Using data on the population of US sociology doctorates over a five-year period, we examine different predictors placement in research-oriented, tenure-track academic jobs. More completely than prior studies, document enormous relationship between PhD institution and job that has, part, prompted popular metaphor likening allocation processes to caste system. Yet, also find comparable relationships program both graduate student publishing awards. Overall, results more consistent with prestige...

State-level public assistance agencies completed nearly a million SNAP fraud investigations in fiscal year 2016. These hinge on compiling incriminating information about clients. Drawing interviews with welfare workers five U.S. states, this article shows how investigators creatively exploit clients’ social networks to extract such information, and thus use ties against them. Investigators gain some through elective cooperation, when people voluntarily implicate others. Fraud say these...

Legal authorities’ second-order legal consciousness—their perceptions of others’ understandings law—shapes the social realization power. Analysis interviews with welfare fraud enforcement workers from five US states reveals their how clients view law, policy, and practices, shows these perceptions’ consequences. Enforcement workers’ influence discretionary work policy implementation, as attempt to circumvent what they see clients’ evasive maneuvers act in ways believe will thinking behavior....

There is a notable contrast between welfare clients’ and fraud investigators’ accounts of rule breaking behaviors. Clients describe some actions (or inactions) that constitute violations as accidental, tend to attribute others situational factors: program rules’ complexity, the exigencies day-to-day subsistence, time energy limitations. Fraud investigators, on other hand, are comparatively likely identify deliberate cite dispositions explain behavior. In part, this disparity reflects...

Sociologists have neglected the politically channeled and racially connected role of leveraged debt in mass incarceration. We use qualitative quantitative data from California, circa 1960-2000, to assess how Republican entrepreneurial leveraging overcame contradictions between parochial preferences for punishment resistance paying taxes building prisons. The bond deferred externalized costs prisons, while repurposed lease revenue bonds massively enlarged extended this dispensed with...

In 1976, the US Supreme Court established that incarcerated people have a constitutional right to health care, ratifying lower court decisions. Corresponding professionalization and standardization initiatives included advent of third-party certifications individual correctional care (CHC) practitioners. Drawing on historical evidence about CHC reforms contemporary data certifications, people’s lawsuits, mortality rates, this study assesses relationships between key outcomes incarceration....

The visibility of populations, policies, and the state matters greatly for questions power, inequality, democratic life. This article builds on existing scholarship by examining how operates as a lever effect social control in racially economically stratified society. By doing so, identifies paradox. Race- class-empowered groups often pressure actors to implement punitive policies or otherwise visibly contain disadvantaged populations. But they also tend decry disavow necessary public costs...

Drawing on trade publications, contemporaneous newspaper stories, and other historical sources from the early twentieth-century United States, this article explains how installment plans overcame moral business concerns to become standard way people bought cars. Prominent figures in automobile industry financial institutions initially denounced idea of selling cars credit, many banks declined extend credit would-be auto buyers. However, relevant legal infrastructure heavily favored...

Researchers working across a variety of contexts have documented common phenomenon: the tendency for one legal liability or entanglement in people's lives to beget another. In this article, I label such phenomena chains and provide framework analyzing them as an access justice issue. To do so, draw on my original research welfare fraud investigation, which included review documentary evidence interviews with workers five politically socioeconomically diverse U.S. states. Building previous...

Some people who work in correctional health care (CHC) choose to obtain third-party professional certifications. Prior research indicates that, the aggregate, rates of certification correspond litigation; that is, increases states' numbers CHC certifications tend follow from number lawsuits incarcerated file against them. These statistical patterns, however, do not reveal what perceived value offers individuals pursue it. To address this open question, we conducted interviews with 33...

For Americans convicted of crimes, collateral consequences impose barriers extending long past the completion official sentences. The present study develops a novel distinction between congruent and incongruent consequences. Congruent consequence laws that are closely linked to their triggering offenses, while measures only loosely connected offenses—or disconnected entirely. Focusing specifically on impactful restricting legal driving privileges, this article examines how determinants these...

Abstract How does the state respond to members of public seeking mobilize its coercive power? Focusing on welfare fraud control units in United States, we examine how race/ethnicity and written English proficiency affect access systems for reporting suspicions. Using a correspondence audit, assess authorities' likelihood taking up reports from Latinas Whites with higher lower proficiency. We find that are less likely take lower‐proficiency Whites' reports, but proficiency's uptake‐dampening...

Using data on the population of US sociology doctorates over a five-year period, we examine different predictors placement in research-oriented, tenure-track academic jobs. More completely than prior studies, document enormous relationship between PhD institution and job that has, part, prompted popular metaphor allocation processes are like caste system. Yet also find comparable relationships program both graduate student publishing awards. Overall, results more consistent with prestige...