Inequality in income, earnings, and wealth has risen dramatically in the United States over the past three decades. Most research into this issue has focused on the causes—global trade, new technology, and economic policy—rather than the consequences of inequality. In Social Inequality, a group of the nation’s leading social scientists opens a wide-ranging inquiry into the social implications of rising economic inequality. Beginning with a critical evaluation of the existing research, they assess whether the recent run-up in economic inequality has been accompanied by rising inequality in social domains such as the quality of family and neighborhood life, equal access to education and health care, job satisfaction, and political participation.

Marcia Meyers and colleagues find that many low-income mothers cannot afford market-based child care, which contributes to inequality both at the present time—by reducing maternal employment and family income—and through the long-term consequences of informal or low-quality care on children’s educational achievement. At the other end of the educational spectrum, Thomas Kane links the growing inequality in college attendance to rising tuition and cuts in financial aid. Neil Fligstein and Taek-Jin Shin show how both job security and job satisfaction have decreased for low-wage workers compared with their higher-paid counterparts. Those who fall behind economically may also suffer diminished access to essential social resources like health care. John Mullahy, Stephanie Robert, and Barbara Wolfe discuss why higher inequality may lead to poorer health: wider inequality might mean increased stress-related ailments for the poor, and it might also be associated with public health care policies that favor the privileged. On the political front, Richard Freeman concludes that political participation has become more stratified as incomes have become more unequal. Workers at the bottom of the income scale may simply be too hard-pressed or too demoralized to care about political participation. Social Inequality concludes with a comprehensive section on the methodological problems involved in disentangling the effects of inequality from other economic factors, which will be of great benefit to future investigators.

While today’s widening inequality may be a temporary episode, the danger is that the current economic divisions may set in motion a self-perpetuating cycle of social disadvantage. The most comprehensive review of this quandary to date, Social Inequality maps out a new agenda for research on inequality in America with important implications for public policy.

KATHRYN NECKERMAN is associate director of the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy, Columbia University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Suzanne Bianchi,  Henry E. Brady,  Coral Celeste,  Tiffani Chin,  Philip N. Cohen,  Sean Corcoran,  Janet Currie,  Paul DiMaggio,  Christine E. Eibner,  David T. Ellwood,  William N. Evans,  Neil Fligstein, Richard B. Freeman,  Jennifer Godwin,  Eszter Hargittai, Robert M. Hauser,  Robert Haveman, V. Joseph Hotz,  Michael Hout,  Christopher Jencks, Thomas J. Kane,  Meredith Kleykamp,  Gabriel S. Lenz,  Kara Levine,  Steven P. Martin,  Susan E. Mayer,  Marcia K. Meyers,  John Mullahy, Sheila E. Murray, Kei Nomaguchi, Lars Osberg, Anne R. Pebley, Meredith Phillips,  Sara Raley, Stephanie Robert,  Dan Rosenbaum,  Jake Rosenfeld, Howard Rosenthal,  Christopher Ruhm,  Gary Sandefur,  Narayan Sastry, Kay Lehman Schlozman,  John Karl Scholz,  Robert M. Schwab, Jonathan Schwabish, Steven Shafer.  Taek-Jin Shin,  Theda Skocpol, Timothy M. Smeeding,  Sidney Verba,  Andrea Voyer,  Jane Waldfogel,  Bruce Western,  Barbara Wolfe.

Teachers, social workers, psychologists, and sociologists carried out an ambitious, six-year experiment in individual casework and group therapy with potential problem girls in a New York City vocational high school. Conducted in collaboration with Youth Consultation Service, this provocative study provides valuable data on adolescent girls—and raises compelling questions on the extent to which casework can be effective in interrupting deviant careers.

HENRY J. MEYER is professor in the School of Social Work and the Department of Sociology at the University of Michigan.

EDGAR F. BORGATTA is chairman of the Department of Sociology at the University of Wisconsin.

WYATT C. JONES is senior research scientist in the School of Social Work at Columbia University

ELIZABETH P. ANDERSON is director of Youth Consultation Service.

HANNA GRUNWALD is group therapy consultant.

DOROTHY HEADLEY is senior group therapist.

"How to inform the judicial mind," Justice Frankfurter remarked during the school desegregation cases, "is one of the most complicated problems." Social research is a potential source of such information. Indeed, in the 1960s and 1970s, with activist courts at the forefront of social reform, the field of law and social science came of age. But for all the recent activity and scholarship in this area, few books have attempted to create an intellectual framework, a systematic introduction to applied social-legal research.

Social Research in the Judicial Process addresses this need for a broader picture. Designed for use by both law students and social science students, it constructs a conceptual bridge between social research (the realm of social facts) and judicial decision making (the realm of social values). Its unique casebook format weaves together judicial opinions, empirical studies, and original text. It is a process-oriented book that teaches skills and perspectives, cultivating an informed sensitivity to the use and misuse of psychology, social psychology, and sociology in apellate and trial adjudication. Among the social-legal topics explored are school desegregation, capital punishment, jury impartiality, and eyewitness identification.

This casebook is remarkable for its scope, its accessibility, and the intelligence of its conceptual integration. It provides the kind of interdisciplinary teaching framework that should eventually help lawyers to make knowledgeable use of social research, and social scientists to conduct useful research within a legally sophisticated context.

WALLACE D. LOH is professor of law and adjunct professor of psychology at the University of Washington.

Given the increasing diversity of the nation—particularly with respect to its growing Hispanic and Asian populations—why does racial and ethnic difference so often lead to disadvantage? In The Colors of Poverty, a multidisciplinary group of experts provides a breakthrough analysis of the complex mechanisms that connect poverty and race.

The Colors of Poverty reframes the debate over the causes of minority poverty by emphasizing the cumulative effects of disadvantage in perpetuating poverty across generations. The contributors consider a kaleidoscope of factors that contribute to widening racial gaps, including education, racial discrimination, social capital, immigration, and incarceration. Michèle Lamont and Mario Small grapple with the theoretical ambiguities of existing cultural explanations for poverty disparities.  They argue that culture and structure are not competing explanations for poverty, but rather collaborate to produce disparities. Looking at how attitudes and beliefs exacerbate racial stratification, social psychologist Heather Bullock links the rise of inequality in the United States to an increase in public tolerance for disparity. She suggests that the American ethos of rugged individualism and meritocracy erodes support for antipoverty programs and reinforces the belief that people are responsible for their own poverty. Sociologists Darren Wheelock and Christopher Uggen focus on the collateral consequences of incarceration in exacerbating racial disparities and are the first to propose a link between legislation that blocks former drug felons from obtaining federal aid for higher education and the black/white educational attainment gap. Joe Soss and Sanford Schram argue that the increasingly decentralized and discretionary nature of state welfare programs allows for different treatment of racial groups, even when such policies are touted as “race-neutral.” They find that states with more blacks and Hispanics on welfare rolls are consistently more likely to impose lifetime limits, caps on benefits for mothers with children, and stricter sanctions.

The Colors of Poverty is a comprehensive and evocative introduction to the dynamics of race and inequality. The research in this landmark volume moves scholarship on inequality beyond a simple black-white paradigm, beyond the search for a single cause of poverty, and beyond the promise of one “magic bullet” solution.

ANN CHIH LIN is associate professor in the Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy and Department of Political Science at the University of Michigan.

DAVID R. HARRIS is professor of sociology and deputy provost at Cornell University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Scott W. Allard, Heather E. Bullock, George Farkas, David R. Harris, Michèle Lamont, Ann Chih Lin, Selina A. Mohammed, Devah Pager, Lincoln Quillian, Rozlyn Reed, Sanford F. Schram, Mario Luis Small, Joe Soss, Michael A. Stoll, Christopher Uggen, Darren Wheelock, and David R. Williams

A Volume in the National Poverty Center Series on Poverty and Public Policy

One of the most challenging goals for welfare reformers has been improving the collection of child support payments from noncustodial parents, usually fathers. Often vilified as deadbeats who have dropped out of their children's lives, these fathers have been the target of largely punitive enforcement policies that give little consideration to the complex circumstances of these men's lives.

Fathers' Fair Share presents an alternative to these measures with an in-depth study of the Parents Fair Share Program. A multi-state intervention run by the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, the program was designed to better the life skills of nonpaying fathers with children on public assistance, in the belief that this would encourage them to improve their level of child support. The men chosen for the program frequently lived on the margins of society. Chronically unemployed or underemployed, undereducated, and often earning their money on the streets, they bore the scars of drug or alcohol abuse, troubled family lives, and arrest records. Among those of African American and Hispanic descent, many felt a deep-rooted distrust of the mainstream economy. The Parents Fair Share Program offered these men the chance not only to learn the social skills needed for stable employment but to participate in discussions about personal difficulties, racism, and problems in their relationships with their children and families.

Fathers' Fair Share details the program's mix of employment training services, peer support groups, and formal mediation of disputes between custodial and noncustodial parents. Equally important, the authors explore the effect of the participating fathers' expectations and doubts about the program, which were colored by their often negative views about the child support and family law system. The voices heard in Fathers' Fair Share provides a rare look into the lives of low-income fathers and how they think about their struggles and prospects, their experiences in the workplace, and their responsibilities toward their families. Parents Fair Share demonstrated that, in spite of their limited resources, these men are more likely to make stronger efforts to improve support payments and to become greater participants in their children's lives if they encounter a less adversarial and arbitrary enforcement system.

Fathers' Fair Share offers a valuable resource to the design of social welfare programs seeking to reach out to this little-understood population, and addresses issues of tremendous importance for those concerned about welfare reform, child support enforcement, family law, and employment policy.

EARL S. JOHNSON is research associate at the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, New York and San Francisco.

ANN LEVINE is a freelance writer and editor.

FRED C. DOOLITTLE is vice president and associate director of research at the Manpower Demonstration Research Corporation, New York and San Francisco.

Justice and Reform is the first study of the origins, philosophy, creation, management, and impact of the Office of Economic Opportunity Legal Services Program. As such, it clearly and concisely describes the Program’s role both as an instrument of equal justice and as a strategy for overcoming poverty. Timely, important, and unique, it tells the story behind the OEO Legal Services Program—an endeavor that has been called both the most successful element of the war on poverty and the most stimulating development to occur in the American legal profession during the Twentieth Century.

The early chapters in the book reveal the nature and motivations of the two groups which joined to create the Program: the conservative, American Bar Association sponsored 89-year-old legal aid movement and the Ford Foundation-financed neighborhood lawyer experiments that started in 1962 under the direction of young activist lawyers. Why they merged and how they merged forms the background for a description of how the partners persuaded the OEO bureaucracy to start a legal services program and convinced over 200 communities (including most large cities) to set up a federally funded legal assistance agency.

Legal Services Program established policy, how it settled upon “law reform” as the priority function of the Program, how it preserved the integrity of its policies within OEO, and how it caused its grantees to engage in law reform. Chapter 8 evaluates, for the first time, the economic, political, and social impact of the Program as of 1972. The final chapter speculates on the future of government-subsidized legal assistance in the United States from the perspective of the OEO program’s twin goals of equal justice and social reform.

EARL JOHNSON, JR. is professor of law at the University of Southern California Law Center and senior research associate at the Social Science Institute, University of Southern California.

A Volume in the American Sociological Association’s Rose Series in Sociology

Winner of the 2002 Outstanding Scholarship Award from the Crime and Delinquency Section of the Society for the Study of Social Problems

Violence motivated by racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia weaves a tragic pattern throughout American history. Fueled by recent high-profile cases, hate crimes have achieved an unprecedented visibility. Only in the past twenty years, however, has this kind of violence—itself as old as humankind—been specifically categorized and labeled as hate crime. Making Hate a Crime is the first book to trace the emergence and development of hate crime as a concept, illustrating how it has become institutionalized as a social fact and analyzing its policy implications.

In Making Hate a Crime Valerie Jenness and Ryken Grattet show how the concept of hate crime emerged and evolved over time, as it traversed the arenas of American politics, legislatures, courts, and law enforcement. In the process, violence against people of color, immigrants, Jews, gays and lesbians, women, and persons with disabilities has come to be understood as hate crime, while violence against other vulnerable victims-octogenarians, union members, the elderly, and police officers, for example-has not. The authors reveal the crucial role social movements played in the early formulation of hate crime policy, as well as the way state and federal politicians defined the content of hate crime statutes, how judges determined the constitutional validity of those statutes, and how law enforcement has begun to distinguish between hate crime and other crime. Hate crime took on different meanings as it moved from social movement concept to law enforcement practice. As a result, it not only acquired a deeper jurisprudential foundation but its scope of application has been restricted in some ways and broadened in others. Making Hate a Crime reveals how our current understanding of hate crime is a mix of political and legal interpretations at work in the American policymaking process. Jenness and Grattet provide an insightful examination of the birth of a new category in criminal justice: hate crime. Their findings have implications for emerging social problems such as school violence, television-induced violence, elder-abuse, as well as older ones like drunk driving, stalking, and sexual harassment. Making Hate a Crime presents a fresh perspective on how social problems and the policies devised in response develop over time.

VALERIE JENNESS is associate professor and chair of criminology, law, and society, as well as associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Irvine.

RYKEN GRATTET is associate professor of sociology at the University of California, Davis.

The search for reliable information on the well-being of America's young is vital to designing programs to improve their lives. Yet social scientists are concerned that many measurements of children's physical and emotional health are inadequate, misleading, or outdated, leaving policymakers ill-informed. Indicators of Children's Well-Being is an ambitious inquiry into current efforts to monitor children from the prenatal period through adolescence. Working with the most up-to-date statistical sources, experts from multiple disciplines assess how data on physical development, education, economic security, family and neighborhood conditions, and social behavior are collected and analyzed, what findings they reveal, and what improvements are needed to create a more comprehensive and policy-relevant system of measurement.

Today's climate of welfare reform has opened new possibilities for program innovation and experimentation, but it has also intensified the need for a clearly defined and wide-ranging empirical framework to pinpoint where help is needed and what interventions will succeed. Indicators of Children's Well-Being emphasizes the importance of accurate studies that address real problems. Essays on children's material well-being show why income data must be supplemented with assessments of housing, medical care, household expenditure, food consumption, and education. Other contributors urge refinements to existing survey instruments such as the Census and the Current Population Survey. The usefulness of records from human service agencies, child welfare records, and juvenile court statistics is also evaluated.

ROBERT M. HAUSER is Vilas Research Professor of Sociology and affiliate at the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin, Madison.

BRETT V. BROWN is research associate at Child Trends, Inc., Washington, D.C.

WILLIAM R. PROSSER is senior policy analyst who is retired from the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Washington, D.C.

CONTRIBUTORS: J. Lawrence Aber, Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, Thomas J. Corbett, Claudia J. Coulton, Greg J. Duncan, David J. Eggebeen, Arthur B. Elster, Frank F. Furstenberg Jr., Robert M. Goerge, Dennis P. Hogan, Mary Elizabeth Hughes, Aurora Jackson, Stephanie M. Jones, Thomas J. Kane, Bruce P. Kennedy, Daniel Koretz, Paula Lantz, John M. Love, Susan E. Mayer, Timothy J. McGourthy, Marc L. Miringoff, Marque-Luisa Miringoff, Kristin A. Moore, Allyn M. Mortimer, Leslie Moscow, Jane Mosley, Melissa Partin, Deborah A. Phillips, Deborah Prothrow-Stith, Gary D. Sandefur, James Sears, Judith R. Smith, Matthew Stagner, Barbara Starfield, Ruby Takanishi, Barbara L. Wolfe.

An Institute for Research on Poverty Affiliated Book on Poverty and Public Policy

Presents the results of the first national field survey of how lawyers use pretrial discovery in practice. Pretrial discovery is a complex set of rules and practices through which the adversaries in a civil dispute are literally allowed to "discover" the facts and legal arguments their opponents plan to use in the trial, with the purpose of improving the speed and quality of justice by reducing the element of trickery and surprise. Dr. Glaser examines the uses, problems, and advantages of discovery. He concludes that it is in wide use in federal civil cases, but that while the procedure has produced more information in some areas, it has failed to bring other improvements favored by its original authors.

WILLIAM A. GLASER is at the Bureau of Applied Social Research and The Project for Effective Social Research at Columbia University.