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Our analysis of data from a nationally representative survey of adults shows that beliefs in whether the January 6th insurrection was justifiable and whether it required investigation through the creation of the U.S. House Select Committee are inexorably steeped in affective partisanship and racial resentment. It is easy to attribute the insurrection to partisan machinations, but evidence shows that racial resentment is the dominant explanation: this includes the fact that allegations of election fraud were centered on districts with large African American and Latino populations; that many of the insurrectionists were white nationalists, racists, and members of radical right-wing groups; and that a large proportion of the electorate had voted to retain a president who fueled whites’ sense of victimization by African Americans and other minorities. We argue that reactions to the legitimacy of the January 6th insurrection have become an example of how racial resentment fuels affective partisanship.

In recent decades, the United States has seen the simultaneous rise of mass incarceration and homelessness. The two crises interact with and worsen one another. Mass incarceration and homelessness are driven by the same structural factors and exacerbate one another in a feedback loop. People on community supervision face many barriers to housing, putting them at high risk of experiencing homelessness in the months following release. People experiencing homelessness are at heightened risk of criminal justice involvement, including violating the terms of their community supervision, for engaging in survival behaviors in public spaces. This paper presents evidence-based approaches to improving housing strategies for reentry populations, preventing homelessness among those in community supervision, and rehousing members of the reentry community experiencing homelessness. It concludes with recommendations for policymakers interested in improving housing outcomes and overall reentry success for people on community supervision.

How do citizens define their civic obligation when their country faces a democratic threat? Do citizens of a democracy think it is important to uphold liberal democratic values or to participate in governance? Do they embrace values that protect democracy, or do they just protect their political party or “side”? I examine changes to citizenship norms in the context of democratic threat using observational data from the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany. I compare trends between 2004 and 2019, which show a weakening in the consensus of “good citizen” norms. Specifically, partisans on the left are more likely to value diversity, vigilance, and tolerance; while partisans on the right become more supportive of values like obeying the law. These differences are reduced in consensus-based political systems, but still the consequences are concerning: when the ties of citizenship norms become weaker, so too does national unity, which is integral to democratic legitimacy and stability.

Hispanic families have historically used means-tested assistance less than high-poverty peers, and one explanation for this may be that anti-immigrant politics and policies are a barrier to program participation. We document the participation of Hispanic children in three antipoverty programs by age and parental citizenship and the correlation of participation with state immigrant-based restrictions. Hispanic citizen children with citizen parents participate in Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) and Medicaid more than Hispanic citizen children with noncitizen parents. Foreign-born Hispanic mothers use Medicaid less than their socioeconomic status would suggest. However, little evidence exists that child participation in Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) varies by mother's nativity: foreign-born mothers of Hispanic infants participate in WIC at higher rates than U.S.-born Hispanic mothers. State policies that restrict immigrant program use correlate to lower SNAP and Medicaid uptake among citizen children of foreign-born Hispanic mothers. WIC participation may be greater because it is delivered through nonprofit clinics, and WIC eligibility for immigrants is largely unrestricted.

This article examines policy changes to and trends in five cash or near-cash income support programs for low-income workers and their families from 2009 to 2019. Our analyses show that the safety net expanded during the recession and then contracted via the tightening of eligibility rules and expiration of most temporary expansions for the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP), unemployment insurance (UI), and Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). Expansions for the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit (CTC) over the period 2009 to 2019 align with a decades-long trend of social welfare policy reinforcing or enforcing labor force participation. Caseloads fell mostly rapidly for UI, which is explicitly designed as countercyclical support; and for TANF, which maintained high levels of administrative burden. We conclude with a cross-program discussion of the state of the social safety net in the pandemic era and postpandemic recovery.

This article reviews how the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) has contributed to our understanding of the links between childhood economic conditions- in particular, the household incomes with very young children-and the economic attainment and health of those children when they reach adulthood. From its beginning, the PSID has provided data useful for addressing intergenerational questions. In the mid-1990s, PSID data supported a series of studies that link early childhood income to early adult attainments, particularly to completed schooling. At the same time, discoveries in neurobiology and epidemiology were beginning to provide details on the processes producing the observed correlations. These discoveries led to a more recent set of PSID-based studies that focus not only on labor market and behavioral outcomes, but also on links between income in the earliest stages of life (including the prenatal period) and adult health. Links between economic disadvantage in childhood and adult health, and the developmental neuroscience underlying those links, are promising areas for future research.

In the growing field of research on the consequences of criminal justice contact for family life, a heavy emphasis has been placed on how imprisonment influences the emotional, physical, and socioeconomic wellbeing of prisoners' loved ones. In this article, I elaborate on and analyze the experiences of family members of people with frequent, low-level criminal justice involvement. I draw on ethnographic data collected in partnership with a clinical social worker over the course of a three-year study of an intensive case management intervention for HIV-positive individuals. Findings indicate that loved ones' brief jail stays and community supervision through probation and parole pose hardships for family members that are distinct from those hardships that arise during imprisonment. These experiences are uniquely destabilizing, may confer specific risks to family members' wellbeing, and merit further study to inform programs, social services, and public policy.

Mass incarceration is commonly understood as a sweeping national policy development, which has obscured remarkable local variation at the policy implementation stage. California’s “Realignment” (Assembly Bill [AB] 109; 2011) is a reform that exploits this variation by design. Research consistently finds that, net of crime, demographic, political, and system capacity characteristics explain the variation in incarceration across local jurisdictions. Do these characteristics also explain decarceration? This study uses group-based trajectory modeling and logistic regression to examine the association of such characteristics with California county trajectories of state prison use in the decade preceding Realignment. County imprisonment trajectories and their related characteristics are then assessed as explanations for decarceration under AB 109. Distinct “risk” factors for high and/or increasing imprisonment trajectories are identified, as well as apparent protective factors. A clear association was found between previous trajectories and decarceration, but county-level characteristics did not demonstrate the predicted effects. Results indicate that decarceration cannot be explained as merely the mirror image of incarceration and should be examined as a distinct phenomenon. Implications for future research and policymaking are discussed.

Dozens of past studies document how affluent people feel somewhat better about life than middle-class people feel and much better than poor people do. New analyses of the General Social Surveys from 1974 to 2012 address questions in the literature regarding aggregate responses to hard times, whether the income-class relationship is linear or not, and whether inequality affects happiness. General happiness dropped significantly during the Great Recession, suggesting that the income-happiness relationship might also exist at the macro level. People with extremely low incomes are not as unhappy as a linear model expects, but there is no evidence of a threshold beyond which personal happiness stops increasing. Comparing happiness over the long term, the affluent were about as happy in 2012 as they were in the 1970s, but the poor were much less happy. Consequently, the gross happiness gap by income was about 30 percent bigger in 2012 than it was in the 1970s. A multivariate model shows that the net effect of income on happiness also increased significantly over time.

Academic research on social mobility from the 1960s until now has made several facts clear. First, and most important, it is better to ask how the conditions and circumstances of early life constrain adult success than to ask who is moving up and who is not. The focus on origins keeps the substantive issues of opportunity and fairness in focus, while the mobility question leads to confusing side issues. Second, mobility is intrinsically symmetrical; each upward move is offset by a downward move in the absence of growth, expansion, or immigration. Third, social origins are not a single dimension of inequality that can be paired with the outcome of interest (without significant excluded variable bias); they are a comprehensive set of conditions describing the circumstances of youth. Fourth, the constraints of social origins vary by time, place, and subpopulation. These four “knowns” should inform any attempt to collect new data on mobility.

Because ethnographies report what is already known in some part of society, the warrant for the method is uniquely double. Each ethnography promises both positive and negative knowledge, a contribution to understanding the social logic that organizes some area of social life and a contribution to the sociology of ignorance. Those reported in this volume illustrate seven distinct warrants that hinge on morally charged forces blocking the dissemination of knowledge about locally known social realities. In addition, running through many of the studies is a focus on an amoral warrant. Ethnographies are distinctively suited for studying the ubiquitous, naturally occurring hiding that is necessarily part of social expression, or how things are hidden in the foundations of the social world. © American Academy of Political & Social Science 2012.

The author draws from in-depth interviews with thirty-nine black and Latino custodial and food service workers at the University of California, Berkeley, to determine how workers make decisions about making job referrals. Interviews were revelatory. Drawing from widely available and institutionalized scripts about what makes a good worker, jobholders assessed jobseekers’ orientation toward work as well as what effect this orientation might have on their own reputations on the job to determine whom to help and how much to do so. Because of ethno-racial differences in how unemployment was interpreted, Latinos were more likely than their black counterparts to help and to do so proactively. These findings suggest that theories of social capital mobilization must take into consideration individuals’ access to and deployment of cultural resources to fully understand the circumstances under which actors are mobilized for instrumental action.

An important question in the study of literacy is the degree to which environmental conditions influence children's ability to learn to read. A comparison was made of the reading ability of schooled and nonschooled children in three locations in Peru: the city, the highlands, and the rain forest. Increased attendance resulted in improved reading ability, but the degree of improvement varied according to the environments in which the children resided. When the children were followed up nine years after the original testing, they showed continued improvement in reading ability, especially in the environment where economic conditions had improved. A comparison of the Peruvian children with children in three industrialized societies, Japan, Taiwan, and the United States, revealed little difference in the children's cognitive abilities but great differences in their reading ability. More stimulating environmental conditions and better schooling in the industrialized societies were presumably responsible for these differences. © 1992, SAGE PUBLICATIONS. All rights reserved.

A reliable prototype index, Three Ratings of Involuntary Admissibility (TRIAD), was developed to reflect the way psychiatric emergency room clinicians apply legal criteria for involuntary commitment. The interrater reliability coefficients--Pearson's r--of the TRIAD system for rating patients are 0.94, danger-to-self score; 0.89, danger-to-other score; 0.77, grave-disability score; and 0.89, total-admissibility score. TRIAD scores accounted for 82 percent of 89 disposition decisions in two metropolitan county hospital psychiatric emergency rooms. Study results indicate that (1) psychiatric emergency room clinicians shared constructs of danger to self, danger to others, and grave disability; (2) these constructs are reliably applied in actual cases; (3) TRIAD is a valid reflection of these constructs; and (4) case disposition is predictable from the severity of the patient's status with regard to these criteria.