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AbstractSince the early 1990s American schools have adopted a number of practices – zero tolerance, school police, metal detectors, drug sweeps, and surveillance cameras – that signal a shift from a discretionary student disciplinary framework to a crime control paradigm. The sociological sub‐field that centers on the examination and interpretation of the criminalization of school discipline is still in its formative stages and, consequently, even basic conceptual issues remain unsettled. However, sustained by a growing body of ethnographic research, the field's theoretical discussions and debates regarding the causes, consequences, and social distribution of school criminalization are complex, vibrant, and synergistic. In the broadest terms, this field explores how school criminalization expresses, accommodates, and reinforces broader fears and political‐economic changes. The field also includes a disappointingly but understandably small number of quantitative studies that bear directly on these theories. The field's critical, sociological insights will find and resonate with a broader audience (including policy‐makers) only after an equally innovative and vigorous quantitative empirical tradition emerges to refine and validate its theoretical contributions.

Successful community reentry and the criminological impact of incarceration may depend in part on the attitudes (and consequent reactions) that prisoners encounter after release. Theories of social stigma suggest that such attitudes depend, in turn, on the levels of familiarity with the stigmatized group (the normalization thesis) as well as on the credibility and trust they accord to sanctioning agents (the legitimation thesis). To assess these two hypotheses, we present the first multivariate analysis of public attitudes toward ex‐offenders. Data from a four‐state, random‐digit telephone survey of more than 2,000 individuals indicate that, net of controls, personal familiarity with ex‐offenders may soften attitudes, whereas confidence in the courts may harden them. As expected, non‐Hispanic Whites, conservatives, and southern residents hold more negative views of ex‐offenders. Our findings lend indirect support to concerns that incarceration is becoming "normalized", and we suggest strategies for reducing the stigma of incarceration.