An unrelenting prison boom, marked by stark racial disparities, pulled a disproportionate number of young black men into prison in the last forty years. In Children of the Prison Boom, Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman draw upon broadly representative survey data and interviews to describe the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration on a generation of vulnerable children tied to these men. In so doing, they show that the effects of mass imprisonment...

The Prison Community was a landmark study on prison culture and social processes, first published in 1940 (and reissued in 1958). This reissue includes a new introduction by Wildeman and Wakefield to situate the study in a contemporary context, alongside the foreword by Donald R. Cressey. The original book represented one of the first studies to take the cultural, social, and administrative conditions of confinement seriously, providing insight into how incarcerated people make co...