Dr. Sara Wakefield

Sara Wakefield received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota. 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, a series of team-based projects that provide original data on the consequences of contact with the criminal legal system that are not easily captured in available datasets (PINS, WO-PINS, and FamHIS) and recent demographic analyses estimate the number of people in the United States with a felony conviction and the prevalence of termination of parental ...