Policy Making and Southern Distinctiveness examines the uniqueness of southern politics and their policy choices.While decades of scholarship on the politics of the American South have focused on partisanship and electoral outcomes as the primary elements of interest in southern politics, few works have focused on the more practical outcomes of these political processes, specifically, comparing state policy choices of southern states to non-southern states. This book exami...

After a great deal of discussion and debate across all levels of government, President Obama signed the Affordable Care Act (ACA) into law in March 2010. Since President Trump's election into office, the ACA has stayed in the headlines. Trump has continued to call for the replacement and repeal of the ACA, and several efforts have spawned in both the House and the Senate to accomplish this goal. Unlike welfare reform, which was generally embraced by all states, the ACA has proven very divi...

The charges of white privilege and systemic racism that are tearing the country apart fIoat free of reality. Two known facts, long since documented beyond reasonable doubt, need to be brought into the open and incorporated into the way we think about public policy: American whites, blacks, Hispanics, and Asians have different violent crime rates and different means and distributions of cognitive ability. The allegations of racism in policing, college admissions, segregation in housing, and...

An award-winning scholar and author of Killing the Black Body exposes the foundational racism of the child welfare system“A brilliant and impassioned call for abolition.” —Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim CrowMany believe the child welfare system protects children from abuse. But as Torn Apart uncovers, this system is designed to punish Black families. Drawing on decades of research, legal scholar and soc...

An analysis of "the Trump era, but not about Trump. . . . but on how incentives across a range of institutions have created corruption" ( New York Times Book Review)."There is not a single American awake to the world who is comfortable with the way things are."So begins Lawrence Lessig's sweeping indictment of modern-day American institutions and the corruption that besets them—from the selling of Congress to special interests to the corporate captur...

"[An] excellent overview of the child welfare system . . . Most importantly, [the author] provides a discussion of how to create true change." —Tina Lee, author of Catching a Case: Inequality and Fear in New York City's Child Welfare SystemA groundbreaking look at the history and politics of the American child welfare system, "When the Welfare People Come" exposes the system in its totality, from child protective investigation to foster care and ma...

An in-depth analysis of the legal entry points and remedies in the school-to-prison pipelineThe “school-to-prison pipeline” is an emerging trend that pushes large numbers of at-risk youth—particularly children of color—out of classrooms and into the juvenile justice system. The policies and practices that contribute to this trend can be seen as a pipeline with many entry points, from under-resourced K-12 public schools, to the over-use of zero-tolerance suspensions...

Why do black families own less than white families? Why does school segregation persist decades after Brown v. Board of Education? Why is it harder for black adults to vote than for white adults? Will addressing economic inequality solve racial and gender inequality as well? This book answers all of these questions and more by revealing the hidden rules of race that create barriers to inclusion today. While many Americans are familiar with the histories of slavery and Jim Crow, we often do...

How can it be, in a nation that elected Barack Obama, that one third of African American males born in 2001 will spend time in a state or federal prison, and that black men are seven times likelier than white men to be in prison? Blacks are much more likely than whites to be stopped by the police, arrested, prosecuted, convicted, and imprisoned, and are much less likely to have confidence in justice system officials, especially the police. In Punishing Race, Michael Tonry demonstr...

Social policy is a continuously evolving field requiring constant review, documentation, and analysis. The Handbook of Social Policy is an attempt to document the now substantial body of knowledge about government social policies that has been accumulated since the study of social policy first emerged as an organized field of academic endeavor about 50 years ago. The Second Edition offers a more streamlined format to make the book more consistent with the ...

The American Dream and the Public Schools examines issues that have excited and divided Americans for years, including desegregation, school funding, testing, vouchers, bilingual education, and ability grouping. While these are all separate problems, much of the contention over them comes down to the same thing--an apparent conflict between policies designed to promote each student's ability to succeed and those designed to insure the good of all students or the nation as a whole....

For decades Americans have turned to the Commerce Department's Index of Leading Economic Indicators to spot trends in the economy. The Index of Leading Cultural Indicators brings a similar kind of empirical analysis to the moral, social, and behavioral condition of American society from 1960 to the present--a vivid, clearly accessible portrait in numbers of who and where we are as a nation.First published in 1994 and now completely updated and considerably expanded...