Punishment & Inequality
Timeline
Summer 2026
Description
This team will work on a series of projects related to the criminal justice system, families and inequality. The team’s primary goal is to develop a proposal to the North Carolina Adult Department of Corrections to undertake a large randomized controlled trial (RCT) in state prisons in North Carolina. A prior national survey revealed that many Americans give hundreds of dollars per month to their incarcerated family members in the form of commissary accounts, phone calls and specific gifts or packages. Building on this descriptive evidence, we will be working on a proposal to offer some sort of financial assistance and financial literacy programming to imprisoned adults and their family members in the months leading up to, and following, their release from prison.
By setting this up as an RCT and pairing it with various surveys and administrative records, our research team will be able to analyze whether this pre-release financial support improves health and wellbeing, benefits familial relationships and ultimately reduces recidivism.
This RCT proposal will be supplemented by a number of ongoing projects that fellows will have the opportunity to work on. These include multiple administrative data projects in Wisconsin and Denmark on parental incarceration’s impacts on child safety and schooling, a large-scale literature review on intimate partner violence, and a project on the lives and employment of prison wardens.
Team
Members
- Garrett Baker, postdoctoral fellow
- Jerry Eiswerth, graduate fellow
- Catalina Giraldo, undergraduate fellow
- Eva Jarvis, undergraduate fellow
- Tyler Rogers, undergraduate fellow
Leaders
- Team Advisor: Christopher Wildeman, Ph.D. (Sociology)
Carceral Justice Pillar