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This commentary highlights some of the key lessons from the preceding articles by Sarah Lageson on online criminal histories and Robert Apel on cohabitation and marriage. To provide additional perspectives on institutions and families, it draws briefly on interview data from the Minnesota Exits and Entries Project, comparing the reentry experiences of 18- to 25-year-olds leaving prisons, jails, the armed forces, the juvenile justice system, foster care, drug treatment, and mental health facilities. While the prison surely ranks among the most salient institutions for U.S. families today and as such merits close scrutiny, there is also great benefit in "escaping prison": considering how the justice system might productively import or borrow ideas and programs from other institutional domains. In collectively showing how specific punishment conditions affect family life, we can provide the research base needed to help institutions better support individuals and families.

Power‐control theory posits that parental workplace positions affect adolescent law violation. To date, however, no test of the theory has directly measured occupational power and control. This paper tests whether parental and adolescent workplace freedom and control affect criminal behavior and arrest as the theory predicts, using data from a prospective longitudinal survey of 1, 000 adolescents and their parents. The results suggest sex differentials in the effects of maternal authority position and parental freedom and control. In particular, daughters whose mothers hold authority positions are more likely to be arrested than are daughters whose mothers do not hold such positions. The effects of adolescent employment also differ by sex, with perceived workplace power and control reducing rates of arrest among females but increasing them among males.

In the past three decades, social scientists have made real progress in understanding "desistance," or the process of transitioning away from criminal behavior. Yet criminal justice policies and practices have been slow to adopt the lessons of life course criminology. Connecting research on desistance theories, particularly identity-based theories, to reentry policies is crucial to understanding the context of criminal offending. Repeated interactions between individuals involved in crime and the police, courts or prison populations can actually increase the salience of criminal identities and strengthen relationships with others involved in crime. Alternatively, movement toward more positively valued adult roles can help foster and gradually stabilize non-criminal identities through the same role commitment process. As a short-term reform, "the problem facing those returning to civilian life from prison is fundamentally a problem of entry rather than reentry." Furthermore, if the task of entry is one of integrating into "pro-social adult life", people need programs that support desistance by fostering success in education, employment, family relationships, maintaining a residence, and participating as a citizen in the community. In the medium-term, we see a crucial need to eliminate most collateral consequences of criminal justice involvement because "It makes little sense for a system to encourage or support the adoption of an identity if the people who pass through it are marked as unredeemable." Finally, there is a long-term need to eliminate structural barriers that prevent people from fully participating in civil society and minimize crime through equitable social policy.

AbstractIn this article, we consider the effect of criminal records on college admissions. Nearly 72 percent of colleges require criminal history information during their application processes, which indicates that an applicant's criminal history could be a significant impediment to achieving the benefits associated with higher education. We conducted a modified experimental audit to learn whether and to what extent criminal records affect admissions decisions. Matched same‐race pairs of tester applications were sent to a national sample of nonelite 4‐year colleges, with both testers applying as either Black or White. Within each pair, one application signaled a prior low‐level felony conviction only when required by the application. Consistent with the findings of research on employment, we find the rejection rate for applicants with felony convictions was nearly 2.5 times the rate of our control testers. Relative to the large racial differences observed in previous studies of hiring decisions, we find smaller racial differences in admissions decisions. Nevertheless, Black applicants with criminal records were particularly penalized when disclosing a felony record at colleges with high campus crime rates. We address implications for reentry, racial progress, and the college "Ban the Box" movement. We suggest colleges consider narrowing the scope of such inquiries or removing the question altogether – particularly when it conflicts with the goals of these institutions, including reducing the underrepresentation of students of color."

christopher uggen and ryan larson on uneven progress in public opinion.

Drug crime often is viewed as distinctive from other types of crime, meriting greater or lesser punishment. In view of this special status, this article asks whether and how illegal earnings attainment differs between drug sales and other forms of economic crime. We estimate monthly illegal earnings with fixed‐effects models, based on data from the National Supported Work Demonstration Project and the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. Although drug sales clearly differ from other types of income‐generating crime, we find few differences in their determinants. For example, the use of cocaine or heroin increases illegal earnings from both drug and nondrug crimes, indicating some degree of fungibility in the sources of illegal income. More generally, the same set of factors—particularly legal and illegal opportunities and embeddedness in criminal and conventional networks—predicts both drug earnings and nondrug illegal earnings.