Affiliated Graduate Program Faculty Member

Sara Wakefield received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2007. Her research interests focus on the consequences of mass imprisonment for the family, with an emphasis on childhood wellbeing and racial inequality, culminating in a series of articles and book, Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality (Oxford University Press, with Chris Wildeman). More recently, she is working on several team-based projects that provide information on the consequences of contact with the criminal legal system that are not easily captured in available datasets. The PINS and WO-PINS studies leverage a variety of methods and data sources (surveys, intensive interviews, administrative data, and social network analysis) to examine social relationships while incarcerated and through reentry. The Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS) provides nationally representative estimates of the concentration of incarceration experiences in American families. Finally, recent demographic analyses estimate the number of people in the United States with a felony conviction and the prevalence of termination of parental rights among U.S. children.