OBJECTIVE To identify predictors of and groups vulnerable to cocaine use in prison. METHODS We selected 376 inmates with history of cocaine use in prison (cases) and 938 inmates with no history of drug use (controls) serving sentences in the Rio de Janeiro State prison system in 1998. The analysis included exposure variables divided into three hierarchical levels: distal, intermediate, and pr...

tem over the past thirty years transformed the path to adulthood followed by disadvantaged minority men? Certainly the prison boom affected many young black men. The U.S. penal population increased six fold between 1972 and 2000, leaving 1.3 million men in state and federal prisons by the end of the century. By 2002, around 12 percent of black men in their twenties were in prison or jail (Harri...

An ‘efficiency wage’ model developed for Western economies is reinterpreted in the context of Stalin’s Russia, with imprisonment – not unemployment – acting as a ‘worker discipline device’. The threat of imprisonment allows the state to pay a lower wage outside the Gulag than otherwise, thereby raising the “surplus” left over for investment: this externality provides a reason for coercion over ...

Research showing an association between business cycles and imprisonment is suspect on both theoretical and empirical grounds. Most research on this topic uses an impoverished notion of business cycles andpays no attention to differences in the institutional contexts o f economic polic.vmaking. This article reexamines this issue using data from 15 afluent capitalist democracies observed over 30...

Since the mid-1970s the U.S. imprisonment rate has increased roughly fivefold. As Christopher Wildeman and Bruce Western explain, the effects of this sea change in the imprisonment rate--commonly called mass imprisonment or the prison boom--have been concentrated among those most likely to form fragile families: poor and minority men with little schooling. Imprisonment diminishes the earnings o...