TY - JOUR
T1 - Incarceration, Families, and Communities
T2 - Recent Developments and Enduring Challenges
AU - Wakefield, Sara
N1 - Publisher Copyright: q 2022 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. Published by The University of Chicago Press.
PY - 2022
Y1 - 2022
N2 - 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 conceptually richer. The newer work involves substantially greater cross-disciplinary engagement, draws on new and more diverse data sources, and pays greater attention to pathways into prison. Fundamental challenges persist. They include measurement problems, overlap between the criminal justice and other governmental systems (e.g., education, public health, social welfare), and generalizability issues. Mixed results, definitional disagreements, and measurement challenges should encourage researchers to embrace complexity in the study of the effects of incarceration on family and community life.
AB - 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 conceptually richer. The newer work involves substantially greater cross-disciplinary engagement, draws on new and more diverse data sources, and pays greater attention to pathways into prison. Fundamental challenges persist. They include measurement problems, overlap between the criminal justice and other governmental systems (e.g., education, public health, social welfare), and generalizability issues. Mixed results, definitional disagreements, and measurement challenges should encourage researchers to embrace complexity in the study of the effects of incarceration on family and community life.
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U2 - 10.1086/721741
DO - 10.1086/721741
M3 - Article
SN - 0192-3234
VL - 51
SP - 399
EP - 434
JO - Crime and Justice
JF - Crime and Justice
ER -