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In the past three decades, incarceration has become an increasingly powerful force for reproducing and reinforcing social inequalities. A new wave of sociological research details the contemporary experiment with mass incarceration in the United States and its attendant effects on social stratification. This review first describes the scope of imprisonment and the process of selection into prison. It then considers the implications of the prison boom for understanding inequalities in the labor market, educational attainment, health, families, and the intergenerational transmission of inequality. Social researchers have long understood selection into prison as a reflection of existing stratification processes. Today, research attention has shifted to the role of punishment in generating these inequalities.

Most accounts of organizations and law treat law as largely exogenous and emphasize organizations' responses to law. This study proposes a model of endogeneity among organizations, the professions, and legal institutions. It suggests that organizations and the professions strive to construct rational responses to law, enabled by "rational myths" or stories about appropriate solutions that are themselves modeled after the public legal order. Courts, in turn, recognize and legitimate organizational structures that mimic the legal form, thus conferring legal and market benefits upon organizational structures that began as gestures of compliance. Thus, market rationality can follow from rationalized myths: the professions promote a particular compliance strategy, organizations adopt this strategy to reduce costs and symbolize compliance, and courts adjust judicial constructions of fairness to include these emerging organizational practices. To illustrate this model, a case study of equal employment opportunity (EEO) grievance procedures is presented in this article.The meaning of law regulating organizations unfolds dynamically across organizational, professional, and legal fields. Legislative action and judicial interpretation offer law its official stamp, but organizations-and the 1

Power is at the core of feminist theories of sexual harassment, although it has rarely been measured directly in terms of workplace authority. Popular characterizations portray male supervisors harassing female subordinates, but power-threat theories suggest that women in authority may be more frequent targets. This article analyzes longitudinal survey data and qualitative interviews from the Youth Development Study to test this idea and to delineate why and how supervisory authority, gender nonconformity, and workplace sex ratios affect harassment. Relative to nonsupervisors, female supervisors are more likely to report harassing behaviors and to define their experiences as sexual harassment. Sexual harassment can serve as an equalizer against women in power, motivated more by control and domination than by sexual desire. Interviews point to social isolation as a mechanism linking harassment to gender nonconformity and women’s authority, particularly in male-dominated work settings.

for research assistance. 778 778 778 778 AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW AMERICAN SOCIOLOGICAL REVIEW 1 To be sure, many of these countries have incomplete or "façade" democracies without fully competitive elections (Markoff 1996, chap. 5). Even within the most democratic countries, barriers to participation inevitably persist (e.g., registration requirements, barriers faced by disabled voters, difficulties accessing polling places, especially when elections are held on working days). Every country excludes noncitizen immigrants from voting in national elections. 2 We thank Joe Levinson at the Prison Reform Trust, and Femke van der Meulen at the International Centre for Prison Studies, both in London, for making the results of their international survey of felon voting rights in Europe available to us.

Convicted felons face both legal and informal barriers to becoming productive citizens at work, responsible citizens in family life, and active citizens in their communities. As criminal punishment has increased in the United States, collateral sanctions such as voting restrictions have taken on new meaning. The authors place such restrictions in comparative context and consider their effects on civil liberties, democratic institutions, and civic life more generally. Based on demographic life tables, the authors estimate that approximately 4 million former prisoners and 11.7 million former felons live and work among us every day. The authors describe historical changes in these groups; their effects on social institutions; and the extent to which they constitute a caste, class, or status group within American society. The authors conclude by discussing how reintegrative criminal justice practices might strengthen democracy while preserving, and perhaps enhancing, public safety.

Ample experimental evidence shows that the stigma of a prison record reduces employment opportunities (Pager, 2007). Yet background checks today uncover a much broader range of impropriety, including arrests for minor crimes never resulting in formal charges. This article probes the lesser boundaries of stigma, asking whether and how employers consider low‐level arrests in hiring decisions. Matched pairs of young African American and White men were sent to apply for 300 entry‐level jobs, with one member of each pair reporting a disorderly conduct arrest that did not lead to conviction. We find a modest but nontrivial effect, with employer callback rates about 4 percentage points lower for the experimental group than for the matched control group. Interviews with the audited employers suggest three mechanisms to account for the lesser stigma of misdemeanor arrests relative to felony convictions: 1) greater employer discretion and authority in the former case; 2) calibration of the severity, nature, and timing of the offense; and 3) a deeply held presumption of innocence, which contrasts the uncertainty of arrest with the greater certainty represented by convictions. In addition, personal contact and workplace diversity play important roles in the hiring process.

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