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.

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The steep rise in U.S. criminal punishment in recent decades has spurred scholarship on the collateral consequences of imprisonment for individuals, families, and communities. Several excellent studies have estimated the number of people who have been incarcerated and the collateral consequences they face, but far less is known about the size and scope of the total U.S. population with felony convictions beyond prison walls, including those who serve their sentences on probation or in jail. This article develops state-level estimates based on demographic life tables and extends previous national estimates of the number of people with felony convictions to 2010. We estimate that 3 % of the total U.S. adult population and 15 % of the African American adult male population has ever been to prison; people with felony convictions account for 8 % of all adults and 33 % of the African American adult male population. We discuss the far-reaching consequences of the spatial concentration and immense growth of these groups since 1980.

The unprecedented growth of the penal system in the United States has motivated an expansive volume of research on the collateral consequences of punishment. In this review, we take stock of what is known about these collateral consequences, particularly in the domains of health, employment, housing, debt, civic involvement, families, and communities. Yet the full reckoning of the formal and informal consequences of mass incarceration and the tough-on-crime era is hindered by a set of thorny challenges that are both methodological and theoretical in nature. We examine these enduring challenges, which include (a) the importance of minimizing selection bias, (b) consideration of treatment heterogeneity, and (c) identification of causal mechanisms underlying collateral consequences. We conclude the review with a focused discussion on promising directions for future research, including insights into data infrastructure, opportunities for policy tests, and suggestions for expanding the field of inquiry.

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What percentage of Americans have ever had a family member incarcerated? To answer this question, we designed the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS). The survey was administered in the summer of 2018 by NORC at the University of Chicago using their AmeriSpeak Panel. It was funded by FWD.us, which released a separate report using the data. The data show that 45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated. The incarceration of an immediate family member was most prevalent for blacks (63 percent) but common for whites (42 percent) and Hispanics (48 percent) as well. College graduates had a lower risk of having a family member incarcerated, but the risk for black college graduates was comparatively high. The most common form of family member incarceration was the incarceration of a sibling.

Contemporary youth typically experience considerable floundering and uncertainty in their transition from school to work. This paper examines patterns of schooling and working during adolescence and the transition to adulthood that hasten or delay an important subjective marker of transition to adulthood: acquiring a job that is recognized as a "career." We use Youth Development Study data, obtained from a prospective longitudinal study of 9(th) graders. Estimation of discrete-time logit models shows that adolescent work patterns during high school, as well as the cumulative investments they make in work and schooling in the years following, significantly influence this milestone. Time-varying predictors, including job characteristics and parenthood, also affect the process of movement into "careers".

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