David James Harding

• PhD
• Professor at University of California, Berkeley

A spatially disadvantaged census tract is one that is surrounded by disadvantaged tracts. More spatially disadvantaged neighborhoods may experience more violence, independent of their own level of disadvantage, and majority Black middle-class neighborhoods are more likely to be spatially disadvantaged than majority white neighborhoods. The purpose...

Criminalization is the process by which people are classified by authorities as criminal and become subject to the control of criminal justice agencies— police, courts, and correctional departments. “Careers in criminalization” refers to sustained criminal justice involvement through repeated incarceration and ongoing police and court contact. Care...

Across a variety of measures of safety and rehabilitation, our current systems of parole and probation are failing. Research shows that community supervision fails to reduce crime; traps its subjects in cycles of criminal justice involvement; is excessively punitive; and creates widespread harm to individuals, families, and communities—all while fa...

First-generation college students and those from ethnic groups such as African Americans, Latinx, Native Americans, or Indigenous Peoples in the United States are less likely to pursue STEM-related professions. How might we develop conceptual and methodological approaches to understand instructional differences between various undergraduate STEM pr...

This article explores one way prior punishments may contribute to cumulative disadvantage: through more severe sentencing of those under criminal justice supervision. We examine the impact of being on supervision in Michigan on receiving a sentence of imprisonment—comparing the magnitude of the impact reflected in the formal sentencing guideline re...

A quantitative study of treatment effects may form many matched pairs of a treated subject and an untreated control who look similar in terms of covariates measured prior to treatment. When treatments are not randomly assigned, one inevitable concern is that individuals who look similar in measured covariates may be dissimilar in unmeasured covaria...

Although nonexperimental studies find robust neighborhood effects on adults, such findings have been challenged by results from the Moving to Opportunity (MTO) residential mobility experiment. Using a within-study comparison design, this article compares experimental and nonexperimental estimates from MTO and a parallel analysis of the Panel Study...

This cross-sectional study examines disparities in gun homicide rates among neighborhoods of different racial composition for fixed levels of socioeconomic status.

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

Although there is some evidence of declining intergenerational mobility in wealthy countries, the sources of these changes are not well understood. This paper examines the changes in intergenerational mobility in Denmark, which has one of the highest levels of intergenerational mobility in the world. We show that mobility has been declining for bot...

Research on racial disparities in post-prison employment has primarily focused on the differential effects of stigma on blacks and whites, but we otherwise know little about racial differences. This paper examines racial differences in post-prison employment by industry and geography. We find that the formerly incarcerated are most likely to find w...

Background and Aims Despite the high prevalence of substance use among people in the US criminal justice system, little is known about the incidence of overdose mortality by use patterns, drug convictions, and supervision setting. We examined the associations between these characteristics and overdose mortality. Design Retrospective cohort study....

How might parole operate as a labor market institution, and how might it contribute to the governance of poverty and social marginality? Drawing on a series of correctional, employment, and arrest records for a cohort of parolees in Michigan, we show that parole generally supervises a jobless population, but also oversees a significant number of pe...

IntroductionMore than 30 million adults are released from incarceration globally each year. Many experience complex physical and mental health problems, and are at markedly increased risk of preventable mortality. Despite this, evidence regarding the global epidemiology of mortality following release from incarceration is insufficient to inform the...

One of the goals of imprisonment is to reduce violence¹. Although imprisonment has risen dramatically since the 1970s, its effects on future violent crime are poorly understood². This study’s objective was to examine the effect of imprisonment on violent crime in the community among individuals on the policy margin between prison and probation sent...

Although there is some evidence of declining intergenerational mobility in wealthy countries, the sources of these changes are not well understood. This paper examines changes in intergenerational mobility in Denmark, which has one of the highest levels of intergenerational mobility in the world. We show that mobility has been declining for both me...

This chapter begins the study of the process of prisoner reentry and reintegration where this transition starts, in prison and in the days and weeks after release. It analyzes participants’ accounts of their experiences in prison and the impact of their incarceration on their social isolation, family ties, and other important relationships. It desc...

Drawing on a broad definition of family, this chapter explores the challenges of reuniting with family and finding a stable home after release. Few formerly incarcerated individuals return to the residences where they were living before their imprisonment. This is because their families moved in the interim, because many live in institutional housi...

This chapter examines the role of family relationships in prisoner reintegration. Romantic partners, children, siblings, parents, and other family members are important sources of material support, informal social control, and emotional support. They provide food, clothing, housing, and transportation. They monitor behavior, provide routines that e...

This chapter introduces the six focal participants who will be prominently featured throughout the book and describes the characteristics and prior experiences of formerly incarcerated individuals in the United States more broadly. The formerly incarcerated come from family backgrounds of extreme disadvantage, including high rates of poverty, low l...

Places and the people one interacts within them present opportunities to connect to employment, social services, friends and community groups. Yet although social networks embedded within neighborhoods may exert social control, they may also facilitate a return to drugs and crime. Neighborhoods also affect one’s chances for victimization, and deter...

The formerly incarcerated exhibit very low rates of employment, even many years after their release from prison. Low levels of human capital, distance from jobs, lack of transportation, and the stigma of a felony record explain the challenges of finding work after prison. Those who do find work do so through different strategies; applying for many...

That formerly incarcerated black men experience poor life-course outcomes relative to other subpopulations is well established, yet our ongoing research indicates substantial racial inequality in outcomes among the formerly incarcerated. Young, black former prisoners lag behind their white counterparts in achieving traditional adulthood markers: ed...

http://ontheoutsidebook.us America’s high incarceration rates are a well-known facet of contemporary political conversations. Mentioned far less often is what happens to the nearly 700,000 former prisoners who rejoin society each year. On the Outside examines the lives of 22 people—varied in race and gender but united by their time in the criminal...

This study examines the effect of being sentenced to prison rather than probation on labor market outcomes among white and non-white young adults age 18-25. We leverage a natural experiment involving the random assignment of judges with different “tastes” for harsh sentencing to isolate effects of incarceration in prison that are uncontaminated by...

This article discusses an instrumental variable approach for analyzing censored data that includes many instruments that are weakly associated with the endogenous variable. We study the effect of imprisonment on time to employment using an administrative data on all individuals sentenced for felony in Michigan in the years 2003–2006. Despite the la...

Because of racially disproportionate imprisonment rates, the literature on mass incarceration has focused on the labor market consequence of imprisonment and the implications of those effects for racial inequality. Yet, the effects of imprisonment itself, as distinct from conviction, are not well understood. The authors leverage a natural experimen...

A substantial contributor to prison admissions is the return of individuals recently released from prison, which has come to be known as prison’s “revolving door.” However, it is unclear whether being sentenced to prison itself has a causal effect on the probability of a subsequent return to prison or on criminal behavior. To examine the causal eff...

Although the labor market consequences of incarceration in prison have been central to the literature on mass incarceration, punishment, and inequality, other components of the growing criminal justice system have received less attention from sociologists. In particular, the rise of mass incarceration was accompanied by an even larger increase in c...

The goals of this chapter are twofold. First, we examine who attends the for-profit sector. Understanding differences in student characteristics between sectors is crucial for understanding differential graduation rates between sectors. We describe overall attendance in the various sectors, differences in sector attendance by respondents’ sex, race...

Cultural sociologists and other social scientists have increasingly used the concept of narrative as a theoretical tool to understand how individuals make sense of the links between their past, present, and future; how individuals construct social identities from cultural building blocks; and how culture shapes social action and individual behavior...

Since the mid-1970s the US has experienced an enormous rise in incarceration, which has been disproportionately experienced by minorities, particularly young black men, and those with low levels of education. The effects of incarceration are felt not just by the individuals who go to prison but by their families as well. In this chapter we explore...

A potentially important but understudied aspect of prisoner reentry is the neighborhood environments experienced by formerly incarcerated people. We know that many formerly incarcerated people return to very disadvantaged neighborhood environments and that returning to disadvantaged neighborhoods after prison increases the risk of recidivism and re...

The proportion of U.S. prison inmates who were black increased dramatically between 1940 and 2000. While about two-thirds of the increase occurred between 1940 and 1970, most recent research analyzes the period after 1970, focusing on explanations such as the war on drugs, law-and-order politics, discrimination, inequality, and racial threat. We an...

Few issues in the study of poverty and inequality in the United States have been as fraught, and as intellectually challenging, as the question of culture and racial inequality. The Cultural Matrix: Understanding Black Youth, edited by Orlando Patterson with Ethan Fosse, is the latest intervention into this longstanding academic and public discussi...

The United States has experienced dramatic increases in both incarceration rates and the population of insecurely housed or homeless persons since the 1980s. These marginalized populations have strong overlaps, with many people being poor, minority, and from an urban area. That a relationship between homelessness, housing insecurity, and incarcerat...

Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family’s economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whet...

Effects of disadvantaged neighborhoods on child educational outcomes likely depend on a family's economic resources and the timing of neighborhood exposures during the course of child development. This study investigates how timing of exposure to disadvantaged neighborhoods during childhood versus adolescence affects high school graduation and whet...

Most research on urban poverty focuses on racial and ethnic minorities living in segregated, high‐poverty neighborhoods in central cities and inner‐ring suburbs. Urban poverty research attempts to understand the roots of dilemmas such as crime and delinquency, unemployment, low levels of education, and single motherhood, as well as the causes and c...

Since the mid-1970s the United States has experienced an enormous rise in incarceration and accompanying increases in returning prisoners and in post-release community correctional supervision. Poor urban communities are disproportionately impacted by these phenomena. This review focuses on two complementary questions regarding incarceration, priso...

In dominant theories of criminal desistance, marital relationship formation is understood to be a key “turning point” away from deviant behavior. Empirical studies supporting this claim have largely focused on the positive role of marriage in men's desistance from crime, and relatively few studies have examined the role that nonmarital relationship...

This paper discusses the current state of the U.S. literature on cultural mechanisms in neighborhood effects research. We first define what we mean by neighborhood effects and by cultural mechanisms. We then review and critique two theoretical perspectives on the cultural context of disadvantaged neighborhoods that are explicitly integrated into re...

Former prisoners are at high risk of economic insecurity due to the challenges they face in finding employment and to the difficulties of securing and maintaining public assistance while incarcerated. This study examines the processes through which former prisoners attain economic security, examining how they meet basic material needs and achieve u...

Poor urban communities experience high rates of incarceration and prisoner reentry. This paper examines the residences where former prisoners live after prison, focusing on returns to pre-prison social environments, residential mobility, and the role of intermediate sanctions. Drawing on a unique dataset that follows a cohort of Michigan parolees r...

Interest in and use of mixed methods research in the social sciences has grown tremendously in recent years and has the potential to assist in addressing core challenges in causal inference. We discuss ways in which the addition of a qualitative component can serve multiple roles in causal analyses, including understanding treatment definition, con...

Our objective is to take stock of the budding literature on the relationship culture-poverty; identify issues that remain unanswered; and make the case that the judicious, theoretically informed, and empirically grounded study of culture can and should be a permanent component of the poverty research agenda. We begin by identifying the scholarly an...

Theory suggests that neighborhood effects depend not only on where individuals live today, but also on where they lived in the past. Previous research, however, usually measured neighborhood context only once and did not account for length of residence, thereby understating the detrimental effects of long-term neighborhood disadvantage. This study...

The literature on neighborhood effects on schooling theorizes that neighborhood cultural context is an important mechanism generating such effects. However, explanations that rely on subcultural theories, such as oppositional culture, have met with considerable criticism on empirical grounds, and no alternative account of the cultural context of di...

Culture is back on the poverty research agenda. Over the past decade, sociologists, demographers, and even economists have begun asking questions about the role of culture in many aspects of poverty and even explicitly explaining the behavior of the low-income population in reference to cultural factors. An example is Prudence Carter (2005), who, b...

For the middle class and the affluent, local ties seem to matter less and less these days, but in the inner city, your life can be irrevocably shaped by what block you live on. Living the Drama takes a close look at three neighborhoods in Boston to analyze the many complex ways that the context of community shapes the daily lives and long-term pros...

We motivate future neighborhood research through a simple model that considers youth educational outcomes as a function of neighborhood context, neighborhood exposure, individual vulnerability to neighborhood effects, and non-neighborhood educational inputs -- with a focus on effect heterogeneity. Research using this approach would require three st...

Using data from Add Health, this study investigates the role of neighborhood violence in mediating the effects of neighborhood disadvantage on high school graduation and teenage pregnancy. Results show that neighborhood violence is a strong predictor of both outcomes, net of individual, family, community and school controls. Neighborhood violence a...

Most theoretical perspectives on neighborhood effects on youth assume that neighborhood context serves as a source of socialization, but the exact sources and processes underlying adolescent socialization in disadvantaged neighborhoods are largely unspecified and unelaborated. This paper proposes that cross-cohort socialization by older neighborhoo...

This paper investigates the social consequences of neighborhood violence. Using ego-centered friendship network data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey of adolescents in the United States in the mid-1990s, it examines the relationship between neighborhood violence and the quantity, closeness, and composition of adol...

This article offers a new approach to the identification of age-period-cohort (APC) models that builds on Pearl's work on nonparametric causal models, in particular his front-door criterion for the identification of causal effects. The goal is to specify the mechanisms through which the age, period, and cohort variables affect the outcome and in do...

ABSTRACT When culture is invoked to understand the consequences of growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods, the isolation of ghetto residents from mainstream,institutions and mainstream,culture is often emphasized. This paper attempts to reorient current theorizing about the cultural context of disadvantaged neighborhoods, particularly when it co...

This article argues that rampage school shootings in American public schools can be understood as instances of organizational deviance, which occurs when events created by or in organizations do not conform to an organization's goals or expectations and produce unanticipated and harmful outcomes. Drawing on data from qualitative case studies of two...

Robert Mare, Stephen Morgan and members of Harvard’s Applied Statistics Colloquium for comments

We analyze changes in the determinants of family income between 1961 and 1999, focusing on the effect of parental education, occupational rank, income, marital status, family size, region of residence, race, and ethnicity. Our data, which cover respondents between the ages of thirty and fifty-nine, come from two Occupational Changes in a Generation...

This article investigates the causal effects of neighborhood on high school dropping out and teenage pregnancy within a counterfactual framework. It shows that when two groups of children, identical at age 10 on observed factors, experience different neighborhoods dur-ing adolescence, those in high-poverty neighborhoods are more likely to drop out...

Drawing on in-depth interviews with male parolees, this study describes how ex-convicts manage their deviant identities in the labor market. Institutional limitations imposed by both the labor market and the criminal justice system as well as subjects' interpretations of stigma play important roles in determining how they choose to present themselv...

This article considers five methodological challenges in studying rare events such as school shootings. Drawing on the literature on causal analysis in macro-historical and other small-N research, it outlines strategies for studying school shootings using qualitative case studies and illustrates these strategies using data from case studies of two...

With approximately 1,5 million working age men currently housed in America's prisons and jails, the US penal system has far-reaching labor market effects. We analyze these effects, focusing on the experiences of young minority men. Counting the incarcerated among the unemployed raises US male jobless rates above the European average for most of the...

Gefängniswesen und Arbeitsmarkt in Amerika. Die gegenwärtig etwa 1,5 Millionen Personen umfassende Insassen-Bevölkerung der Gefängnisse und Zuchthäuser der Vereinigten Staaten im berufsfähigen Alter übt nennenswerte Wirkungen auf den dortigen Arbeitsmarkt aus. Diese Einflüsse werden im vorliegenden Artikel am Beispiel junger Angehöriger sozialer Mi...

For those interested in child wellbeing, time use can provide an unusually objective measure of exactly what youth are doing. Before we can evaluate how well children are doing and why some are doing better than others, it is important to understand what they are doing, with whom, and in which social contexts and institutions. The report is intende...

Corresponding author: Stephen Morgan. Address and email above are correct. Phone number is (607) 255-0706, and FAX is (607) 255-8473.

Thesis (Ph. D., Committee on Higher Degrees in Social Policy)--Harvard University, 2005. Includes bibliographical references (p. 266-274). Photocopy.