Sara Wakefield

AFFILIATED SCHOLAR

Sara Wakefield received her Ph.D. from the Department of Sociology at the University of Minnesota in 2007 and is an Associate Professor of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University, Newark. Her research interests focus on the consequences of criminal legal system contact for families and communities, with an emphasis on childhood wellbeing and racial inequality. She is the author of Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality (Oxford University Press, with Chris Wildeman). More recently, Dr. Wakefield has completed several team-based and mixed-method research projects that provide information on the consequences of contact with the criminal legal system that is 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 re-entry. 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. Dr. Wakefield’s work with the Policing Project is focused on mixed methods research design.