Ecologies of Social Control: Race, Criminal Justice, and Child Protection

• In Event: 416 - Section on the Sociology of the Family. Race, Ethnicity, Social Class, and Families

Abstract

Institutions tasked with the regulation of poverty, such as criminal justice and child welfare systems, are deeply intertwined. These formally distinct organizations have complex organizational ties, operate within similar regulatory and political environments, share many institutional routines, and often monitor and intervene in the same communities and families. As the targets and sites of intervention increasingly overlap, these distinct systems form a loosely coordinated network that subjects communities to routine surveillance and coercive intervention from a diverse network of agencies with often competing priorities and demands. I suggest that these place-specific networks of agencies and actors tasked with regulating marginalized groups constitute ecologies of social control.
Using data on state prison and foster care systems, this study finds that racial inequalities in coercive social control are tightly correlated across policy domains. States with high levels of inequality in the rate at which African Americans or Native Americans are incarcerated relative to Whites are likely to have high levels of inequality in the rate at which the state separates African American or Native American children from their families and places them into foster care, after controlling for socio-economic and family inequality and state political context. This relationship suggests that similar mechanisms may account for the institutionalization of racial bias in the application of formal social control across policy domains.

Author

• Frank Edwards, Cornell University