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The census has registered more than two centuries of growth and transformation in America’s political, social, and economic life. It traditionally gives us the opportunity to ask big questions about and measure changes in American society. In this double issue of RSF, sociologist and demographer Zhenchao Qian, economist Trevon Logan, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how American society has changed—or stayed the same—from 2010 to 2020.

Topics examined in issue 1 include the impact of census counts, changes in neighborhood demographics, gender inequality in education, and racial inequality in employment. Lisa Neidert and colleagues find that the census consistently undercounts Hispanics, Blacks, and Native Americans and overcounts Whites and Asians, which has negative impacts on state and federal funding for vulnerable communities. Nima Dahir shows the arrival of Black immigrants into Black American neighborhoods often results in a decline in the native Black American population and an increase in White residents. Claudia Buchmann and colleagues reveal that women are now earning more advanced degrees than men in the U.S.; however, rising shares of women, including those who are pursing advanced degrees, are attending for-profit institutions and carrying student debt. Julie Y. Cai and Marybeth J. Mattingly find that workers with variable hours have lower incomes than those who have more stable hours and Black workers earn substantially less than their White counterparts when working jobs with volatile hours.

Themes explored in issue 2 include changes in living arrangements, divergent families, and rural America. Hyunjoon Park and col-leagues find that despite growing public concern about the potential rise in solitary living, the likelihood of living alone has not changed much over the last four decades except for older men, who have an increased likelihood of living alone. Christopher S. Carpenter and col-leagues show that gender minority individuals, including transgender and nonbinary individuals, are less likely to be married, more likely to be widowed, and less likely to live in a traditional two-adult household compared to their cisgender counterparts. Daniel T. Lichter and Kenneth M. Johnson reveal that while rural America is often envisioned as a monolith, it is made up of complex and diverse economic, social, and demographic conditions.

This double issue of RSF provides an updated and insightful snapshot of American society in the 2010s.

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Racial disparities in criminal justice system contact are a pressing concern for both scholars and the public. For 25 years, the Russell Sage Foundation has been at the forefront of this issue and has supported research on law enforcement, the criminal justice system, and incarceration with an emphasis on examining racial and ethnic disparities. Since then, the literature on these topics has expanded and we now have a vast body of research on them. In this special issue of RSF, an interdisciplinary group of contributors review research from over the past two decades to advance our understanding of racial and ethnic bias in law enforcement, criminal justice processes, and incarceration.

Shawn Bushway and colleagues review literature on racial disparities in pretrial detention, sentencing, and outcomes of community corrections programs, such as probation, parole, halfway houses, and work-release programs. They find that systematic issues, rather than individual bias, are the main driver for these disparities and that reforms, such as eliminating pretrial detention for nonviolent offenders, who are not on probation or parole, can be effective tools for reducing racial disparities without creating significant harms to public safety. Alia Nahra and colleagues review literature on the difficulties the formerly incarcerated face when they transition from prison into their communities, a process referred to as reentry. They find that criminalization and punishment, such as criminal record discrimination in housing and employment and parole and probation supervision, stymie reintegration, while support from family and welfare programs help reintegration. They also found that formerly incarcerated Black men and women face greater obstacles when reentering their communities. Emily Ryo and colleges review literature on the criminalization of immigration. They find that while immigration law is considered federal civil law, immigration enforcement has come substantially intertwined with criminal law enforcement. They also find that criminalizing immigration results in the categorization of certain groups as dangerous and results in sustaining and promoting policies that target or have disproportionate impact on certain immigrant groups. Additionally, they find that the U.S. has outsourced immigration enforcement to other countries, such as Mexico, Guatemala, and El Salvador, therefore, the effects of criminalizing immigration are not limited to the U.S.

This volume of RSF provides a fascinating look back at the research conducted on racial disparities in the criminal justice system thus far and offers new avenues for future research.

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The United States is home to the largest deportation system in the world. Between 2001 and 2022, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) carried out nearly 6.5 million deportations. Deportation is often framed as a singular event that happens to an individual. However, as public policy scholar Caitlin Patler and political scientist Bradford Jones argue in this issue of RSF, deportation is a system that encompasses premigration, within-U.S., and post-deportation contexts and outcomes. With Congress recently approving a massive expansion of the U.S. deportation system, understanding its consequences is more important than ever before.

In this issue, an interdisciplinary group of contributors explore the wide range of impacts of the U.S. deportation system. The introduction by Patler and Jones defines the U.S. deportation system and provides a comprehensive historical context for understanding its causes and consequences. Mass deportation is enabled primarily through the merging of U.S. immigration and criminal laws. Ian Peacock explores the proliferation of 287(g) agreements, which deputize local law enforcement to enforce immigration law. He shows that counties with stronger ties to public official associations, such as the National Sheriff’s Association and the Major County Sheriffs of America, were more likely to adopt identical 287(g) agreements, devote more jail space to ICE detainees, and comply with ICE detainer requests at higher rates. The issue also presents empirical analyses of the consequences of the U.S. deportation system. Articles by Youngjin Stephanie Hong and colleagues, Cora Bennett and colleagues, and J. Jacob Kirksey and Carolyn Sattin-Bajaj link deportation to reduced Head Start enrollment, lower K-12 test scores, and declines in college enrollment, respectively. The remaining articles turn to the aftermath of deportation. Erin R. Hamilton and colleagues show that between 2015 and 2020, 11,000 individuals were de facto deportees—family members who leave the country because another family member has been deported—in Mexico, with a disproportionate number being women and children. Further highlighting the importance of family, Ángel A. Escamilla García and Adriana M. Cerón analyze survey data from recently deported Central Americans and find those who left minor children in the U.S. were more likely to intend to remigrate to the U.S.

This issue of RSF sheds light on various dimensions of the increasingly punitive U.S. deportation system and the many ways it harms individuals and communities. In the current era of mass expansion of immigration law enforcement, it will be a valuable educational tool for students, faculty, policymakers, and many other stakeholders.

Randomized experiments—often referred to as the gold standard of research design—are generally accepted as the type of studies that provide the strongest evidence about cause and effect. There has been a wide adoption of experimental methods in agriculture, medicine, industrial design, and laboratory social sciences, such as experimental psychology, where conditions can be controlled. Since then, there has been an increase in the use of field experiments to provide evidence of cause and effect beyond the laboratory. However, the social settings in which these studies take place complicate the design and evaluation of experiments because their social contexts must be taken into account in order for the experiment to provide useful and unambiguous results. In Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences, statistician Larry V. Hedges details how to design educational and social science field experiments that are sensitive enough to provide clear-cut evidence on the effects of social interventions.

Hedges draws on one hundred years of statistical theory and classic experimental design in Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences. Highlighting the social-structural information embedded in field experiments, he links this history with contemporary statistical methods in the social sciences to explain how to design social experiments that are adequately sensitive to determine the influence of an intervention. He covers the four basic research designs—and thirty-nine elaborations of those designs—that are used most often in social experiments while also introducing additional, more complex, designs. He brings together, in the same notation, work on experimental design, design sensitivity, and optimal design of experiments for the most frequently used research designs in education and the social sciences, emphasizing their conceptual consistency. Hedges also discusses the practical problems of how to recruit and maintain a sample throughout the duration of an experiment.

Designing Experiments in Education and the Social Sciences is an essential resource for researchers planning educational and social field experiments and graduate students.

School choice promises to free families from the limits of where they live. The Scarcity Loop asks what happens when that promise is made in school systems where more children seek desirable schools than those schools can serve. Focused on New York City’s high school admissions system, sociologist Jennifer L. Jennings argues that choice becomes another way to ration scarce educational opportunity, shifting where rationing happens, who must manage it, and how families understand the outcomes that follow.

Jennings begins with the admissions process itself. New York City asks every eighth grader to choose from hundreds of options. On paper, the system offers extraordinary possibility. But that possibility still has to be converted into a seat. Someone has to learn the rules, compare schools, manage deadlines, make trips, and decide how much risk a thirteen-year-old can bear. Jennings calls this the work of getting in and shows that the capacity to do that work is not evenly distributed. Some families enter choice systems with the flu-ency and flexibility to turn options into opportunity. Others confront these systems with fewer supports and far less room for error. Some teenagers shoulder decisions with little adult help. Counselors trans-late complicated rules under impossible constraints. Principals are not passive actors: Jennings shows how they recruit and adapt as they try to build, manage demand for, and maintain the reputation of schools that families will choose.

Jennings contends that reforms meant to expand access can reorganize the very competition they aim to resolve. As one barrier recedes, another becomes more consequential. Residence matters less, but advantage does not disappear; it travels through information, timing, and familiarity with the rules. Inequality persists, not because nothing changes, but because advantage finds new points of entry as reforms change rules. As the work of securing opportunity shifts, so do understandings of inequality. Unequal outcomes can come to look less like consequences of how educational opportunities are organized and more like reflections of how families navigate the system.

Drawing on more than 450 interviews, participant observation, administrative data, and archival research, The Scarcity Loop follows students, parents, counselors, and principals as they navigate school choice at scale. Jennings traces who must do the work of making choice real, clarifying what is at stake when public education becomes something families must know how to secure.

Despite cultural scripts that continue to view fathers as the primary breadwinners in their families, there has been a striking escalation of mothers’ assumption of that role. Over the last twenty years, the rate at which mothers have become the primary bread-winner has increased by almost 50 percent, and an astonishing 70 percent of American mothers can expect to become the primary earner for their household for at least a year before their first child turns eighteen. In The Motherlode, sociologist Jennifer L. Glass traces the rise of mothers as the primary financial providers for their children, investigates the causes of this increase, and evaluates the consequences of this shift for mothers and families.

Glass finds the swift increase of fiscal responsibility for children by their mothers is occurring in households of all racial backgrounds and across the educational spectrum. This increase is not due to more divorces or relationship breakups. In fact, the most rapid growth in mothers’ financial responsibility for the household has come from married mothers, not single mothers, and about half of contemporary mom-breadwinners have spouses or romantic partners living in the home. Nor is it due to a narrowing of the gender pay gap or mothers’ ability to out-earn their partners: The bulk of breadwinning mothers see large financial losses or are better off financially but still living in poverty when they become the primary earner. Instead, this rise is due to broader, long-term changes in the economy, which have led to wage stagnation and less job security for all workers.

The increase in mothers’ financial obligations to their children has occurred at the same time that nonfinancial responsibilities for children have increased: More time is dedicated to identifying, evaluating, and obtaining goods and services for children, including health care and schooling. There has not been a corresponding increase in support for mothers by their employers, the government, or fathers. This leaves mothers with greater burdens of both financial support and nonmonetary care for their children, which increases the number of children that are dependent on their mothers’ earnings and vulnerable to intermittent poverty. While this rise in maternal breadwinning is unlikely to decline anytime soon, Glass suggests policies that could provide mothers with more support, such as enacting labor protections for care occupations dominated by women, legislating federal paid family and medical leave, and providing federally funded, wraparound, non-means-tested systems of childcare.

The Motherlode is an illuminating and in-depth examination of the surprisingly pervasive phenomenon of maternal breadwinning in American society.

"In this propulsive text, we learn that attending to patients’ social needs can inspire compassion and improve care. All too often, though, these needs are weaponized, stoke race and class tropes, and degrade care, with sometimes horrific results. A harrowing reminder of the urgent need for reform in patient care, Seen but Not Heard is a book that should be read by health researchers, policy makers, and healthcare practitioners alike."
—KATHRYN J. EDIN, William Church Osborn Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University

"Seen but Not Heard is a powerful and unflinching book that exposes the profound gap between what health systems record and what patients actually live, revealing how inequality is not merely treated within clinical settings but often reproduced through them. Offering deeply humanizing accounts, Jennifer Silva and Annemarie Hirsch show how racism, poverty, gendered violence, and stigma are translated into medical shorthand, obscuring suffering while shaping care in consequential ways. Urgent and illuminating, this work challenges us to rethink the ethical limits of healthcare as a solution to social inequality and to imagine more just and humane approaches to healing."
—CELESTE WATKINS-HAYES, Joan and Sanford Weill Dean, Gerald R. Ford School of Public Policy, and University Diversity and Social Transformation Professor, Jean E. Fairfax Collegiate Professor of Public Policy, and professor of sociology, University of Michigan

"Be careful what you wish for. Jennifer Silva and Annemarie Hirsch show in this gripping book that asking medical professionals to address social determinants of health may sow distrust and harm marginalized women’s well-being."
—STEFAN TIMMERMANS, professor of sociology, University of California, Los Angeles

Medical clinicians, who are already overworked and burned out, are increasingly expected to understand and treat systemic social issues like poverty and racism. One aspect of this is documenting patient’s social risk factors in electronic health records (EHRs). But EHRs do not always give the full story. Critically, they omit patients’ voices and perspectives about their lives, their care, and whether their needs are being met. In Seen but Not Heard, sociologist Jennifer M. Silva and epidemiologist Annemarie G. Hirsch explore the gaps between what clinicians document in EHRs and women’s lived experiences.

Drawing on interviews with 87 non-college-educated, economically disadvantaged women living in rural America and their health records from a large, nonprofit health system, Silva and Hirsch find that the stories that medical records provide and the stories that women tell about themselves differ dramatically. Medical charts often translate women’s suffering into sterile diagnostic codes, prescriptions, and treatment plans. Some women felt heard by their clinicians and believed they received adequate care. Many of these women thought their clinicians went above and beyond to help meet their needs by offering them information on how to apply for benefits like food stamps or childcare subsidies and helping them obtain necessary items like mattress covers and winter coats. More often, however, women felt that clinicians were detached from their everyday struggles to survive, whether that meant keeping their families intact even in the face of violence or finding money to pay the never-ending string of bills.

Silva and Hirsch argue that because the system of healthcare delivery interprets social problems as individual failings, it often reproduces long-standing injurious stereotypes of women as hysterical, recalcitrant, impure, and gluttonous. For some healthcare providers, knowledge about patients’ social risk factors can become a source of control and punishment, such as denying patients care or reporting patients to child welfare services. Patients described clinicians mobilizing harmful stereotypes about marriage and motherhood, race, and poverty during their appointments. Some of the women’s most traumatic experiences in the healthcare system were completely missing from their EHRs. These troubling experiences ultimately deter women from accessing healthcare, discourage them from sharing their experiences with clinicians, and in some cases, make their health and social problems worse. Silva and Hirsch offer several policies and practices that would improve women’s experiences in clinical encounters, such as training clinicians in trauma-informed and culturally responsive care, as well as making national investments in housing, food security, transportation, and environmental research.

Seen but Not Heard is a disturbing but necessary examination of the ways vulnerable women are often failed by the healthcare system and offers solutions that will allow healthcare workers to better address the structural barriers faced by their patients.

"Gender Flashpoints represents a vital contribution to understanding gender as both a major axis of social inequality and a central aspect of personal identity. Through a wide- ranging analysis of what we know about gender—coupled with original research on the activists who are shaping current debates—Abigail Saguy does a masterful job of shining light and lowering the heat on this important but increasingly contentious subject. Her fair- minded insights accomplish the remarkable feat of addressing the variety of issues that have divided scholars and political activists alike while also remaining above the fray. By providing a road map for thinking about the diverse points of disagreement, she has given us a brave book that is a gift to researchers, teachers, and students at all levels.”
—KATHLEEN GERSON, professor of sociology and Collegiate Professor of Arts and Science, New York University 

“Americans have been talking past each other on hot-button gender questions for decades, barely stopping to consider what each other is saying. Gender Flashpoints is a crucial gift: it lays out the terrain, the fissures, the assumptions, and the conflicts that these debates presume. People on all sides of sex and gender debates will find this guide essential.”
—ANDREW PERRIN, SNF-Agora Professor of Sociology, Johns Hopkins University 

“Gender Flashpoints is a terrific book that should be required reading for scholars and students of sex and gender no matter the discipline. It provides a thick, nonjudgmental description of how different individuals and groups within and outside of feminism think about sex and gender. The book is novel and brave in this respect but also in its normative contribution: Abigail Saguy identifies both the collisions and the points of agreement that can provide the basis for rigorous dialogue and potential resolution.”
—DORIANE LAMBELET COLEMAN, Thomas L. Perkins Distinguished Professor of Law, Duke University School of Law

Americans are deeply divided about gender. Like other issues in the US, debates about gender are extremely polarized and can spark intense anger and conflict. These “gender flashpoints” include gender identity, gender and parenting, gender-neutral restrooms, the use of identifying pronouns, and participation in women’s sports. Even the term gender itself has become contested. In this divisive social context, advocates on both sides have reduced complex issues to all-or-nothing propositions. Many people are confused about these topics, embarrassed about what they do not know, or afraid that they will be called bigots if they say the “wrong thing.” In Gender Flashpoints, sociologist Abigail C. Saguy gets to the root of these major disagreements about gender.

Saguy interviews activists across the full political spectrum about a wide range of contemporary debates over gender to better understand points of contention as well as surprising areas of agreement. She finds that at the crux of many of these debates are disputes about the goals of gender-related advocacy, the strategies to achieve these goals, and whose rights are being advocated for. For example, when activists discuss pregnancy-related policy issues, there is disagreement as to whether the term pregnant person or pregnant woman should be used. While some believe pregnant person affirms the existence of nonbinary people and trans men, others believe it erases women. These differences often appear to be simply about language, but they are, in fact, disagreements about worldviews, identities, and legitimacy.

One of the conflicts Saguy dives into is the issue of gender-neutral restrooms. She finds when interviewing different activists about what they thought of the topic that they initially repeated the familiar, mainstream polarized discourse. LGBTQ+ activists and mainstream feminists emphasized the importance of restroom access, especially for transgender and gender-nonconforming people. Conservatives and gender-critical feminists emphasized women’s and girls’ vulnerability and need for privacy and safety in public restrooms. Across the political spectrum, activists spoke about how those on the “other side” were unwilling to engage in productive dialogue. However, Saguy also finds that activists on both sides recognized the complexity of the issue and agreed on the need for public bathrooms that provide everyone with greater safety and privacy. Activists across the spectrum showed enthusiasm for desegregated public restrooms that include an open space for sinks and mirrors—along with toilets with European style, floor-to-ceiling doors. Saguy advocates for engaging in dialogue about charged issues, such as gender-neutral bathrooms, in order to help identify workable solutions to seemingly intractable social problems.

Gender Flashpoints is a fascinating and comprehensive view of the deeply personal and divisive topic of gender that offers hope for finding common ground and a path forward.

“Normalizing Inequality offers a compelling and deeply insightful examination of how people living amid stark economic and racial disparities interpret and navigate the inequalities that shape their everyday lives. A beautifully written and groundbreaking contribution to the study of race, ethnicity, immigration, class, and political culture in the United States.”
—LORRIE FRASURE, Ralph J. Bunche Endowed Chair and professor of political science and African American studies, University of California, Los Angeles

“Normalizing Inequality is a timely and exceptional book that carefully unpacks how members of the precarious middle class make sense of inequality in their own lives and in the broader social world. Focusing on four racial groups in California, it offers new insights into how people understand the origins of inequality—particularly as it relates to class, race, and immigration— and how they perceive its consequences and explain its persistence. By identifying the interpretive strategies people use to downplay structural constraints while emphasizing agency and individualism, G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel show how everyday beliefs—shaped by enduring narratives of the American Dream—can normalize inequality and contribute to its reproduction. The result is a nuanced and powerful analysis of the cultural dimensions of stratification in contemporary America.”
—DINA OKAMOTO, Class of 1948 Herman B. Wells Professor, Department of Sociology, Indiana University 

“As an economist by training, I have long documented the widening inequality in America— and how that process has played out on steroids in my home state of California. In this brilliant book, two daughters of the Golden State bring both their own experience and an amazing wealth of interviews to take on a key question: how do those who are part of the ‘precarious middle’ make sense of their experience in an economy that seems to be foreclosing their mobility? G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel stress that people are not fooled: they are aware of the structural forces limiting their progress and they rely on individualist stories that offer the glimmer of an escape route. Noting that the belief that hard work can overcome hard luck is even more prevalent for Black and Latino residents facing multiple barriers, the authors bring complexity to a subject too important to be ignored. Elegantly written and analytically rich, Normalizing Inequality smartly offers extended stories and quotes in which they let those they study speak for themselves. A remarkable contribution to sociological practice, this volume is essential for those working to restore the promise of the American and California Dream.”
—MANUEL PASTOR, Distinguished Professor of Sociology, American Studies and Ethnicity, and Turpanjian Chair in Civil Society and Social Change, University of Southern California

California has long been mythologized as the quintessential land of opportunity and reinvention—a place where anyone, regardless of origin, can forge a new life and realize their aspirations. Yet beneath this gilded narrative lies a starker reality: California ranks among the most unequal states in one of the world’s most unequal countries, where the middle class finds itself increasingly squeezed. Economic inequality is not an anomaly but part of a broader global phenomenon, as disparities deepen across the world. While we know a lot about its contours, its evolution over time, and its intersections with race and immigration, we understand far less about how ordinary people interpret and internalize it. In Normalizing Inequality, sociologists G. Cristina Mora and Tianna S. Paschel illuminate how middle-class Californians perceive and come to accept the inequalities that surround them.

Drawing on extensive interviews and surveys, Mora and Paschel uncover a profound paradox at the heart of middle-class consciousness. They find that Californians are keenly aware of the systemic causes of inequality—they recognize policies engineered to benefit the wealthy, and they acknowledge how structural racism makes it hard for some groups to get ahead—yet they consistently minimize these forces. Instead, they gravitate toward explanations rooted in individualism, moral character, and the idea that things are worse in other places. Racism and racial inequality in California become palatable when framed as “not as bad as the South.” Immigrant exploitation, however severe, transforms into evidence of the American Dream fulfilled simply upon arrival. Economic pressures that displace others become surmountable through personal industriousness and forbearance.

These beliefs about inequality grow more troubling still. Middleclass Californians sometimes blame disempowered people for their circumstances—acknowledging structural barriers facing homeless and undocumented populations while simultaneously faulting them for insufficient drive or criminal behavior that compounds their difficulties. When contemplating California’s future, interviewees envision economic prosperity propelled by technological innovation, yet remain curiously unconcerned with how present inequalities might shape that tomorrow. Their imagined future is one where White and Asian American populations thrive, while Black, Latino, and economically marginalized Californians either vanish through displacement or fade into irrelevance. As respondents use these interpretive frameworks to make sense of inequality, they lean heavily on California’s foundational narratives of opportunity, sanctuary, and multiracial promise.

Normalizing Inequality offers an incisive examination of how ordinary citizens make sense of inequality and, through that very process of sense-making, how they tolerate and passively reproduce the conditions they often claim to deplore.

“Inside Jobs is a landmark study of prison labor practices in the US, past and present. Instead of viewing penal labor in isolation, Adam Reich locates it on a broader field of ‘outside’ labor markets, production regimes, labor struggles, and social and political developments. The result is a distinctive and deeply rewarding account of prison labor, the conflicts that surround it, and how and why they have changed over time. Inside Jobs is carefully researched and beautifully written. It should appeal to undergraduate students and deserves to be widely read by scholars, advocates, and practitioners inside and outside of government.”
—JOE SOSS, Cowles Chair for the Study of Public Service, Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities

“With intellectual range, moral clarity, and a keen sociological eye, Adam Reich has produced a remarkable book. In Inside Jobs, he offers a compelling account of the long and changing relationship between prison labor and the American labor market. Refusing to treat prison as a world apart, he shows how ideas about work, discipline, freedom, and coercion have been produced through the prison and then carried beyond it. Ambitious in scope and clear in argument, this is an important book.”
—SANDRA SUSAN SMITH, Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice and faculty chair for the Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management at the Harvard Kennedy School

“Adam Reich has written a brilliant and inspiring book about prison labor in the United States. It’s beautifully written, full of stories, and a must-read for everyone who cares about the future of workers in the US. Inside Jobs digs deeply into the interconnections between the criminal punishment system, wage labor, and the development of American capitalism. It reminds us of how racism undergirds everything related to workers and the US economy. This book will be a great tool for organizing forward to create a more fair and just economy and a criminal justice system that is actually rooted in equity and justice.”
—MADELINE JANIS, ESQ., executive director, Jobs to Move America

From the stone quarries of Sing Sing that supplied marble for early New York City landmarks to twenty-first-century construction projects staffed by formerly incarcerated workers, Inside Jobs traces the relationship between prison work and the labor market over the past two hundred years. Sociologist Adam Reich demonstrates how prison labor has repeatedly been used to solve economic problems—disciplining workers, lowering labor costs, managing unemployment—revealing unexpected connections that challenge our assumptions about freedom, coercion, and labor itself.

Reich examines the history of work in prisons to understand how it has related to the free labor market. He finds that the organization of prison work, and debates over it, have changed dramatically over time. In the mid- to late nineteenth century, prisons helped shape the emerging factory system as the apprentice-based labor market gave way to industrial production. Labor unions opposed prison labor as immoral, and in the early to mid-twentieth century, the moral character of the workforce became central to economic life within the prison and without. Therapeutic professionals worked in prisons to rehabilitate the incarcerated and determine what motivated them to work. Following prison uprisings in the late twentieth century, prison work became a tool of population control. Yet, paradoxically, work programs were remodeled to mirror the free labor market, requiring applications and hiring processes.

Blending archival research, political economy, and sociological theory, Inside Jobs offers a powerful new framework for understanding mass incarceration and reentry today. Reich examines how the dynamics of mass incarceration have begun to shift. He explores how the “mark of a criminal record”—the stigma traditionally associated with felony convictions—has given way to a “market” for criminal records, as employers discover advantages in hiring disadvantaged, dependent, and disciplined workers recently released from prison. Looking toward the future, Reich focuses on promising efforts to transform this system.

Inside Jobs is an illuminating examination of prison work’s history, its relationship to work outside prison walls, and how the criminal justice system disempowers workers both behind bars and beyond.