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Although Gideon v. Wainright has provided indigent defendants potentially facing prison time the right to counsel, commentators and scholars have documented that the public defense system is vastly underfunded and currently in crisis. However, research has rarely examined how public defender resources impact case outcomes, and the research that does exist has yet, to my knowledge, examine how these resources impact racial disparities in case outcomes. By merging data from the Census of Public Defender Offices to data from the State Court Processing Statistics, I begin to fill this gap. Results from multivariate regression analyses with state-year fixed effects provide mixed evidence. Regardless of race, higher public defender and support staff caseloads tend to be associated with worse case outcomes. In the case of pretrial detention, I find that high public defender and support staff caseloads exacerbate Black-White disparities. With respect to sentence length, I find evidence that high public defender caseloads exacerbate Latinx-White disparities and some evidence that they mitigate Black-White disparities. In sum, these results provide strong support for the view that the public defender funding crisis harms indigent defendants regardless of race and mixed evidence regarding its impact on racial disparities in the criminal justice system.

A growing body of scholarship explores how incarceration contributes to inequality. The majority of this scholarship focuses on individual-level outcomes or aggregate outcomes within the United States. Despite substantial cross-national variation in incarceration rates, we know little about whether these differences contribute to cross-national variation in inequality outcomes. Using data from the period 1971-2010 from 15 advanced democracies, this study begins to fill this gap by exploring whether cross-national differences in incarceration rates help to explain cross-national differences in relative poverty rates. Although this research finds no average association, this null association obscures the important moderating role of country context. The association between incarceration and relative poverty is contingent upon a country's female employment rate and welfare state generosity.

A growing body of scholarship explores how incarceration contributes to inequality. The majority of this scholarship focuses on individual-level outcomes or aggregate outcomes within the United States. Despite substantial cross-national variation in incarceration rates, we know little about whether these differences contribute to cross-national variation in inequality outcomes. Using data from the period 1971–2010 from 15 advanced democracies, this study begins to fill this gap by exploring whether cross-national differences in incarceration rates help to explain cross-national differences in relative poverty rates. Although this research finds no average association, this null association obscures the important moderating role of country context. The association between incarceration and relative poverty is contingent upon a country's female employment rate and welfare state generosity.

Abstract
Given the scope of mass incarceration, it is quite appropriate that promote smart decarceration (PSD) has been identified as one of the 13 Grand Challenges for Social Work. The aims of PSD are both ambitious and critical but do not address women explicitly. The authors argue that PSD should incorporate a gendered lens because a gender-responsive framework is critical for these three reasons: (1) women's pathways to incarceration are different than men's and are shaped by their social status and multiple forms of marginalization based on race, socioeconomic status, gender, and other factors; (2) women face gender-specific needs behind bars (especially those related to reproductive health) and have higher rates of behavioral health needs (e.g., mental health disorders, substance use issues) than men; and (3) although men and women face similar reentry challenges (e.g., housing, parenting, economic hardship, behavioral health), women experience many of these risk factors at higher rates, and their social status shapes how these needs impact their reentry. Until social workers and other advocates consider all the various and intersecting identities of all those impacted by the criminal legal system, they will be never be successful in ending mass incarceration.

Millions of individuals in the United States experience eviction each year, with low-income women being particularly at risk. As a result, scholarship has increasingly sought to understand what the implications of eviction are for families. In this article, we build on this work by presenting the first estimates of the impact of eviction on criminal justice involvement for mothers in the U.S. context and examining three pathways that may help to explain these associations. Using longitudinal data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, adjusted estimates suggest that mothers who have been evicted have more than two times higher odds of experiencing criminal justice involvement. When we differentiate by eviction timing, we find that both recent and less recent evictions are associated with criminal justice involvement. Last, we find that eviction indirectly affects criminal justice involvement through future financial hardship and substance use.

AbstractIncreasingly scholars have argued that, if the United States is to reduce Black–White disparities in incarceration, it is necessary to move away from race‐neutral efforts and ensure that policies consider race. Despite this perspective, criminal legal policies have almost exclusively been race‐neutral, with one general exception at the state level: racial impact statement reform. Although racial impact statement reform exists now in 10 states, no scholarship has empirically examined the implications of this approach for racial disparities in imprisonment. Using a mixed methods approach, we begin to fill this gap by examining the implications of Minnesota's racial impact statement reform on Black–White imprisonment rate disparities. Our quasi‐experimental results do not suggest that Minnesota's reform reduced Black–White disparities in imprisonment. Our legislative analysis suggests that the null effects we observed were likely due to the fact that racial impact statements are responses to legislation that has already been proposed, and that the legislation proposed in Minnesota was not sufficient to significantly address Black–White imprisonment disparities, regardless of the extent to which these statements impacted the votes of legislators.

This study examines the association between three forms of father–child contact during incarceration and fathers' reports of parental self-efficacy. The study's sample derives from ( n = 1,720) fathers participating in the Multisite Family Study on Incarceration, Partnering, and Parenting (MFS-IP) study. Multivariate ordinary least squares regression models were conducted to examine the study's hypotheses. Among the contact types, visits had a positive and significant effect on fathers' views of their parental efficacy after controlling demographic, familial, and carceral characteristics. This study informs practice and policy, demonstrating that contact is essential to family-strengthening services and beneficial for incarcerated fathers and families. Importantly, efforts should be made to make it easier for fathers to have contact with their children.