Becky Pettit's research while affiliated with University of Texas at Austin and other places
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Publications (44)
Existing research often views attitudes toward the U.S. criminal legal system as reflections of punitive sentiment, overlooking racial differences in how people respond to questions related to crime and punishment. Using over four decades of nationally representative survey data from the General Social Survey, we employ latent class analysis to exa...
Monetary sanctions are an integral and increasingly debated feature of the American criminal legal system. Emerging research, including that featured in this volume, offers important insight into the law governing monetary sanctions, how they are levied, and how their imposition affects inequality. Monetary sanctions are assessed for a wide range o...
Low-level misdemeanor and traffic violations draw tens of millions of people into local courts to pay fines and fees each year, generating billions of dollars in revenue. We examine how standardized legal fines and fees for low-level charges induce disparate treatment and result in disparate impact. Using a mixed-methods approach that incorporates...
This paper investigates how the complexity of and everyday interactions within the criminal legal system sow confusion about the causes and consequences of low-level misdemeanor, or fine only, legal entanglements. Drawing on data from 62 interviews with people assessed legal debt and 240 hours of ethnographic observation in courtrooms, we describe...
Decades of significant crime declines and recent reductions in the number of people confined in prisons and jails in the United States have been accompanied by the emergence of new, and the resurgence of old, forms of punishment. One of these resurgent forms is the assessment of fines, fees, and costs to those who encounter the criminal legal syste...
Objectives. To explore whether and how the Affordable Care Act (ACA) affects the relationship between employment and health insurance coverage, health care utilization, and health outcomes among recently incarcerated men aged 18 to 64 years in the United States.
Methods. With data from the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH), we used a d...
Despite two decades of declining crime rates, the United States continues to incarcerate a historically and comparatively large segment of the population. Moreover, incarceration and other forms of criminal justice contact ranging from police stops to community supervision are disproportionately concentrated among African American and Latino men. M...
Currently, 2.2 million individuals are incarcerated, and more than 11 million have been released from U.S. correctional facilities. Individuals with a history of incarceration are more likely to be of racial and ethnic minority populations, poor, and have higher rates of cardiovascular risk factors, especially smoking and hypertension. Cardiovascul...
The expansion of the criminal justice system over the last four decades and the corresponding rise of parental incarceration raises questions about whether the children of current and former inmates are at an increased risk of material hardship that necessitates social service intervention. Recent sociological scholarship finds that the greater sur...
Civil rights legislation in the 1960s promised greater racial equality in a variety of domains including education, economic opportunity, and voting. Yet those same laws were coupled with exclusions from surveys used to gauge their effects thereby affecting both statistical portraits of inequality and our understanding of the impact of civil rights...
This paper examines how motherhood is associated with occupational segregation, paying careful attention to how motherhood
affects labor force withdrawal in ways that may obscure its relevance for occupational segregation. Using data on eleven countries
from the Luxembourg Income Study (2000–2007), we find that mothers are more likely than childles...
In this article we examine the link between family complexity-measured by noncustodial parenthood and multiple-partner fertility-and incarceration. In 2012, close to 2.6 million children, or roughly one in twenty-five minors, had a parent in jail or prison. The risk of having a parent currently or ever incarcerated is disproportionately concentrate...
This article examines how the rise in incarceration and its disproportionate concentration among low-skill, young African American men influences estimates of educational attainment in the United States. We focus on high school graduation rates and the persistent gap in attainment that exists between young black and white Americans. Although offici...
Recent research and press reports highlight increased voting rates among the demographic groups with rising rates of imprisonment. The standard surveys of voting in the U.S. are household-based probability surveys that exclude the institutionalized. Among the most marginal populations, the excluded have grown to such an extent to force a re-evaluat...
Gender inequality in the workplace persists, even in nations with some of the most progressive laws and generous family support policies. Yet the dimensions on which inequality is measured-levels of women's employment, number of hours worked, sex segregation by occupations and wages-tell very different stories across industrialized nations. By exam...
Over the past 30 years, the U.S. inmate population has increased dramatically, and the penal system has acquired growing attention in accounts of recent trends in economic stratification. As the prison system has expanded, its population has aged; incarceration rates have risen sharpest among older age groups. A large body of research documents dif...
Public policy initiatives in the 1950s and 1960s, including Affirmative Action and Equal Employment Opportunity law, helped mitigate explicit discrimination in pay, and the expansion of higher education and training programs have advanced the employment fortunes of many American women. By the early 1980s, some scholars proclaimed near equity in pay...
Prison growth over the last quarter of the twentieth century is notable not only for its magnitude but also for the fact that it has disproportionately affected already disadvantaged segments of the population. The prison buildup generates three important observations about inequalities related to incarceration. African Americans are seven times mo...
In this paper we analyze social survey data from 19 countries using multi-level modeling methods in an effort to synthesize structural and institutional accounts for variation in women's employment. Observed demographic characteristics show much consistency in their relationship to women's employment across countries, yet there is significant varia...
The observed gap in average wages between black men and white men inadequately reflects the relative economic standing of blacks, who suffer from a high rate of joblessness. The authors estimate the black-white gap in hourly wages from 1980 to 1999 adjusting for the sample selection effect of labor inactivity. Among working-age men in 1999, account...
Though organizationally driven geographic mobility is a distin- guishing feature of modern careers, accounts of its origin are murky. Drawing on various theories of organization, the authors show how a merger wave exposed competing institutional logics and triggered the elaboration of the modern, mobile, bureaucratic career. Using organizational da...
Using data from an experimental housing relocation program, this research compares social connections of children in families that move with those of similar children who do not move. Qualitative interview data are used to examine what factors influence the formation of social connections after moving. Results show the impact of moving on children'...
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 est...
Objective. This article examines the effects of residential mobility on social connections that are likely to affect children's well-being.
Methods. We use data from a survey of participants in a housing experiment in Los Angeles, California to examine whether families that moved from public housing projects to other neighborhoods suffered short-te...
Changes in government policy on crime and punishment have put many poor minority men behind bars, more than their arrest rates would indicate. The growth of the penal system has also obscured the extent of economic inequality and sowed the seeds for greater inequality in the future.
This paper is an evaluative inventory of 29 data sets containing information on public participation in and attitudes towards the arts collected from cross-sectional samples of local, state, and national populations in North America. This paper reviews surveys focused on participation in the arts, and omnibus social surveys that include a selection...
To estimate employment-population ratios for black and white men with an adjustment for incarceration-a factor overlooked by most research on employment inequality-the authors combine data from surveys of prisons and jails with data from the Current Population Survey. This adjustment significantly reduces estimated employment rates for African Amer...
Moving during childhood is associated with declines in educational achievement, educational attainment, and early adult occupational outcomes. Coleman (1988,1990) and others have argued that the negative effects of moving for children may be due to the loss of social capital in the short-term after moving. There have been few studies directly exami...
This investigation measures empirically the influence of cultural capital on residential mobility. Cultural capital is broadly conceived as a form of capital based on possession of and familiarity with culturally dominant skills, tastes, and attributes. It works as a resource much like economic, social, or human capital. Using longitudinal data fro...
Using panel data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79), I test hypotheses about the impact of union employment on individually held wealth over the lifecourse. I posit that unions, as a labor market institution, increase the ability of workers to accumulate wealth by providing stable employment and increased access to non-wage pac...
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 est...
Citations
... For example, defendants under house arrest will usually be ordered to pay for supervision or electronic monitoring fees. Economic sanctions have increased in recent years as compared to past decades; this is partly because of a rise in the costs of the criminal justice system and due to an increased focus on restitution (Bing et al., 2022;Menendez et al., 2019). ...
Reference: Sentencing
... This can be understood even though the law always echoes the aspect of equality (equality before the law). Still, the law always creates discrimination, especially when one party is in a position to able to intervene (Friedman et al., 2022). In this context, the notion of inclusive law is essential as a theoretical and paradigmatic basis related to the practice of exoneration clauses in parking practices. ...
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... LFOs have become a popular topic in recent public and political discourse, especially regarding their effect on poverty and racial inequality (US Department of Justice 2016; Laisne, Wool, and Henrichson 2017). Yet, the research to date has focused largely on adults with legal debt (Harris 2016;Colgan 2017;Friedman and Pattillo 2019;Shannon et al. 2020). Our article turns the spotlight instead on LFOs in the juvenile legal system, because it operates differently to its criminal counterpart with its' parens patriae philosophy of rehabilitating the youth. ...
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... Scholars have looked extensively at why the criminal justice system imposes fines and fees so broadly. Previous research has tried to understand how a variety of factors, such as political ideology or racial threat in communities with growing minority populations, are associated with increased imposition of court debts [24,25]. More narrowly, researchers have also examined two important potential rationales for the expansive use of fines and fees: first, that fines and fees are a deterrent to future crime; and second, that fines and fees are a kind of "reverse welfare" used to finance local and municipal governments [26][27][28][29]. ...
... Legal fines and fees also accompany supervisory sentences requiring community service, probation, victim panel classes, drug and alcohol assessment and treatment, and anger management courses (Huebner and Shannon 2022, this volume;Harris, Smith, and Obara 2019;Pattillo and Kirk 2021). The assessment of monetary sanctions for low-level misdemeanors, including traffic citations, also widens the scope of criminal legal contact, involving tens of millions of people each year (Bing, Pettit, and Slavinski 2022, this volume;Needham et al. 2020). ...
... Today's social climate is experiencing more calls for criminal justice reform than ever before, while the justice system remains the visible representation of racial inequality (Gutierrez & Pettit, 2020). The national discussion of prison overcrowding revolves around two subjects: taxpayer cost (Kantorowicz-Reznichenko, 2018) and the overrepresentation of certain minority groups, primarily Black males, exacerbated by a perceived causal relationship with systemic racism (Bohn & Morreale, 2018). ...
... One of the leading indicators of life expectancy is graduation after attending high school, which differs hugely in the divisions of class, race, and ethnicity, as do the rates of academic institution and occupational school participation. This shapes future income, employment, and individual and intergenerational wealth [59]. ...
... This study found close connections with the previous studies that claimed that parental incarceration generates economic strain and instability and leads to family breakdown (Christian, 2009;Kazura, 2001; National Resource Center on Children & Families of the Incarcerated, 2014) and residential instability (Sykes & Pettit, 2015). Thus, children experiencing parental incarceration face financial hardships (Copp et al., 2022). ...
... Incarcerated individuals predominantly come from racial and ethnic minority groups and are of low-income status [1]. Those with a history of incarceration have chronic medical conditions-such as diabetes, hypertension, hepatitis C, depression, and substance use disorders-higher than the general population [2][3][4][5][6]. Upon release, these individuals bear high risks of death and hospitalization from preventable conditions [2,[7][8][9]. ...
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... This result is contrary to the findings inKling (2006) andLandersø (2015), but it is more in line withRamakers et al. (2014).6 On how incarceration and a criminal history can generate a stigma in the labor market see(Bushway 2004; Finlay 2009;Mesters et al. 2016;Pager 2003;Pettit and Lyons 2007). A complete discussion on these two mechanisms can be found inApel and Sweeten (2014).Content courtesy of Springer Nature, terms of use apply. ...
