M Pattillo
Biographic Data
| ID | 45426 |
|---|---|
| NAME | M Pattillo |
| GIVEN NAMES | M |
| FAMILY NAME | Pattillo |
| SIGNATURE | PATTILLO M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0717-169X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 31 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 851 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 31 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 12 |
College-in-prison participation and declines in incarcerated students’ perceptions of relationships to correctional staff
Prison education programs shape the interactions that incarcerated students have not only with faculty and fellow students, but also with prison staff. Research on college-in-prison, however, has focused on post-release outcomes such as recidivism, with less attention to how college-in-prison shapes everyday prison life. In this paper, we ask: How does college-in-prison participation influence incarcerated students’ perceptions of relationships w…
Where the hood at? Fifty years of change in black neighborhoods , by Michael C. Lens: New York, Russell Sage Foundation, 2024
It's like a reverse Robin Hood—We all know they can't pay”: How court actors navigate the logics of monetary sanctions
Monetary sanctions (also known as legal financial obligations or LFOs) are the most common form of state sanction for criminal convictions, yet we know little about the logics that court actors use in their implementation. Merging an inhabited institutions perspective with the institutional logics framework, we present evidence from court actors’ accounts of imposing and collecting LFOs to reveal how they navigate the competing penal and fiscal l…
Housing as a Right
Although the proclamation that housing is a right may seem straightforward, it is not. Eighty-four countries make explicit reference to housing rights in their constitutions. This list does not inc
Monetary Sanctions and Housing Instability
The relationship between criminal legal involvement and housing is complex because the causal arrow goes both ways. Research documents a homelessness-incarceration nexus whereby homelessness is criminalized, and incarceration leads to homelessness. In this article, we broaden the scope of housing outcomes by considering housing instability more generally and we shift the focus to legal financial obligations (LFOs) as a specific kind of criminal l…
Studying the System of Monetary Sanctions
some people are able to pay to be released from jail prior to adjudication (see Bail presents a somewhat unique case in that it is ostensibly refundable at the conclusion of a case. However, our research shows that at least a portion of sentenced fines and fees can be deducted from bail monies before refunding them, which makes bail a special prepaid form of monetary sanctions
Estamos Distanciados: The Black Middle Class and Politics in Cali, Colombia
A Black middle class has emerged in many Latin American countries. Yet given the fluidity of Black identity, it is unclear if socioeconomic gains will result in the consolidation of a Black middle-class group identity with a sense of political responsibility or purpose. In this article, we use qualitative interviews with twenty-two Black professionals in Cali, Colombia, plus a small convenience survey, to explore the following research questions:…
Mary Pattillo's Sociology of the Black Middle Class
Layaway Freedom: Coercive Financialization in the Criminal Legal System
Economic sociologists have documented the rise of financialization, including credit and debt. In the case of monetary sanctions in the criminal legal system, courts frequently extend payment plans—or “layaway”—as a way for defendants to manage financial court debt and gain their freedom. Using 241 hours of courtroom ethnography and 155 interviews with court actors and people paying their court debt in Illinois, the authors offer a microsociology…
Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class
The one black doctor who lives in an exclusive white suburb and the few African American lawyers who work at a large firm are not representative of the black middle class overall. The geography of Groveland is typical of black middle-class areas, which often sit as a kind of buffer between core black poverty areas and whites. Contrary to popular discussion, the black middle class has not out-migrated to unnamed neighborhoods outside of the black …
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Chicago’s block clubs: How neighbors shape the city , by Amanda I. Seligman
Chicago’s block clubs: How neighbors shape the city, by Amanda I. Seligman." Journal of Urban Affairs, 40(4), pp. 597–598
Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, by Michael Javen Fortner
Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea
The title lettering on the front cover of sociologist Mitchell Duneier's book is oversized, precisely centred, and in all capitals: GHETTO. You cannot read it in public without your neighbour immed
Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry
Using Chicago as our case, this article puts forth a notion of black placemaking that privileges the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being black and being around other black people in the city. Black placemaking refers to the ways that urban black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction. Our framework offers a corrective to existing accounts that depict urban…
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
Organizational “Failure” and Institutional Pluralism: A Case Study of an Urban School Closure
We use the framework of institutional pluralism to provide new insights into a controversial process of market-based reform—school closures. School closure is a shock that highlights the dynamics and definitions of failure and surfaces values and meanings that might otherwise be hidden from consideration. Using qualitative data from a closing urban school, we disaggregate stakeholders’ competing conceptions of legitimacy and argue that failure is…
Everyday Politics of School Choice in the Black Community
School choice is promoted as one strategy to improve educational outcomes for African Americans. Key themes in Black school choice politics are empowerment, control, and agency. Using qualitative interviews with seventy-seven poor and working-class Black parents in Chicago, this article asks: How well do the themes of empowerment, agency, and control characterize the experiences of low-income African American parents tasked with putting their chi…
Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago
Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago
Black Picket Fences, Second Edition: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class
The tension between abstraction and specificity in enacting reflexivity in race scholarship
Emirbayer and Desmond (2012; hereafter ED) intend for their exposition on race and reflexivity to be prescriptive. Moreover, they propose quite high stakes, 'such that there come to be real sanctio
Revisiting Loïc Wacquant's Urban Outcasts
Loïc Wacquant's Urban Outcasts compares poor and working-class neighborhoods in Chicago and Paris, and concludes that American racism has combined with advanced capitalism to create hyperghettos, whereas Parisian banlieues are heterogeneous anti-ghettos that are nonetheless destabilized by labor market and political forces that render low-skilled workers simultaneously superfluous and without a state safety net. This review revisits Chicago in th…
Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City
In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo - a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century - uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago's North Kenwood - Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America.There was a time when North Kenwood - Oakland was plagued by gangs, drugs, violence, and the font of poverty from which they sprang. But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackl…
Poverty in the family: Race, siblings, and socioeconomic heterogeneity
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry
Using Chicago as our case, this article puts forth a notion of black placemaking that privileges the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being black and being around other black people in the city. Black placemaking refers to the ways that urban black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction. Our framework offers a corrective to existing accounts that depict urban…
Everyday Politics of School Choice in the Black Community
School choice is promoted as one strategy to improve educational outcomes for African Americans. Key themes in Black school choice politics are empowerment, control, and agency. Using qualitative interviews with seventy-seven poor and working-class Black parents in Chicago, this article asks: How well do the themes of empowerment, agency, and control characterize the experiences of low-income African American parents tasked with putting their chi…
Sweet Mothers and Gangbangers: Managing Crime in a Black Middle-Class Neighborhood
Black middle-class neighborhoods have higher internal poverty rates and are closer to high-poverty and high-crime areas than white middle-class neighborhoods, which presents particular challenges to neighborhood social organization. This study uses ethnographic data from a black middle-class neighborhood in Chicago to explore how residents manage this ecological context. I find that dense social networks fostered by residential stability facilita…
Poverty in the family: Race, siblings, and socioeconomic heterogeneity
Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago
Negotiating Blackness, for Richer or for Poorer
For decades, Chicago's South Side has provided the material for the iconic representation of black urban poverty in the USA. Today, the poorest (but best-located) parts of this vast homeland - where land and homes could be had for a pittance two decades ago - are being celebrated by the City, eyed by developers, and featured by the media for their rise from the dust. This article focuses on how they are also being reclaimed by affluent African Am…
Organizational “Failure” and Institutional Pluralism: A Case Study of an Urban School Closure
We use the framework of institutional pluralism to provide new insights into a controversial process of market-based reform—school closures. School closure is a shock that highlights the dynamics and definitions of failure and surfaces values and meanings that might otherwise be hidden from consideration. Using qualitative data from a closing urban school, we disaggregate stakeholders’ competing conceptions of legitimacy and argue that failure is…
Kin Effects on Black-White Account and Home Ownership
This article combines the literature on kin networks and racial disparities in asset ownership. Specifically, we examine the effects of kin characteristics-sibling poverty and parental poverty, education, and occupation-on financial account ownership and home ownership. We find that kin matter for these outcomes. Having a poor sibling and coming from a poor family are negatively associated with account and home ownership while mother's education …
Extending the boundaries and definition of the ghetto
While William Julius Wilson and I both write about 'ghettos', the places and people we study are not the same. Wilson's 'ghettos' are places of concentrated poverty with high rates of joblessness. My definition includes such places and adds working- and middle-class black neighbourhoods as well. I argue that my usage of the term as the entirety of the spatially segregated and contiguous black community is more historically faithful and analytical…
Studying the System of Monetary Sanctions
some people are able to pay to be released from jail prior to adjudication (see Bail presents a somewhat unique case in that it is ostensibly refundable at the conclusion of a case. However, our research shows that at least a portion of sentenced fines and fees can be deducted from bail monies before refunding them, which makes bail a special prepaid form of monetary sanctions
Layaway Freedom: Coercive Financialization in the Criminal Legal System
Economic sociologists have documented the rise of financialization, including credit and debt. In the case of monetary sanctions in the criminal legal system, courts frequently extend payment plans—or “layaway”—as a way for defendants to manage financial court debt and gain their freedom. Using 241 hours of courtroom ethnography and 155 interviews with court actors and people paying their court debt in Illinois, the authors offer a microsociology…
Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea
The title lettering on the front cover of sociologist Mitchell Duneier's book is oversized, precisely centred, and in all capitals: GHETTO. You cannot read it in public without your neighbour immed
Monetary Sanctions and Housing Instability
The relationship between criminal legal involvement and housing is complex because the causal arrow goes both ways. Research documents a homelessness-incarceration nexus whereby homelessness is criminalized, and incarceration leads to homelessness. In this article, we broaden the scope of housing outcomes by considering housing instability more generally and we shift the focus to legal financial obligations (LFOs) as a specific kind of criminal l…
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Revisiting Loïc Wacquant's Urban Outcasts
Loïc Wacquant's Urban Outcasts compares poor and working-class neighborhoods in Chicago and Paris, and concludes that American racism has combined with advanced capitalism to create hyperghettos, whereas Parisian banlieues are heterogeneous anti-ghettos that are nonetheless destabilized by labor market and political forces that render low-skilled workers simultaneously superfluous and without a state safety net. This review revisits Chicago in th…
Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago
Sweet Mothers and Gangbangers: Managing Crime in a Black Middle-Class Neighborhood
Black middle-class neighborhoods have higher internal poverty rates and are closer to high-poverty and high-crime areas than white middle-class neighborhoods, which presents particular challenges to neighborhood social organization. This study uses ethnographic data from a black middle-class neighborhood in Chicago to explore how residents manage this ecological context. I find that dense social networks fostered by residential stability facilita…
Red Lines, Black Spaces: The Politics of Race and Space in a Black Middle-Class Suburb
Kin Effects on Black-White Account and Home Ownership
This article combines the literature on kin networks and racial disparities in asset ownership. Specifically, we examine the effects of kin characteristics-sibling poverty and parental poverty, education, and occupation-on financial account ownership and home ownership. We find that kin matter for these outcomes. Having a poor sibling and coming from a poor family are negatively associated with account and home ownership while mother's education …
Black Power in the Suburbs: The Myth or Reality of African American Suburban Political Incorporation
Negotiating Blackness, for Richer or for Poorer
For decades, Chicago's South Side has provided the material for the iconic representation of black urban poverty in the USA. Today, the poorest (but best-located) parts of this vast homeland - where land and homes could be had for a pittance two decades ago - are being celebrated by the City, eyed by developers, and featured by the media for their rise from the dust. This article focuses on how they are also being reclaimed by affluent African Am…
Extending the boundaries and definition of the ghetto
While William Julius Wilson and I both write about 'ghettos', the places and people we study are not the same. Wilson's 'ghettos' are places of concentrated poverty with high rates of joblessness. My definition includes such places and adds working- and middle-class black neighbourhoods as well. I argue that my usage of the term as the entirety of the spatially segregated and contiguous black community is more historically faithful and analytical…
Poverty in the family: Race, siblings, and socioeconomic heterogeneity
Black on the Block: The Politics of Race and Class in the City
In Black on the Block, Mary Pattillo - a Newsweek Woman of the 21st Century - uses the historic rise, alarming fall, and equally dramatic renewal of Chicago's North Kenwood - Oakland neighborhood to explore the politics of race and class in contemporary urban America.There was a time when North Kenwood - Oakland was plagued by gangs, drugs, violence, and the font of poverty from which they sprang. But in the late 1980s, activists rose up to tackl…
Revisiting Loïc Wacquant's Urban Outcasts
Loïc Wacquant's Urban Outcasts compares poor and working-class neighborhoods in Chicago and Paris, and concludes that American racism has combined with advanced capitalism to create hyperghettos, whereas Parisian banlieues are heterogeneous anti-ghettos that are nonetheless destabilized by labor market and political forces that render low-skilled workers simultaneously superfluous and without a state safety net. This review revisits Chicago in th…
The tension between abstraction and specificity in enacting reflexivity in race scholarship
Emirbayer and Desmond (2012; hereafter ED) intend for their exposition on race and reflexivity to be prescriptive. Moreover, they propose quite high stakes, 'such that there come to be real sanctio
Black Picket Fences, Second Edition: Privilege and Peril among the Black Middle Class
Exit Zero: Family and Class in Postindustrial Chicago
Racial Democracy and the Black Metropolis: Housing Policy in Postwar Chicago
Black Metropolis: A Study of Negro Life in a Northern City
Organizational “Failure” and Institutional Pluralism: A Case Study of an Urban School Closure
We use the framework of institutional pluralism to provide new insights into a controversial process of market-based reform—school closures. School closure is a shock that highlights the dynamics and definitions of failure and surfaces values and meanings that might otherwise be hidden from consideration. Using qualitative data from a closing urban school, we disaggregate stakeholders’ competing conceptions of legitimacy and argue that failure is…
Everyday Politics of School Choice in the Black Community
School choice is promoted as one strategy to improve educational outcomes for African Americans. Key themes in Black school choice politics are empowerment, control, and agency. Using qualitative interviews with seventy-seven poor and working-class Black parents in Chicago, this article asks: How well do the themes of empowerment, agency, and control characterize the experiences of low-income African American parents tasked with putting their chi…
Black Placemaking: Celebration, Play, and Poetry
Using Chicago as our case, this article puts forth a notion of black placemaking that privileges the creative, celebratory, playful, pleasurable, and poetic experiences of being black and being around other black people in the city. Black placemaking refers to the ways that urban black Americans create sites of endurance, belonging, and resistance through social interaction. Our framework offers a corrective to existing accounts that depict urban…
Chicago’s block clubs: How neighbors shape the city , by Amanda I. Seligman
Chicago’s block clubs: How neighbors shape the city, by Amanda I. Seligman." Journal of Urban Affairs, 40(4), pp. 597–598
Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, by Michael Javen Fortner
Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea
The title lettering on the front cover of sociologist Mitchell Duneier's book is oversized, precisely centred, and in all capitals: GHETTO. You cannot read it in public without your neighbour immed
Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class
The one black doctor who lives in an exclusive white suburb and the few African American lawyers who work at a large firm are not representative of the black middle class overall. The geography of Groveland is typical of black middle-class areas, which often sit as a kind of buffer between core black poverty areas and whites. Contrary to popular discussion, the black middle class has not out-migrated to unnamed neighborhoods outside of the black …
The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
Estamos Distanciados: The Black Middle Class and Politics in Cali, Colombia
A Black middle class has emerged in many Latin American countries. Yet given the fluidity of Black identity, it is unclear if socioeconomic gains will result in the consolidation of a Black middle-class group identity with a sense of political responsibility or purpose. In this article, we use qualitative interviews with twenty-two Black professionals in Cali, Colombia, plus a small convenience survey, to explore the following research questions:…
Mary Pattillo's Sociology of the Black Middle Class
Layaway Freedom: Coercive Financialization in the Criminal Legal System
Economic sociologists have documented the rise of financialization, including credit and debt. In the case of monetary sanctions in the criminal legal system, courts frequently extend payment plans—or “layaway”—as a way for defendants to manage financial court debt and gain their freedom. Using 241 hours of courtroom ethnography and 155 interviews with court actors and people paying their court debt in Illinois, the authors offer a microsociology…
Political science (23 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Law (22 works) · Gender Studies (13 works) · Law (13 works) · Urban, Neighborhood, and Segregation Studies (11 works) · Politics (10 works) · Economics (8 works) · Gender Studies (7 works) · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism (7 works)