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Author: Pettit, Becky
Resulting in 4 citations.
1. Pettit, Becky
Western, Bruce
Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration
American Sociological Review 69 (2004):151-69.
Also: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3593082
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: American Sociological Association
Keyword(s): Census of Population; Earnings; Educational Attainment; High School Completion/Graduates; Incarceration/Jail; Life Course; Racial Differences

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

Although growth in the U.S. prison population over the past twenty-five years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at different levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born between 1965 and 1969, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks had served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born during this period, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) was used to estimate the proportion of inmates who go on [to] graduate from high school or attend college in each subsequent age interval.

Bibliography Citation
Pettit, Becky and Bruce Western. "Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course: Race and Class Inequality in U.S. Incarceration." American Sociological Review 69 (2004):151-69.
2. Sykes, Bryan L.
Pettit, Becky
Choice or Constraint? Mass Incarceration and Fertility Outcomes among American Men
Presented: Detroit, MI, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April 2009.
Also: http://paa2009.princeton.edu/download.aspx?submissionId=91004
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Population Association of America
Keyword(s): Demography; Fertility; Incarceration/Jail; Racial Differences; Socioeconomic Background

Permission to reprint the abstract has not been received from the publisher.

The rapid growth of the prison system over the last three decades represents a critical institutional intervention in the lives of U.S. families, which may have far-reaching and unintended consequences for demographic processes. In this paper, we investigate how exposure to the criminal justice system affects micro fertility decisions and aggregate fertility patterns. We propose to examine fertility choice and constraint within a counterfactual framework to assess whether and to what extent institutionalization has restricted and lowered the parity of men, and we theorize about how exogenous institutional factors (the penal system) have altered partnership selection in such a way that accounts for observed changes in non-marital, multi-partnered and teenage fertility. Our findings may help to explain growing disparities in fertility patterns by race and class.
Bibliography Citation
Sykes, Bryan L. and Becky Pettit. "Choice or Constraint? Mass Incarceration and Fertility Outcomes among American Men." Presented: Detroit, MI, Population Association of America Annual Meeting, April 2009.
3. Western, Bruce
Lopoo, Leonard M.
Pettit, Becky
Punishment and Inequality in America
New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: Russell Sage Foundation
Keyword(s): Incarceration/Jail; Minorities; Minority Groups; Punishment, Criminal; Racial Equality/Inequality

The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young menʼs lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.

See in particular Chapter 6: Incarceration, Marriage, and Family Life"

See review of monograph: http://www.bsos.umd.edu/gvpt/lpbr/subpages/reviews/western1006.htm

Bibliography Citation
Western, Bruce, Leonard M. Lopoo and Becky Pettit. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation, 2007.
4. Western, Bruce
Pettit, Becky
Incarceration and Social Inequality
Daedalus 139,3 (Summer 2010): 8-19.
Also: http://www.amacad.org/publications/daedalus/10_summer_western.pdf
Cohort(s): NLSY79
Publisher: MIT Press
Keyword(s): Economic Well-Being; Economics of Discrimination; Economics of Minorities; Economics, Demographic; Educational Attainment; Incarceration/Jail; Intergenerational Patterns/Transmission; Mobility, Economic; Racial Differences; Social Environment

In the last few decades, the institutional contours of American social inequality have been transformed by the rapid growth in the prison and jail population.1 America's prisons and jails have produced a new social group, a group of social outcasts who are joined by the shared experience of incarceration, crime, poverty, racial minority, and low education. As an outcast group, the men and women in our penal institutions have little access to the social mobility available to the mainstream. Social and economic disadvantage, crystallizing in penal confinement, is sustained over the life course and transmitted from one generation to the next. This is a profound institutionalized inequality that has renewed race and class disadvantage. Yet the scale and empirical details tell a story that is largely unknown. Though the rate of incarceration is historically high, perhaps the most important social fact is the inequality in penal confinement. This inequality produces extraordinary rates of incarceration among young African American men with no more than a high school education. For these young men, born since the mid-1970s, serving time in prison has become a normal life event. The influence of the penal system on social and economic disadvantage can be seen in the economic and family lives of the formerly incarcerated. The social inequality produced by mass incarceration is sizable and enduring for three main reasons: it is invisible, it is cumulative, and it is intergenerational. The inequality is invisible in the sense that institutionalized populations commonly lie outside our official accounts of economic well-being. Prisoners, though drawn from the lowest rungs in society, appear in no measures of poverty or unemployment. As a result, the full extent of the disadvantage of groups with high incarceration rates is underestimated. The inequality is cumulative because the social and economic penalties that flow from incarceration are accrued by those who already have the weakest economic opportunities. Mass incarceration thus deepens disadvantage and forecloses mobility for the most marginal in society. Finally, carceral inequalities are intergenerational, affecting not just those who go to prison and jail but their families and children, too.
Bibliography Citation
Western, Bruce and Becky Pettit. "Incarceration and Social Inequality." Daedalus 139,3 (Summer 2010): 8-19.