Since the Great Recession, states have increasingly relied less on incarceration and more on diversionary and rehabilitation treatment programs. At the same time, research shows that other types of punishment, like monetary sanctions, have also been placed on the criminal justice reform agenda, highlighting how known financial punishments imposed by courts and probation services continue to burden and entangle poor people in the criminal legal system. Yet, little empirical scholarship has examined how these two consequential areas of research and policy reform intersect in the lives of economically disadvantaged defendants, probationers, and parolees seeking to comply with their state-mandated rehabilitation programs. In this paper, we examine how economic inequality and beliefs about criminal legal system fairness affect indigent people’s behavior through the routine attendance of their state-mandated rehabilitation health programs. Using pilot data from a novel and recent field experiment in Los Angeles County, this paper explores whether perceptions about one’s court case and whether the government should pay for rehabilitation services mediate the relationship between economic inequality (and its alleviation) and compliance with court-ordered programs. Findings from this study will shed light on how beliefs and actions align within the criminal legal system – in the presence and absence of economic inequality among the poor – to highlight potential policy solutions and reforms for financial punishments and population health in the criminal legal system.

Several decades ago, most Americans held a narrow definition of “family”—one in which same-gender couples were excluded or counted out. Few could have predicted the remarkable shifts in social, cultural, legal, and political acceptance of same-gender families. Today, these families are increasingly counted in, but their inclusion is part of a much broader recount of what Americans consider a family. 

These changes or additions, however, have been accompanied by subtractions, contested boundaries and new forms of division.  In this presentation, Brian Powell examines these changing contours of family life, considering how Americans’ definitions of family—and their related views of parenthood—have evolved. He also identifies emerging battlegrounds over who is included and who remains outside these boundaries, including debates over the denial of services to same-gender couples and attitudes toward transgender youth and adults. Drawing on two decades of survey data, he explores the shifting social math through which Americans count families in, count others out, and continually redraw the boundaries of family.

The US gender pay gap has narrowed substantially since 1980, but more slowly since 1990. We ask how these trends have been shaped by the combination of changes in gender pay gaps upon labor market entry and changes in how gender pay inequalities evolve across the life course. We find that young women in later cohorts consistently gained ground in pay relative to their male peers. Later cohorts of women launched their careers from more advantageous starting points, and these gains in starting points suffice to explain the entire narrowing of the cross-sectional gender pay gap 1980–2020. By contrast, changes across cohorts in the gender gap in wage growth with age were mixed and offsetting. Together, our results help shed light on both progress toward pay parity and its stall. Furthermore, they suggest that women are unlikely to achieve pay parity if future gains come only from narrowing the wage gap in young adulthood: even if young women were to reach pay parity with young men, the aggregate gender pay gap will persist as long as rates of pay growth with age do not converge.