Below is a first look at new and forthcoming books from the Foundation for Fall 2016. The list includes Abandoned Families, a study of how increasing economic and residential segregation has led to the social isolation of many low-income workers; Hard Bargains, an investigation of how the expansion of punitive federal drug sentencing has exacerbated mass incarceration and racial disparities in the criminal justice system; Framing Immigrants, a look at the way the mainstream media frames the issue of immigration and how these discussions influence public opinion and the creation of new immigration policies; and Children of the Great Recession, a volume that draws from a study of nearly 5,000 economically and ethnically diverse families in twenty cities to analyze the effects of the Great Recession on parents and young children.

Four new issues of RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences will also be released this fall, and include “A Half Century of Change in the Lives of American Women,” which investigates women’s changing work and family roles and the implications of these shifts for gender equality; “The Coleman Report and Educational Inequality Fifty Years Later,” which analyzes ongoing barriers to educational opportunity today in the context of the fiftieth anniversary of the 1966 Equality of Educational Opportunity Report (EEO); “Wealth Inequality: Economic and Social Dimensions,” which examines the causes of contemporary wealth inequality and its consequences for social mobility, racial equity, education, and more; and “Big Data in Political Economy,” which investigates how the proliferation of “big data” since the 1980s can help social scientists gain new insights into such issues as social inequality, political polarization, and the influence of money in politics.

To request a printed copy of our Fall 2016 catalog, please contact Bruce Thongsack at bruce@rsage.org, or view the complete list of RSF books on our publications page.

Fall 2016 Books

Abandoned Families: Social Isolation in the Twenty-First Century

By Kristin S. Seefeldt

Education, employment, and home ownership have long been considered stepping stones to the middle class. But in Abandoned Families, social policy expert Kristin Seefeldt shows how many working families have access only to a separate but unequal set of poor-quality jobs, low-performing schools, and declining housing markets which offer few chances for upward mobility. Through in-depth interviews over a six-year period with women in Detroit, Seefeldt charts the increasing social isolation of many low-income workers, particularly African Americans, and analyzes how economic and residential segregation keep them from achieving the American Dream of upward mobility. Read more

Hard Bargains: The Coercive Power of Drug Laws in Federal Court

By Mona Lynch

The convergence of tough-on-crime politics, stiffer sentencing laws, and jurisdictional expansion in the 1970s and 1980s increased the powers of federal prosecutors in unprecedented ways. In Hard Bargains, social psychologist Mona Lynch investigates the increased power of these prosecutors in our age of mass incarceration. Lynch documents how prosecutors use punitive federal drug laws to coerce guilty pleas and obtain long prison sentences for defendants—particularly those who are African American— and exposes deep injustices in the federal courts. Read more

Framing Immigrants: News Coverage, Public Opinion, and Policy

By Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and S. Karthick Ramakrishnan

While undocumented immigration is controversial, the general public is largely unfamiliar with the particulars of immigration policy. Given that public opinion on the topic is malleable, to what extent do mass media shape the public debate on immigration? In Framing Immigrants, political scientists Chris Haynes, Jennifer Merolla, and Karthick Ramakrishnan explore how conservative, liberal, and mainstream news outlets frame and discuss undocumented immigrants. Drawing from original voter surveys, they show that how the media frames immigration has significant consequences for public opinion and has implications for the passage of new immigration policies. Read more

Children of the Great Recession

Edited by Irwin Garfinkel, Sara McLanahan, and Christopher Wimer

Many working families continue to struggle in the aftermath of the Great Recession, the deepest and longest economic downturn since the Great Depression. In Children of the Great Recession, a group of leading scholars draw from a unique study of nearly 5,000 economically and ethnically diverse families in twenty cities to analyze the effects of the Great Recession on parents and young children. By exploring the discrepancies in outcomes between these families—particularly between those headed by parents with college degrees and those without—this timely book shows how the most disadvantaged families have continued to suffer as a result of the Great Recession. Read more