Jeffrey Morenoff

• University of Michigan

We propose a theoretical framework on the structural sources and spatially embedded nature of three mechanisms that produce collective efficacy for children. Using survey data collected in 1995 from 8,782 Chicago residents, we examine variations in intergenerational closure, reciprocal local exchange, and shared expectations for informal social con...

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...

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

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....

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...

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...

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...

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...

BACKGROUNDA large proportion of justice-involved individuals have mental health issues and substance use disorders (SUD) that are often untreated due to high rates of uninsurance. However, roughly half of justice-involved individuals were estimated to be newly eligible for health insurance through the Affordable Care Act (ACA). OBJECTIVE We aimed t...

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...

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...

The spread of crime is a complex, dynamic process that calls for a systems level approach. Here, we build and analyze a series of dynamical systems models of the spread of crime, imprisonment and recidivism, using only abstract transition parameters. To find the general patterns among these parameters-patterns that are independent of the underlying...

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...

Over the last two decades, research has assessed the relationship between neighborhood socioeconomic factors and individual health. However, existing research is based almost exclusively on cross-sectional data, ignoring the complexity in health transitions that may be shaped by long term residential exposures. We address these limitations by speci...

Objectives: We investigated the association between anticipatory stress, also known as racism-related vigilance, and hypertension prevalence in Black, Hispanic, and White adults. Methods: We used data from the Chicago Community Adult Health Study, a population-representative sample of adults (n = 3105) surveyed in 2001 to 2003, to regress hypert...

Researchers have posited that one potential explanation for nativity differences in Latino health may be the strength of social ties among immigrants. We examined the association between nativity status and social ties using data from the Chicago Community Adult Health Study. We employed OLS regressions to model the effect of nativity status on fiv...

Objectives Researchers have posited that one potential explanation for the better-than-expected health outcomes observed among some Latino immigrants, vis-à-vis their US-born counterparts, may be the strength of social ties and social support among immigrants.Methods We examined the association between nativity status and social ties using data fro...

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...

In this study, we used data from Add Health Waves II and III to compare men who had been incarcerated to those who had not, and examined whether incarceration was associated with increased numbers of sexual partners and increased odds of concurrent partnerships. We used multivariate regression and propensity-score matching to compare sexual behavio...

Background: Blacks have higher hypertension rates than whites, but the reasons for these disparities are unknown. Differential vulnerability, through which stress alters vulnerability to the effects of environmental hazards, is an emergent notion in environmental health that may contribute to these disparities. Objectives: We examined whether black...

Objectives: We explored the notion that social disadvantage increases vulnerability to the health effects of environmental hazards. Specifically, we examined (1) whether race modifies the association between blood lead and blood pressure and (2) whether socioeconomic status (SES) plays a role in this modifying effect. Methods: Using the National...

This study compared the hypertension prevalence, awareness, treatment and control in Chicago, Illinois and Detroit, Michigan to that of the general United States population (aged > or = 25 years) for the period 2001-2003. We examined whether and how much 1) urban populations have less favorable hypertension-related outcomes and 2) the rates of raci...

Neighborhood disadvantage has consistently been linked to increased rates of morbidity and mortality, but the mechanisms through which neighborhood environments may get "under the skin" remain largely unknown. Differential exposure to chronic environmental stressors has been identified as a potential pathway linking neighborhood disadvantage and po...

Neighborhood-level interventions provide an opportunity to better understand the impact that neighborhoods have on health. In 2004, municipal authorities in Medellín, Colombia, built a public transit system to connect isolated low-income neighborhoods to the city's urban center. Transit-oriented development was accompanied by municipal investment i...

This study examines the role of neighborhood context in the accumulation of biological risk factors and racial/ethnic and socioeconomic disparities. Data came from face-to-face interviews and blood sample collection on a probability sample of adults (n = 549) in the 2002 Chicago Community Adult Health Study. Following the approach of prior studies,...

Existing research has found a positive association between cognitive function and residence in a socioeconomically advantaged neighbourhood. Yet, the mechanisms underlying this relationship have not been empirically investigated. To test the hypothesis that neighbourhood socioeconomic structure is related to cognitive function partly through the av...

We investigated whether the conventional Spanish translation of the self-rated health survey question helps explain why Latinos' self-rated health is worse than Whites' despite more objective health measures showing them to be as healthy as or healthier than are Whites. We analyzed the relationship between language of interview and self-rated healt...

Over the last two decades, the impact of community characteristics on the physical and mental health of residents has emerged as an important frontier of research in population health and health disparities. However, the development and evaluation of measures to capture community characteristics is still at a relatively early stage. The purpose of...

There is a growing interest in understanding the effects of specific neighborhood conditions on psychological wellbeing. We examined cross-sectional associations of neighborhood stressors (perceived violence and disorder, physical decay and disorder) and social support (residential stability, family structure, social cohesion, reciprocal exchange,...

Studying the relation between the residential environment and health requires valid, reliable, and cost-effective methods to collect data on residential environments. This 2002 study compared the level of agreement between measures of the presence of neighborhood businesses drawn from 2 common sources of data used for research on the built environm...

Many demographic, socioeconomic, and behavioral risk factors predict mortality in the United States. However, very few population-based longitudinal studies are able to investigate simultaneously the impact of a variety of social factors on mortality. We investigated the degree to which demographic characteristics, socioeconomic variables and major...

We sought to demonstrate the advantages of using individual-level survey data in quantitative environmental justice analyses and to provide new evidence regarding racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of polluting industrial facilities. Addresses of respondents in the baseline sample of the Americans' Changing Lives Study and pol...

Research on the effects of the built environment in the pathway from impairment to disability has been largely absent. Using data from the Chicago Community Adult Health Study (2001–2003), the authors examined the effect of built environment characteristics on mobility disability among adults aged 45 or more years (n = 1,195) according to their lev...

: The goal of this study was to investigate cross-sectional associations between features of neighborhoods and hypertension and to examine the sensitivity of results to various methods of estimating neighborhood conditions. : We used data from the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis on 2612 individuals 45-85 years of age. Hypertension was defined...

The spatial segregation of the US population by socioeconomic position and especially race/ethnicity suggests that the social contexts or "neighborhoods" in which people live may substantially contribute to social disparities in hypertension. The Chicago Community Adult Health Study did face-to-face interviews, including direct measurement of blood...

Most studies examining the relation between residential environment and health have used census-derived measures of neighborhood socioeconomic position (SEP). There is a need to identify specific features of neighborhoods relevant to disease risk, but few measures of these features exist, and their measurement properties are understudied. In this p...

In her commentary, Dr. Lynne Messer (1) recognizes the important contributions of our paper (2) to the discussion of methodological issues related to measurement of neighborhood or area-level properties. Dr. Messer reviews the many challenges involved in observational studies of neighborhood health effects, which we and other investigators have not...

This study explores how neighborhood context influences participation in local social organization through a multilevel-spatial analysis of residents in Chicago neighborhoods. We construct a typology of community participation based on two dimensions: instrumental vs. expressive motivations for participation and formal vs. informal modes of partici...

Peer Reviewed http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/57187/1/Morenoff JD et al 2007 Understanding social disparities in hypertension prevalence awareness treatment and control The role of neighborhood context.pdf

We analyzed key individual, family, and neighborhood factors to assess competing hypotheses regarding racial/ethnic gaps in perpetrating violence. From 1995 to 2002, we collected 3 waves of data on 2974 participants aged 18 to 25 years living in 180 Chicago neighborhoods, augmented by a separate community survey of 8782 Chicago residents. The odds...

Spatial analysis assists theoretical understanding and empirical testing in the social sciences, and rapidly expanding applications of geographic information technologies have advanced the spatial data-gathering needed for spatial analysis and model making. This much-needed volume covers outstanding examples of spatial thinking in the social scienc...

Racial and ethnic disparities in the United States criminal justice system are large and persistent. Prison statistics indicate that 28 percent of African American males and 16 percent of Hispanic males will be sent to prison in their lifetime, compared with only 4.4 percent of White males, and that Black and Hispanic minority groups made up 64 per...

This study addresses two questions about why neighborhood contexts matter for individuals via a multilevel, spatial analysis of birthweight for 101,662 live births within 342 Chicago neighborhoods. First, what are the mechanisms through which neighborhood structural composition is related to health? The results show that mechanisms related to stres...

■ Abstract This paper assesses and synthesizes the cumulative results of a new "neighborhood-effects" literature that examines social processes related to problem behaviors and health-related outcomes. Our review identified over 40 relevant studies published in peer-reviewed journals from the mid-1990s to 2001, the take-off point for an increasing...

This paper discusses problems that are common to both the epidemiologic risk-factor approach and the demographic variable-based approach to studying population health. We argue that there is a shared reluctance to move away from a narrow variable-based thinking that pervades both disciplines, and a tendency to reify the multivariate linear procedur...

This paper assesses and synthesizes the cumulative results of a new "neighborhood-effects" literature that examines social processes related to problem behaviors and health-related outcomes. Our review identified over 40 relevant studies published in peer-reviewed journals from the mid-1990s to 2001, the take-off point for an increasing level of in...

This paper discusses problems that are common to both the epidemiologic risk-factor approach and the demographic variable-based approach to studying population health. We argue that there is a shared reluctance to move away from a narrow variable-based thinking that pervades both disciplines, and a tendency to reify the multivariate linear procedur...

Highlighting resource inequality, social processes, and spatial interdependence, this study combines structural characteristics from the 1990 census with a survey of 8,872 Chicago residents in 1995 to predict homicide variations in 1996–1998 across 343 neighborhoods. Spatial proximity to homicide is strongly related to increased homicide rates, adj...

This paper discusses problems that are common to both the epidemiologic risk-factor approach and the demographic variable-based approach to studying population health. We argue that there is a shared reluctance to move away from a narrow variable-based thinking that pervades both disciplines, and a tendency to reify the multivariate linear procedur...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, 2000. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 311-327). Photocopy of typescript. s

We propose a theoretical framework on the structural sources and spatially embedded nature of three mechanisms that produce collective efficacy for children. Using survey data collected in 1995 from 8,782 Chicago residents, we examine variations in intergenerational closure, reciprocal local exchange, and shared expectations for informal social con...

Integrating ecological, demographic, and criminological theory, this article examines the role of violent crime and socioeconomic disadvantage in triggering population decline in Chicago neighborhoods from 1970 to 1990. The results show that high initial levels of homicide and increases over time in the spatial proximity to homicide were associated...

This article places the growth of an urban underclass in the broader context of trends in inequality and the stratification of place in global cities. Using Chicago as a case study, we construct a multidimensional typology of urban neighborhoods to illuminate trends in the spatial distribution of opportunity, the impact of immi gration on the city'...

Objectives. We sought to demonstrate the advantages of using individual- level survey data in quantitative environmental justice analyses and to provide new evidence regarding racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of polluting industrial facilities. Methods. Addresses of respondents in the baseline sample of the Americans' Changi...