevalence of solitary confinement.

Solitary confinement is a severe form of incarceration closely associated with long-lasting psychological harm and poor post-release outcomes. Estimating the population prevalence, we find that 11% of all black men in Pennsylvania, born 1986 to 1989, were incarcerated in solitary confinement by age 32. Reflecting large racial disparities, the population prevalence is only 3.

The cumulative risk of jail incarceration.

Research on incarceration has focused on prisons, but jail detention is far more common than imprisonment. Jails are local institutions that detain people before trial or incarcerate them for short sentences for low-level offenses. Research from the 1970s and 1980s viewed jails as "managing the rabble," a small and deeply disadvantaged segment of urban populations that struggled with problems of addiction, mental illness, and homelessness.

Drug use in the year after prison.

With poor health and widespread drug problems in the U.S. prison population, post-prison drug use provides an important measure of both public health and social integration following incarceration.

Social capital in the creation of cultural capital: Family structure, neighborhood cohesion, and extracurricular participation.

Past research has found that participation in extracurricular activities helps develop children's cultural capital that is crucial to both education and career successes. Previous studies have examined various determinants of extracurricular participation, but mostly focused on social class, demographics, and school characteristics. In this paper we renew the Coleman tradition by putting social capital (as measured by family structure and neighborhood cohesion) in the spotlight and studying the effect of social capital on youth participation in organized extracurricular activities.

Formerly Incarcerated Parents and Their Children.

The negative effects of incarceration on child well-being are often linked to the economic insecurity of formerly incarcerated parents. Researchers caution, however, that the effects of parental incarceration may be small in the presence of multiple-partner fertility and other family complexity. Despite these claims, few studies have directly observed either economic insecurity or the full extent of family complexity.

Study retention as bias reduction in a hard-to-reach population.

Collecting data from hard-to-reach populations is a key challenge for research on poverty and other forms of extreme disadvantage. With data from the Boston Reentry Study (BRS), we document the extreme marginality of released prisoners and the related difficulties of study retention and analysis. Analysis of the BRS data yields three findings.

Trends in Income Insecurity Among U.S. Children, 1984-2010.

Has income insecurity increased among U.S. children with the emergence of an employment-based safety net and the polarization of labor markets and family structure? We study the trend in insecurity from 1984-2010 by analyzing fluctuations in children's monthly family incomes in the Survey of Income and Program Participation.

Stress and Hardship after Prison.

The historic increase in U.S. incarceration rates made the transition from prison to community common for poor, prime-age men and women.

How health care reform can transform the health of criminal justice-involved individuals.

Provisions of the Affordable Care Act offer new opportunities to apply a public health and medical perspective to the complex relationship between involvement in the criminal justice system and the existence of fundamental health disparities. Incarceration can cause harm to individual and community health, but prisons and jails also hold enormous potential to play an active and beneficial role in the health care system and, ultimately, to improving health. Traditionally, incarcerated populations have been incorrectly viewed as isolated and self-contained communities with only peripheral importance to the public health at large.

Identifying Discrimination at Work: The Use of Field Experiments.

Antidiscrimination law offers protection to workers who have been treated unfairly on the basis of their race, gender, religion, or national origin. In order for these protections to be invoked, however, potential plaintiffs must be aware of and able to document discriminatory treatment. Given the subtlety of contemporary forms of discrimination, it is often difficult to identify discrimination when it has taken place.

Paternal incarceration and support for children in fragile families.

High U.S. incarceration rates have motivated recent research on the negative effects of imprisonment on later employment, earnings, and family relationships.

Incarceration in fragile families.

Since the mid-1970s the U.S. imprisonment rate has increased roughly fivefold.

Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment.

Decades of racial progress have led some researchers and policymakers to doubt that discrimination remains an important cause of economic inequality. To study contemporary discrimination, we conducted a field experiment in the low-wage labor market of New York City, recruiting white, black, and Latino job applicants who were matched on demographic characteristics and interpersonal skills. These applicants were given equivalent résumés and sent to apply in tandem for hundreds of entry-level jobs.

Sequencing Disadvantage: Barriers to Employment Facing Young Black and White Men with Criminal Records.

In this article, the authors report the results of a large-scale field experiment conducted in New York City investigating the effects of race and a prison record on employment. Teams of black and white men were matched and sent to apply for low-wage jobs throughout the city, presenting equivalent resumés and differing only in their race and criminal background. The authors find a significant negative effect of a criminal record on employment outcomes that appears substantially larger for African Americans.