David J. Harding

This chapter examines the effect of imprisonment on labor-market outcomes for young adults. The life-course framework suggests that imprisonment may be particularly consequential for young people making the transition to adulthood. It emphasizes the sequential connections between critical life events and the role of early events in establishing trajectories of advantage or disadvantage over the life course. Drawing on data on young adults sentenced for felonies between 2003 and 2006 in Michigan and leveraging a natural experiment based on the random assignment of judges, this chapter estimates the effect of imprisonment versus probation on various employment outcomes. Imprisonment has substantively large negative effects on employment. Effects are largest 1 year after sentencing, when incapacitation removes most prisoners from the labor market, but persist to the 5-year point. Effects are also larger for whites than nonwhites, reflecting low employment among nonwhites in the comparison group.

Poor urban communities experience high rates of incarceration and prisoner reentry. This article examines where former prisoners live after prison, focusing on returns to pre-prison social environments, residential mobility, and the role of intermediate sanctions—punishments for parole violations that are less severe than returning to prison—on where former prisoners live. Drawing on a unique dataset that uses administrative records to follow a cohort of Michigan parolees released in 2003 over time, we examine returns to pre-prison environments, both immediately after prison and in the months and years after release. We then investigate the role of intermediate sanctions in residential mobility among parolees. Our results show low rates of return to former neighborhoods and high rates of residential mobility after prison, a significant portion of which is driven by intermediate sanctions resulting from criminal justice system supervision. These results suggest that, through parole supervision, the criminal justice system generates significant residential mobility.

The literature on neighborhood effects on schooling theorizes that neighborhood cultural context is an important mechanism generating such effects. However, explanations that rely on subcultural theories, such as oppositional culture, have met with considerable criticism on empirical grounds, and no alternative account of the cultural context of disadvantaged neighborhoods has been developed in the education literature. This study develops a new account of the cultural context of schooling decisions in disadvantaged neighborhoods based on the concept of cultural heterogeneity, defined as the presence of a wide array of competing and conflicting cultural models. It applies this concept to neighborhood effects on college enrollment. Using survey data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, this study shows that disadvantaged neighborhoods exhibit greater heterogeneity in college goals and that adolescents in more heterogeneous neighborhoods are less likely to act in concert with the college goals that they articulate.

Using data from Add Health, this study investigates the role of neighborhood violence in mediating the effects of neighborhood disadvantage on high sc

Most theoretical perspectives on neighborhood effects on youth assume that neighborhood context serves as a source of socialization. The exact sources and processes underlying adolescent socialization in disadvantaged neighborhoods, however, are largely unspecified and unelaborated. This article proposes that cross-cohort socialization by older neighborhood peers is one source of socialization for adolescent boys. Data from the National Educational Longitudinal Survey suggest that adolescents in disadvantaged neighborhoods are more likely to spend time with older individuals. I analyze qualitative interview data from 60 adolescent boys in three neighborhoods in Boston to understand the causes and consequences of these interactions and relationships. Some of the strategies these adolescents employ to cope with violence in disadvantaged neighborhoods promote interaction with older peers, particularly those who are most disadvantaged. Furthermore, such interactions can expose adolescents to local, unconventional, or alternative cultural models.

This paper investigates the social consequences of neighborhood violence. Using ego-centered friendship network data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, a survey of adolescents in the United States in the mid-1990s, it examines the relationship between neighborhood violence and the quantity, closeness, and composition of adolescent same-sex friendships. Though neighborhood violence is unrelated to quantity and closeness net of individual and family characteristics, it predicts boys' friendships with individuals who no longer attend school ( who are presumably older or have dropped out of school) and predicts boys' and girls' friendships with individuals who attend other schools. These results are consistent with the theory that violence and fear of victimization focus adolescents' social attention on their neighborhoods and lead them to develop friendships with individuals who can help them to stay safe. By structuring who adolescents interact with, neighborhood violence may play a role in determining the cultural messages and ideals to which they are exposed.

When culture is invoked to understand the consequences of growing up in disadvantaged neighborhoods, the isolation of ghetto residents from mainstream institutions and mainstream culture is often emphasized. This article attempts to reorient current theorizing about the cultural context of disadvantaged neighborhoods, particularly when it comes to adolescent decision making and behavior. I argue that rather than being characterized by the dominance of “oppositional” or “ghetto-specific” cultures, disadvantaged neighborhoods are characterized by cultural heterogeneity: a wide array of competing and conflicting cultural models. I apply this conception to sexual behavior and romantic relationships among adolescents using survey data from Addhealth. Analyses show that disadvantaged neighborhoods exhibit greater heterogeneity in cultural frames and scripts and that, in more heterogeneous neighborhoods, adolescents' frames and scripts are poorly predictive of their actual behavior.