"Yinger writes as if four decades of protest and progressive legislation have barely altered the terrain upon which minority Americans struggle for equality. He's right....Yinger figures that housing discrimination costs black homebuyers $5.7 billion and Hispanic homebuyers $3.4 billion every three years." —Washington Monthly

Nearly three decades after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, illegal housing discrimination against blacks and Hispanics remains rampant in the United States. Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost reports on a landmark nationwide investigation of real estate brokers, comparing their treatment of equally qualified white, black, and Hispanic customers. The study reveals pervasive discrimination. Real estate brokers showed 25 percent fewer homes to the minority buyers, and loan agencies were 60 percent more likely to turn down minority applicants. Realtors and lenders also charged higher prices to minority buyers, withheld or gave insufficient financial and application information, and showed them homes only in non-white neighborhoods. Residents of minority neighborhoods faced further difficulties trying to sell their homes or obtain housing credit and homeowner's insurance.

Economist John Yinger provides a lucid account of these disturbing facts and shows how deeply housing discrimination can affect the living conditions, education, and employment of black and Hispanic Americans. Deprived of residential mobility and discouraged from owning their own homes, many minority families are unable to flee stagnant or unsafe neighborhoods. Two thirds of black and Hispanic children are concentrated in high-poverty schools where educational achievement is low and dropout rates are high. The employment possibilities for minority job-seekers are diminished by the ongoing movement of jobs from the cities to the suburbs, where housing discrimination is particularly severe. Altogether, these effects of housing discrimination create a vicious cycle—discrimination imposes social and economic barriers upon blacks and Hispanics, and the resulting hardships fuel the prejudice that leads whites to associate minorities with neighborhood deterioration.

Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost provides a history of fair housing and fair lending enforcement and joins the intense debate about integration policy. Yinger proposes a bold, comprehensive program that aims not only to end discrimination in housing and mortgage markets but to reverse their long-term effects by stabilizing poorer neighborhoods and removing the stigma of integration. He urges reforms to strengthen the enforcement powers of HUD and other agencies, provide funding for poor and integrated schools, encourage local housing and race-counseling programs, and shift income tax breaks toward low-income homebuyers.

Closed Doors, Opportunities Lost provides valuable insight into the causes, extent, and consequences of housing discrimination—undeniably one of America's most vexing and important problems. This volume speaks directly to the ongoing debate about the nature and causes of poverty and the underclass, civil rights policy, the Community Reinvestment Act, and the plight of our nation's cities.

JOHN YINGER is professor of economics and public administration, and director for the Metropolitan Studies Program at the Center for Policy Research, the Maxwell School, Syracuse University.

On Record provides descriptive accounts of record keeping in a variety of important organizations: schools, from elementary to graduate school; consumer credit agencies, general business organizations, and life insurance companies; the military and security agencies; the Census Bureau and the Social Security Administration; public welfare agencies, juvenile courts, and mental hospitals. It also examines the legal status of records. The authors pose questions such as the following: Who determines what records are kept? Who has access to the records?

STANTON WHEELER is professor of law and sociology at Yale University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Rodolfo Alvarez, Pierce Baker, Ivar Berg, Nancy Bordier, David Caplovitz, Burton R. Clark, Kai T. Erikson, Daniel E. Gilbertson, Abraham S. Goldstein, David A. Goslin, Adwin M. Lemert, Roger M. Lemert, Roger W. Little, Wilbert E. Moore, Jesse Orlansky, H. Laurence Ross, James Rule, James Salvate, Joseph Steinberg, Stanton Wheeler, Don H. Zimmerman.

Winner of the 2008 Michael J. Hindelang Book Award from the American Society of Criminology

Winner of the 2007 Albert J. Reiss, Jr. Distinguished Scholarship Award

"Punishment and Inequality in America is a searing examination of the effects of mass imprisonment on poor black men. Sent to prison in extraordinary numbers, they come out with substantially worsened prospects for employment, income, marriage, and responsible parenting. Bruce Western has now made these huge, but little recognized, effects perfectly clear. The exclusion of prisoners from employment statistics makes black employment rates, incomes, and economic progress look much better than they are. Western offers no easy answers but the message is clear-racial inequality will not diminish by much until mass imprisonment becomes part of America's past."
-MICHAEL H. TONRY, Marvin J. Sonosky Professor of Law and Public Policy, University of Minnesota

"Reflecting a rare combination of empirical analysis and social conscience, Bruce Western skillfully explores the intersection of three troubling phenomena in modern America: the era of mass incarceration, the stubborn racial divide, and the worsening economic prospects of unskilled African American men. This sobering and ambitious book is destined to become the definitive examination of a tragic chapter in American history. For those who care about the direction of our country, Punishment and Inequality in America is a required text."
-JEREMY TRAVIS, president, John Jay College of Criminal Justice, The City University of New York

"The consequences of incarceration have traditionally been debated in terms of crime control. Bruce Western is one of the leading scholars of a new movement that seeks to understand institutions of social control within the broader scope of social inequality. Punishment and Inequality in America brings together in one place the results of his research program, essential reading for a deeper appreciation of the role that mass incarceration has played in an increasingly stratified society."
-ROBERT J. SAMPSON, Henry Ford II Professor of the Social Sciences and chair, Department of Sociology, Harvard University

Over the last thirty years, the prison population in the United States has increased more than seven-fold to over two million people, including vastly disproportionate numbers of minorities and people with little education. For some racial and educational groups, incarceration has become a depressingly regular experience, and prison culture and influence pervade their communities. Almost 60 percent of black male high school drop-outs in their early thirties have spent time in prison. In Punishment and Inequality in America, sociologist Bruce Western explores the recent era of mass incarceration and the serious social and economic consequences it has wrought.

Punishment and Inequality in America dispels many of the myths about the relationships among crime, imprisonment, and inequality. While many people support the increase in incarceration because of recent reductions in crime, Western shows that the decrease in crime rates in the 1990s was mostly fueled by growth in city police forces and the pacification of the drug trade. Getting “tough on crime” with longer sentences only explains about 10 percent of the fall in crime, but has come at a significant cost. Punishment and Inequality in America reveals a strong relationship between incarceration and severely dampened economic prospects for former inmates. Western finds that because of their involvement in the penal system, young black men hardly benefited from the economic boom of the 1990s. Those who spent time in prison had much lower wages and employment rates than did similar men without criminal records. The losses from mass incarceration spread to the social sphere as well, leaving one out of ten young black children with a father behind bars by the end of the 1990s, thereby helping perpetuate the damaging cycle of broken families, poverty, and crime.

The recent explosion of imprisonment is exacting heavy costs on American society and exacerbating inequality. Whereas college or the military were once the formative institutions in young men’s lives, prison has increasingly usurped that role in many communities. Punishment and Inequality in America profiles how the growth in incarceration came about and the toll it is taking on the social and economic fabric of many American communities.

BRUCE WESTERN is professor of sociology at Princeton University.

"Trust in the Law is one of the most creative policy-relevant studies I have read. This book is replete with insightful arguments about variations in citizen responses to the criminal justice system, arguments that are theoretically derived and empirically based. Anyone concerned about effective law enforcement in the United States must read this book."
-William Julius Wilson, Harvard University

"Trust in the Law reports keystone findings in one of the most important research programs in social science in the past few decades. A landmark contribution; one that gives us genuine guidance on how to maintain the legitimacy of our institutions of social control. The societal importance of these findings is absolutely central, and surprisingly optimistic."
-John M. Darley, Princeton University

"Trust in the Law is a significant contribution to understanding why, when, and which citizens are most likely to comply with the police and the courts. The key is 'street-level bureaucrats' who are perceived as fair and trustworthy, and as treating citizens well. Tom Tyler and Yuen Huo make their case with detailed analysis of interviews that capture personal experiences among diverse ethnic groups in several cities. The result is a book that persuasively and refreshingly contradicts the rationale for current government practice. It is an important advance on Tyler's own path-breaking work on procedural justice and offers a major building block for a system of legal regulation built on an accurate human psychology."
-Margaret Levi, University of Washington

"In Trust in the Law, Yuen Huo and Tom Tyler have taken a major new step in work on psychological jurisprudence. Treating people fairly and convincing them that regulatory motives are honorable paves a path to trust in the law. Reckless resort to deterrence can rupture that path and shatter trust. These findings have profound importance for how we must change the direction of our regulatory policies."
-John Braithwaite, Chair, Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University

Public opinion polls suggest that American's trust in the police and courts is declining. The same polls also reveal a disturbing racial divide, with minorities expressing greater levels of distrust than whites. Practices such as racial profiling, zero-tolerance and three-strikes laws, the use of excessive force, and harsh punishments for minor drug crimes all contribute to perceptions of injustice. In Trust in the Law, psychologists Tom R. Tyler and Yuen J. Huo present a compelling argument that effective law enforcement requires the active engagement and participation of the communities it serves, and argue for a cooperative approach to law enforcement that appeals to people's sense of fair play, even if the outcomes are not always those with which they agree.

Based on a wide-ranging survey of citizens who had recent contact with the police or courts in Oakland and Los Angeles, Trust in the Law examines the sources of people's favorable and unfavorable reactions to their encounters with legal authorities. Tyler and Huo address the issue from a variety of angles: the psychology of decision acceptance, the importance of individual personal experiences, and the role of ethnic group identification. They find that people react primarily to whether or not they are treated with dignity and respect, and the degree to which they feel they have been treated fairly helps to shape their acceptance of the legal process. Their findings show significantly less willingness on the part of minority group members who feel they have been treated unfairly to trust the motives to subsequent legal decisions of law enforcement authorities.

Since most people in the study generalize from their personal experiences with individual police officers and judges, Tyler and Huo suggest that gaining maximum cooperation and consent of the public depends upon fair and transparent decision-making and treatment on the part of law enforcement officers. Tyler and Huo conclude that the best way to encourage compliance with the law is for legal authorities to implement programs that foster a sense of personal involvement and responsibility. For example, community policing programs, in which the local population is actively engaged in monitoring its own neighborhood, have been shown to be an effective tool in improving police-community relationships.

Cooperation between legal authorities and community members is a much discussed but often elusive goal. Trust in the Law shows that legal authorities can behave in ways that encourage the voluntary acceptance of their directives, while also building trust and confidence in the overall legitimacy of the police and courts.

TOM R. TYLER is professor of psychology at New York University.

YUEN J. HUO is professor of psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles

A Volume in the Russell Sage Foundation Series on Trust

Two sociologists and a lawyer examine here the attitudes of both survivors and attorney on various problems surrounding inheritance—from will-making through estate settlement. Within a legal frame of reference, this book is a study of what happens within a family at death—and why. The authors use the "inheritance unit" as the basis for looking at the functions of inheritance in intergenerational family continuity and the general patterns of family relationship.

MARVIN B. SUSSMAN is professor and chairman of the Department of Sociology at Case Western Reserve University.

JUDITH N. CATES is research associate of the American Psychological Association.

DAVID T. SMITH is professor of law at the University of Florida.

Provides a directory of the rapidly expanding philanthropic foundations in Latin America, identifying over 750 foundations and presenting detailed information on 364 of them. In addition, the directory contains an introduction that analyzes historical data on Latin American foundations, a country-by-country summary of legal processes regarding foundations and pertinent tax laws, two essays by North and South American foundation presidents discussing the organization and management of private foundations, and an appendix with models of bylaws and financial statements of Latin American foundations.

ANN STROMBERG has participated in various community development projects in Latin America, taught in Latin American schools, and engaged in other sociological research projects. She is at the Pan American Development Foundation.

In recent years the decisions of the United States Supreme Court in the area of juvenile law and the growing public awareness of the delinquency problem have brought about drastic changes in American juvenile courts.

This book represents a major research effort to determine the effect of defense counsel’s performance on the conduct and outcome of delinquency cases. After a brief historical analysis of the factors leading to changes in juvenile law, the authors explore in detail the impact of the lawyer’s presence and performance on the outcomes of cases in two juvenile courts.

The analysis further explores the various factors influencing a lawyer’s defense posture and develops the thesis that the effectiveness of counsel is determined largely by the structure of the delinquency hearing and the willingness and ability of court personnel and procedures to adapt to the introduction of an adversarial role of defense counsel. What makes this study unique is the large-scale effort to combine legal analysis and sociological methodology to the study of an action-oriented program. The use of the classical experimental design, the selection of control and experimental groups by random assignment, and the extent to which the use of this methodology increases the validity of the results, will be of interest to both lawyers and social scientists. The book is a major contribution to the growing literature in the field of the sociology of law.

W. VAUGHAN STAPLETON is assistant professor of sociology at the State University College at Buffalo, New York.

LEE E. TEITELBAUM is associate professor of law at the State University of New York at Buffalo, faculty of law and jurisprudence.

"All modern nations-even Norway, even Japan-contradict themselves: they contain multitudes. How are such contradictions to be dealt with, such multitudes managed? This series of vivid and circumstantial case studies of everything from group rights in India and religious conflicts in France to customary marriages in South Africa and cultural defenses in American courts reveals the depth of the problems posed to democratic governments by cultural difference, how they are being approached, and what the results have been. A searching discussion of an urgent issue."
-CLIFFORD GEERTZ, INSTITUTE FOR ADVANCED STUDY

"A lively, deeply insightful discussion of the profound ethical dilemmas posed by the unexpected collision of two of liberalism's favored assumptions."
-JEROME KAGAN, PROFESSOR OF PSYCHOLOGY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

"Engaging Cultural Differences provides a fresh analysis on aspects of the challenges facing liberal pluralistic societies as they attempt to accommodate the cultural values and preferences of their new citizens. It includes penetrating perspectives that call for a reevaluation of the dominant theories on the subject. A must read for scholars and policy makers reflecting on the impact of emigration on Western societies and the dynamics of integration and assimilation in the age of globalization."
-YVONNE YABECK HADDAD, PROFESSOR OF HISTORY OF ISLAM AND CHRISTIAN-MUSLIM RELATIONS, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

"The question of cultural difference has long been a double- pronged thorn in the side of liberalism. It has dented confident assertions of universal individual rights with allegations of discrimination. And it has punctured claims of broadly based tolerance with accusations of indifference to oppression. This remarkably powerful volume, rich in both empirical detail and theoretical sophistication, confronts these issues head on from a range of different perspectives-legal, psychological, anthropological, historical. It will change the way many people think and become indispensable reading for scholars interested in liberalism, practitioners working within multicultural institutions, and activists involved in human rights."
-JACQUELINE BHABHA, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, UNIVERSITY COMMITTEE ON HUMAN RIGHTS STUDIES, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

"When a society professes commitment to equal liberties, and also to tolerance of cultural difference, the resulting paradoxes are not merely intellectual. In Engaging Cultural Differences, some two dozen distinguished scholars in law and the social sciences consider the law's confrontations with deep cultural difference in six liberal nations. Some subjects are broad (international human rights, cultural models of identity and equality), and some particular (individual claims to asylum, or to the 'cultural defense' in criminal law). Both general readers and specialists in many disciplines have much to learn from these essays-even readers who find some cultural differences more engaging than others."
-KENNETH L. KARST, DAVID G. PRICE AND DALLAS P. PRICE PROFESSOR OF LAW EMERITUS, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

Liberal democracies are based on principles of inclusion and tolerance. But how does the principle of tolerance work in practice in countries such as Germany, France, India, South Africa, and the United States, where an increasingly wide range of cultural groups holds often contradictory beliefs about appropriate social and family life practices? As these democracies expand to include peoples of vastly different cultural backgrounds, the limits of tolerance are being tested as never before. Engaging Cultural Differences explores how liberal democracies respond socially and legally to differences in the cultural and religious practices of their minority groups.

Building on such examples, the contributors examine the role of tolerance in practical encounters between state officials and immigrants, and between members of longstanding majority groups and increasing numbers of minority groups. The volume also considers the theoretical implications of expanding the realm of tolerance. Some contributors are reluctant to broaden the scope of tolerance, while others insist that the notion of "tolerance" is itself potentially confining and demeaning and that modern nations should aspire to celebrate cultural differences.

Coming to terms with ethnic diversity and cultural differences has become a major public policy concern in contemporary liberal democracies, as they struggle to adjust to burgeoning immigrant populations. Engaging Cultural Differences provides a compelling examination of the challenges of multiculturalism and reveals a deep understanding of the challenges democracies face as they seek to accommodate their citizens' diverse beliefs and practices.

RICHARD A. SHWEDER, an anthropologist, is professor of human development at the University of Chicago.

MARTHA MINOW is professor of law at Harvard University.

HAZEL R. MARKUS is professor of psychology at Stanford University.

CONTRIBUTORS: Richard A. Shweder, Martha Minow, Hazel Rose Markus, Caroline Bledsoe, David L. Chambers, Jane Maslow Cohen, Joanna Davidson, Arthur N. Eisenberg, Karen Engle, Katherine Pratt Ewing, Heejung S. Kim, Corinne A. Kratz, Maivân Clech Lâm, Usha Menon, Victoria C. Plaut, Alison Dundes Renteln, Lloyd I. Rudolph, Susanne Hoeber Rudolph, Lawrence G. Sager, Austin Sarat, Claude M. Steele, Dorothy M. Steele, Nomi Stolzenberg, Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, and Unni Wikan.
 

To what extent can and should people participate in dealing with the personal problems they bring to consulting professionals? This book presents two alternative models for the conduct of such professional-client relationships as those between lawyers and clients and doctors and patients. One model, called the traditional, prescribes a role of minimal participation for the client. The other, called the participatory, prescribes a role of decision-making shared by the client and the professional. After presenting the two models and their implications, the book systematically tests their validity in a case study of the lawyer-client relationship in the making of personal injury claims.

The distinctive feature of this work is a sophisticated and objective test of the traditional proposition that passive clients get better results than active clients. Evidence drawn from a sample of actual cases of personal injury claimants reveals that active clients in fact fare significantly better than passive clients.

The book is important and novel in four respects: it offers the first clear and realistic proposal for increasing the control people can have over the complex problems they bring to professionals; it presents concrete evidence that lay participation in complex decision making need not be inefficient; it gives practical advice to clients and to lawyers for dealing with each other more effectively and it presents a comprehensive picture of the actual and often dramatic experiences of accident victims, and what it is like to make a personal injury claim.

DOUGLAS E. ROSENTHAL is a member of the New York Bar and is presently Deputy Section Chief, Foreign Commerce Section of the Antitrust Division of the Department of Justice.

Social Diagnosis is the classic in social work literature. In it Miss Richmond first established a technique of social casework. She discusses the nature and uses of social evidence, its tests and their practical application, and summarizes the lessons to be learned from history, science, and the law. While other aids in diagnosis have been added to the caseworker's equipment, the assembling of social evidence is still an important discipline of the profession, to which this volume continues to make a significant contribution. No revision of the book has ever been made nor does any later book take its place.

MARY RICHMOND was the director of the Charity Organization Department at the Russell Sage Foundation.