abstract: 'Civil rights legislation in the 1960s promised greater racial equality

  in a variety of domains including education, economic opportunity, and

  voting. Yet those same laws were coupled with exclusions from surveys

  used to gauge their effects thereby affecting both statistical portraits

  of inequality and our understanding of the impact of civil rights

  legislation. This article begins with a review of the exclusionary

  criteria and some tools intended for its evaluation. Civil rights laws

  were designed at least in part to be assessed through data on the

  American population collected from samples of individuals living in

  households, which neglects people who are unstably housed, homeless, or

  institutionalized. Time series data from surveys of the civilian

  population and those in prisons and jails show that growth in the

  American criminal justice system since the early 1970s undermines

  landmark civil rights acts. As many as 1 in 10 black men age 20-34 are

  in prison or jail on any given day, and in the post-Great Recession era,

  young black men who have dropped out of high school are more likely to

  be incarcerated than working in the paid labor force. Our findings call

  into question assessments of equal opportunity more than half a century

  after the enactment of historic legislation meant to redress racial

  inequities in America.'
affiliation: 'Pettit, B (Corresponding Author), Univ Texas Austin, Dept Sociol, 305
  E 23rd St,1700,CLA 3-306, Austin, TX 78712 USA.

  Pettit, Becky, Univ Texas Austin, Dept Sociol, Austin, TX 78712 USA.

  Sykes, Bryan L., UCI Sch Social Ecol, Dept Criminol Law \& Soc, Irvine, CA 92697
  USA.'
author: Pettit, Becky and Sykes, Bryan L.
author-email: bpettit@utexas.edu
author_list:
- family: Pettit
  given: Becky
- family: Sykes
  given: Bryan L.
da: '2023-09-28'
doi: 10.1111/socf.12179
eissn: 1573-7861
files: []
issn: 0884-8971
journal: SOCIOLOGICAL FORUM
keywords: 'civil rights; incarceration; law; policy; racial inequality; survey

  methods'
keywords-plus: BLACK; EMPLOYMENT; IMPACT; RACE; LEGACY
language: English
month: JUN
number: 1, SI
number-of-cited-references: '64'
pages: 589-611
papis_id: 15b0f4543741bc69a245826a80320c00
ref: Pettit2015civilrights
times-cited: '29'
title: 'Civil Rights Legislation and Legalized Exclusion: Mass Incarceration and the
  Masking of Inequality'
type: article
unique-id: WOS:000355695300007
usage-count-last-180-days: '1'
usage-count-since-2013: '60'
volume: '30'
web-of-science-categories: Sociology
year: '2015'