Race, Family, and Institutions of Social Control

One of my research areas examines the implications of child welfare and criminal legal system contact for family life, with a focus on racial/ethnic inequality. For this work I use both survey and administrative data, including data from the Family History of Incarceration Survey, National Longitudinal Studies, National Survey of Child and Adolescent Wellbeing, National Child Abuse and Neglect Data System, Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System, and state and local administrative data. My work in this area includes:

• “State-Level Variation in the Cumulative Prevalence of Child Welfare System Contact, 2015-2019.” Children and Youth Services Review (with Frank Edwards, Natalia Emanuel, Hedwig Lee, John M. Leventhal, Jane Waldfogel, and Christopher Wildeman, 2023).
• “Racial Inequality in the Prevalence, Degree, and Extension of Incarceration in Family Life.” Demography (2023).
• “Paternal Jail Incarceration and Birth Outcomes: Evidence from New York City, 2010-2016.” American Journal of Public Health (with Joseph Kennedy, Cynthia Chazotte, Mary Huynh, Yang Jiang, and Christopher Wildeman, 2021)
• “Institutional Contact and Unequal Instability in Childhood and the Transition to Adulthood.” Invited Presentation, Youth Justice Institute (2021).
• “Cumulative Prevalence of Confirmed Maltreatment and Foster Care Placement for US Children by Race/Ethnicity, 2011-2016.” American Journal of Public Health (with Frank Edwards and Christopher Wildeman, 2020).
• “What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated? Evidence from the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS).“ Socius (with Peter K. Enns, Megan Comfort, Alyssa Goldman, Hedwig Lee, Christopher Muller, Sara Wakefield, Emily A. Wang, and Christopher Wildeman, 2019)
• “Leaving Home, Entering Institutions: Implications for Home-Leaving in the Transition to Adulthood.” Journal of Marriage and Family (2019)
• “Can Foster Care Interventions Diminish Justice System Inequality?” Future of Children (with Christopher Wildeman, 2018). See my remarks on this work at a Brookings Institution/Future of Children panel event here.

Social Segregation and Separation

Another research area examines racial/ethnic categorization and immigrant status and generation as dimensions of social and spatial stratification and inequality in the social lives of people in the U.S., particularly among those who are Latinx or of Hispanic ethnicity. My work in this area includes:

• “Job Mobility among Unauthorized Immigrant Workers.” Social Forces (with Matthew Hall and Emily Greenman, 2019)
• “Living Arrangements and Household Complexity among Undocumented Latino Immigrants.” Population and Development Review (with Matthew Hall and Kelly Musick, 2019), read a summary of key findings in a Council on Contemporary Families fact sheet here.
• “Racial Separation at Home and at Work: Segregation in Residential and Workplace Settings.” Population Research and Policy Review (with Matthew Hall and John Iceland, 2019), see Alvin Chang at Vox.com’s feature of the data and article here.

Public Opinion, the Criminal Legal System, and Inequality

In a new branch of my research, I explore civic and political engagement in relation to the criminal legal system, as a domain of social life impacted by the criminal legal system as well as as one that, in turn, can shape and influence criminal legal institutions and actors. Currently, this work includes a collaboration with Peter Enns and Christopher Wildeman in which we offer a theoretical argument and empirical evidence for why carceral contact may be negatively associated with trust in the state but not necessarily civic participation and community engagement. This area of research also includes a collaboration with Jamie Rowen, Kelsey Shoub, Cindy Xiong, Kathryn Reynolds, and Hamza Elhamdadi in which we used a mixed-methods and multipronged study of a progressive prosecutorial jurisdiction to examine disparities in prosecutorial processes, the role that discretion and decision-making may play in shaping disparate outcomes, as well as the potential promise and pitfalls of data-sharing and transparency for the actualization of goals of progressive reform in prosecution.