Wakefield
Biographic Data
| ID | 67545 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Wakefield |
| FAMILY NAME | Wakefield |
| SIGNATURE | WAKEFIELD |
| AFFILIATIONS | Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-1120-4266 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 695 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
The Prison Community
The Rise of the Carceral State: Foundations and Contours of a Rapidly Changing Criminal Legal System
A “carceral state” represents a critical definitional contrast to the more commonly invoked frames of “mass incarceration” or “mass criminalization.” Mass criminalization scholarship is typically focused on the most proximate causes and consequences of growth in the size of the criminal legal system. In contrast, conceptualizing mass incarceration as merely the most visible feature of a broader carceral state expands the analytical landscape but …
Birds of a Feather Born Together? On Siblings, Crime, and Criminal Legal System Contact
Classic criminological scholarship emphasizes sibling correlations in delinquency, criminal offending, and system contact. This foundational work, however, has mostly not translated to a rich contemporary research agenda on whether and how siblings influence one another—an unfortunate omission given that siblings spend significant time together throughout the life course. Our review, therefore, has one overarching goal: to invigorate the criminol…
The consequences of sibling criminal legal system contact for family life
ObjectiveTo consider whether one sibling's criminal legal system contact influences another's material conditions, social support, and mental health and behavioral problems.BackgroundSibling incarceration is both the most common form of familial incarceration in the United States, with more than one in four Americans reporting ever experiencing this event, and highly unequally distributed. Despite how prevalent and unequally distributed sibling c…
Are the Average Effects of Foster Care Placement Really Close to Zero
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 the poor outcomes of children who are ever placed in care. Our argument proceeds in three stages. In the first, we dispute the claim that the average effects of foster care placement on children a…
Incarceration, Families, and Communities: Recent Developments and Enduring Challenges
Mass incarceration has fundamental adverse effects that include weakening families and intimate relationships, altering children’s life chances, and undermining communities. Serious work on those effects began in the late 1990s and laid foundations on which subsequent research has built. More recent work, especially in the past dozen years, is more complex and has produced findings that are more nuanced and mixed. It is also theoretically and con…
Structural Racism, Poverty, and Sexism Shape the History of and Response to Childhood Maltreatment Among Incarcerated Individuals
Structural Racism, Poverty, and Sexism Shape the History of and Response to Childhood Maltreatment Among Incarcerated Individuals Sara WakefieldPhD, and Christopher WildemanPhD Affiliation Sara Wakefield is with the School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ. Christopher Wildeman is with the Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, NC, and the ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit, Copenhagen, Denmark. CopyRightCorrespondence…
Pretrial Detention and the Costs of System Overreach for Employment and Family Life
Using unique Danish register data that allow for comparisons across both conviction and incarceration status, this article analyzes the association between pretrial detention and work, family attachment, and recidivism. We find that pretrial detention may impose unique social costs, apart from conviction or additional punishments. Most notably, men who are detained pretrial experience poorer labor market trajectories than men who are convicted of…
Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality
Kristin Turney, Sara Wakefield, Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 1, Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality (February 2019), pp. 1-23
What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated: Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS)
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 their AmeriSpeak Panel. It was funded by FWD.us, which released a separate report using the data. The data show that 45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated…
How Much Might Mass Imprisonment Affect Childhood Inequality?
This chapter first briefly introduces readers of some arguments made in an earlier work, Children of the Prison Boom (2013). This book made three core arguments, the first of which was that 25 per cent of recent birth cohorts of African-American children could expect to experience the imprisonment of a father. In addition, the book outlined a host of theoretical mechanisms through which paternal incarceration could affect child wellbeing. Finally…
Sentence Length and Recidivism: Evidence and the Challenges of Criminal Justice Reform in the Carceral State
Social Networks and Health in a Prison Unit
Although a growing body of research documents lasting health consequences of incarceration, little is known about how confinement affects inmates’ health while incarcerated. In this study, we examine the role of peer social integration and prisoners’ self-reported health behaviors (smoking, exercise, perception of health, and depression) in a prison unit. We also consider whether inmates with similar health characteristics cluster within the unit…
The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People With Felony Records in the United States, 1948–2010
The steep rise in U.S. criminal punishment in recent decades has spurred scholarship on the collateral consequences of imprisonment for individuals, families, and communities. Several excellent studies have estimated the number of people who have been incarcerated and the collateral consequences they face, but far less is known about the size and scope of the total U.S. population with felony convictions beyond prison walls, including those who s…
Appealing to Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic
Changing the Ties that Bind: Distinguishing the Connected from the Disconnected and Accounting for the Burdensome
Tough on Crime, Tough on Families? Criminal Justice and Family Life in America
mass imprisonment; criminal justice; family; inequality; drug offenders
Distinguishing Petty Offenders from Serious Criminals in the Estimation of Family Life Effects
Prior research on the consequences of imprisonment for the family suggest that incarceration of so-called petty offenders is most harmful for families, yet few studies provide a clear description of who is and is not a petty offender and how best to make such distinctions. We compare various ways of categorizing inmates (using preprison family involvement and characteristics related to criminality and child well-being) to better understand hetero…
The role of race in probation monitoring and responses to probation violations among juvenile offenders in two jurisdictions
Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality
An unrelenting prison boom, marked by stark racial disparities, pulled a disproportionate number of young black men into prison in the last forty years. In Children of the Prison Boom, Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman draw upon broadly representative survey data and interviews to describe the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration on a generation of vulnerable children tied to these men. In so doing, they show th…
Disrupted Childhoods: Children of Women in Prison
Misidentifying the Effects of Parental Incarceration? A Comment on Johnson and Easterling (2012)
Mass imprisonment and racial disparities in childhood behavioral problems
Mass imprisonment and racial disparities in childhood behavioral problems
Research Summary This essay provides estimates of the influence of mass imprisonment on racial disparities in childhood well-being. To do so, we integrate results from three existing studies in a novel way. The first two studies use two contemporary, broadly representative data sets to estimate the effects of paternal incarceration on a range of child behavioral and mental health problems. The third study estimates changes in Black–White disparit…
Invisible inequality, million dollar blocks, and extra-legal punishment: A review of recent contributions to mass incarceration scholarship
Incarceration and Stratification
In the past three decades, incarceration has become an increasingly powerful force for reproducing and reinforcing social inequalities. A new wave of sociological research details the contemporary experiment with mass incarceration in the United States and its attendant effects on social stratification. This review first describes the scope of imprisonment and the process of selection into prison. It then considers the implications of the prison …
Mass imprisonment and racial disparities in childhood behavioral problems
The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People With Felony Records in the United States, 1948–2010
The steep rise in U.S. criminal punishment in recent decades has spurred scholarship on the collateral consequences of imprisonment for individuals, families, and communities. Several excellent studies have estimated the number of people who have been incarcerated and the collateral consequences they face, but far less is known about the size and scope of the total U.S. population with felony convictions beyond prison walls, including those who s…
What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated: Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS)
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 their AmeriSpeak Panel. It was funded by FWD.us, which released a separate report using the data. The data show that 45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated…
Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality
Kristin Turney, Sara Wakefield, Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 1, Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality (February 2019), pp. 1-23
Misidentifying the Effects of Parental Incarceration? A Comment on Johnson and Easterling (2012)
Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality
An unrelenting prison boom, marked by stark racial disparities, pulled a disproportionate number of young black men into prison in the last forty years. In Children of the Prison Boom, Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman draw upon broadly representative survey data and interviews to describe the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration on a generation of vulnerable children tied to these men. In so doing, they show th…
Tracing the Timing of 'Career' Acquisition in a Contemporary Youth Cohort
Contemporary youth typically experience considerable floundering and uncertainty in their transition from school to work. This article examines patterns of schooling and working during adolescence and the transition to adulthood that hasten or delay an important subjective marker of transition to adulthood: acquiring a job that is recognized as a 'career.' We use Youth Development Study data, obtained from a prospective longitudinal study of 9th …
Tough on Crime, Tough on Families? Criminal Justice and Family Life in America
mass imprisonment; criminal justice; family; inequality; drug offenders
The Prison Community
Mass imprisonment and racial disparities in childhood behavioral problems
Research Summary This essay provides estimates of the influence of mass imprisonment on racial disparities in childhood well-being. To do so, we integrate results from three existing studies in a novel way. The first two studies use two contemporary, broadly representative data sets to estimate the effects of paternal incarceration on a range of child behavioral and mental health problems. The third study estimates changes in Black–White disparit…
Social Networks and Health in a Prison Unit
Although a growing body of research documents lasting health consequences of incarceration, little is known about how confinement affects inmates’ health while incarcerated. In this study, we examine the role of peer social integration and prisoners’ self-reported health behaviors (smoking, exercise, perception of health, and depression) in a prison unit. We also consider whether inmates with similar health characteristics cluster within the unit…
The Declining Significance of Race in Federal Civil Rights Law: The Social Structure of Employment Discrimination Claims
We examine changes in the nature and rate of complaints filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the past 35 years. The EEOC's role has shifted over this period from ensuring job access for racial minorities to providing diverse protections for a much broader class of incumbent workers. We first describe trends in discrimination complaints, most notably the shift from racial discrimination to other bases of discrim…
Pretrial Detention and the Costs of System Overreach for Employment and Family Life
Using unique Danish register data that allow for comparisons across both conviction and incarceration status, this article analyzes the association between pretrial detention and work, family attachment, and recidivism. We find that pretrial detention may impose unique social costs, apart from conviction or additional punishments. Most notably, men who are detained pretrial experience poorer labor market trajectories than men who are convicted of…
Distinguishing Petty Offenders from Serious Criminals in the Estimation of Family Life Effects
Prior research on the consequences of imprisonment for the family suggest that incarceration of so-called petty offenders is most harmful for families, yet few studies provide a clear description of who is and is not a petty offender and how best to make such distinctions. We compare various ways of categorizing inmates (using preprison family involvement and characteristics related to criminality and child well-being) to better understand hetero…
Are the Average Effects of Foster Care Placement Really Close to Zero
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 the poor outcomes of children who are ever placed in care. Our argument proceeds in three stages. In the first, we dispute the claim that the average effects of foster care placement on children a…
Changing the Ties that Bind: Distinguishing the Connected from the Disconnected and Accounting for the Burdensome
Incarceration, Families, and Communities: Recent Developments and Enduring Challenges
Mass incarceration has fundamental adverse effects that include weakening families and intimate relationships, altering children’s life chances, and undermining communities. Serious work on those effects began in the late 1990s and laid foundations on which subsequent research has built. More recent work, especially in the past dozen years, is more complex and has produced findings that are more nuanced and mixed. It is also theoretically and con…
Birds of a Feather Born Together? On Siblings, Crime, and Criminal Legal System Contact
Classic criminological scholarship emphasizes sibling correlations in delinquency, criminal offending, and system contact. This foundational work, however, has mostly not translated to a rich contemporary research agenda on whether and how siblings influence one another—an unfortunate omission given that siblings spend significant time together throughout the life course. Our review, therefore, has one overarching goal: to invigorate the criminol…
The consequences of sibling criminal legal system contact for family life
ObjectiveTo consider whether one sibling's criminal legal system contact influences another's material conditions, social support, and mental health and behavioral problems.BackgroundSibling incarceration is both the most common form of familial incarceration in the United States, with more than one in four Americans reporting ever experiencing this event, and highly unequally distributed. Despite how prevalent and unequally distributed sibling c…
The role of race in probation monitoring and responses to probation violations among juvenile offenders in two jurisdictions
Disrupted Childhoods: Children of Women in Prison
The Declining Significance of Race in Federal Civil Rights Law: The Social Structure of Employment Discrimination Claims
We examine changes in the nature and rate of complaints filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) in the past 35 years. The EEOC's role has shifted over this period from ensuring job access for racial minorities to providing diverse protections for a much broader class of incumbent workers. We first describe trends in discrimination complaints, most notably the shift from racial discrimination to other bases of discrim…
Tracing the Timing of 'Career' Acquisition in a Contemporary Youth Cohort
Contemporary youth typically experience considerable floundering and uncertainty in their transition from school to work. This article examines patterns of schooling and working during adolescence and the transition to adulthood that hasten or delay an important subjective marker of transition to adulthood: acquiring a job that is recognized as a 'career.' We use Youth Development Study data, obtained from a prospective longitudinal study of 9th …
Doing Time Together: Love and Family in the Shadow of the Prison
Invisible inequality, million dollar blocks, and extra-legal punishment: A review of recent contributions to mass incarceration scholarship
Incarceration and Stratification
In the past three decades, incarceration has become an increasingly powerful force for reproducing and reinforcing social inequalities. A new wave of sociological research details the contemporary experiment with mass incarceration in the United States and its attendant effects on social stratification. This review first describes the scope of imprisonment and the process of selection into prison. It then considers the implications of the prison …
Mass imprisonment and racial disparities in childhood behavioral problems
Mass imprisonment and racial disparities in childhood behavioral problems
Research Summary This essay provides estimates of the influence of mass imprisonment on racial disparities in childhood well-being. To do so, we integrate results from three existing studies in a novel way. The first two studies use two contemporary, broadly representative data sets to estimate the effects of paternal incarceration on a range of child behavioral and mental health problems. The third study estimates changes in Black–White disparit…
Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality
An unrelenting prison boom, marked by stark racial disparities, pulled a disproportionate number of young black men into prison in the last forty years. In Children of the Prison Boom, Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman draw upon broadly representative survey data and interviews to describe the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration on a generation of vulnerable children tied to these men. In so doing, they show th…
Disrupted Childhoods: Children of Women in Prison
Misidentifying the Effects of Parental Incarceration? A Comment on Johnson and Easterling (2012)
The role of race in probation monitoring and responses to probation violations among juvenile offenders in two jurisdictions
Changing the Ties that Bind: Distinguishing the Connected from the Disconnected and Accounting for the Burdensome
Tough on Crime, Tough on Families? Criminal Justice and Family Life in America
mass imprisonment; criminal justice; family; inequality; drug offenders
Distinguishing Petty Offenders from Serious Criminals in the Estimation of Family Life Effects
Prior research on the consequences of imprisonment for the family suggest that incarceration of so-called petty offenders is most harmful for families, yet few studies provide a clear description of who is and is not a petty offender and how best to make such distinctions. We compare various ways of categorizing inmates (using preprison family involvement and characteristics related to criminality and child well-being) to better understand hetero…
The Growth, Scope, and Spatial Distribution of People With Felony Records in the United States, 1948–2010
The steep rise in U.S. criminal punishment in recent decades has spurred scholarship on the collateral consequences of imprisonment for individuals, families, and communities. Several excellent studies have estimated the number of people who have been incarcerated and the collateral consequences they face, but far less is known about the size and scope of the total U.S. population with felony convictions beyond prison walls, including those who s…
Appealing to Justice: Prisoner Grievances, Rights, and Carceral Logic
How Much Might Mass Imprisonment Affect Childhood Inequality?
This chapter first briefly introduces readers of some arguments made in an earlier work, Children of the Prison Boom (2013). This book made three core arguments, the first of which was that 25 per cent of recent birth cohorts of African-American children could expect to experience the imprisonment of a father. In addition, the book outlined a host of theoretical mechanisms through which paternal incarceration could affect child wellbeing. Finally…
Sentence Length and Recidivism: Evidence and the Challenges of Criminal Justice Reform in the Carceral State
Social Networks and Health in a Prison Unit
Although a growing body of research documents lasting health consequences of incarceration, little is known about how confinement affects inmates’ health while incarcerated. In this study, we examine the role of peer social integration and prisoners’ self-reported health behaviors (smoking, exercise, perception of health, and depression) in a prison unit. We also consider whether inmates with similar health characteristics cluster within the unit…
Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality
Kristin Turney, Sara Wakefield, Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 5, No. 1, Criminal Justice Contact and Inequality (February 2019), pp. 1-23
What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated: Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS)
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 their AmeriSpeak Panel. It was funded by FWD.us, which released a separate report using the data. The data show that 45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated…
Pretrial Detention and the Costs of System Overreach for Employment and Family Life
Using unique Danish register data that allow for comparisons across both conviction and incarceration status, this article analyzes the association between pretrial detention and work, family attachment, and recidivism. We find that pretrial detention may impose unique social costs, apart from conviction or additional punishments. Most notably, men who are detained pretrial experience poorer labor market trajectories than men who are convicted of…
Structural Racism, Poverty, and Sexism Shape the History of and Response to Childhood Maltreatment Among Incarcerated Individuals
Structural Racism, Poverty, and Sexism Shape the History of and Response to Childhood Maltreatment Among Incarcerated Individuals Sara WakefieldPhD, and Christopher WildemanPhD Affiliation Sara Wakefield is with the School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University, Newark, NJ. Christopher Wildeman is with the Department of Sociology, Duke University, Durham, NC, and the ROCKWOOL Foundation Research Unit, Copenhagen, Denmark. CopyRightCorrespondence…
Are the Average Effects of Foster Care Placement Really Close to Zero
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 the poor outcomes of children who are ever placed in care. Our argument proceeds in three stages. In the first, we dispute the claim that the average effects of foster care placement on children a…
Incarceration, Families, and Communities: Recent Developments and Enduring Challenges
Mass incarceration has fundamental adverse effects that include weakening families and intimate relationships, altering children’s life chances, and undermining communities. Serious work on those effects began in the late 1990s and laid foundations on which subsequent research has built. More recent work, especially in the past dozen years, is more complex and has produced findings that are more nuanced and mixed. It is also theoretically and con…
Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (23 works) · Criminology (21 works) · Sociology (21 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Homelessness and Social Issues (14 works) · Political science (13 works) · Crime Patterns and Interventions (12 works) · Law (9 works) · Prison (8 works) · Criminal justice (7 works)