Finally, the research I review uses pre-pandemic data. Crime and incarceration rates have recently decreased, and drug arrests have fallen sharply since 2019, but this may not hold in the current political environment. /FIN.

All that said, people racialized as Black remain disproportionately incarcerated compared to their population share, and the increasing significance of class doesn't negate the continued importance of ethnoracial disparities and racial domination. 9/

... and proposing that rising violent crime rates, economic restructuring, urban decline, and an incomplete social state contributed to the punitive turn in crime policy. 8/ catalyst-journal.com/2019/12/the-...

See also Clegg & Usmani (2019), disputing that the carceral system functions mainly as a race-based social control mechanism ... 7/ catalyst-journal.com/2019/12/the-...

Clegg and Usmani (2024) found that adverse local labor market shocks due to increased Chinese exports led to significant increases in total incarceration rates for both Black and White people. 6/ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/... 6/

Muller and Roehrkasse (2022) observe that Black-White inequality in the prison admission rate peaked in 2000 and then declined, while class inequality in admission, using education as a proxy, has surged for both groups. 5/ escholarship.org/content/qt74...

Light (2021) finds that the average sentencing difference between Black and White defendants in US federal courts narrowed considerably between 2009 and 2018, especially for drug offenses. 4/ academic.oup.com/sf/article-a...

Robey, Massoglia, and Light (2023) highlight a substantial 44 percent decrease in the risk of incarceration for Black men between 1999 and 2019, with the fastest decline among young Black men. 3/ sociology.wisc.edu/2023/07/12/a...

Beckett and Brydolf-Horwitz (2020) document significant declines in drug arrests and imprisonment for Black individuals between 2007 and 2018, attributing this partly to increased support for drug policy reform in urban areas. 2/ lsj.washington.edu/sites/lsj/fi...

... and Vivek Chibber's Rescuing Class from the Cultural Turn catalyst-journal.com/2017/11/cult...

Catalyst journal is publishing interesting stuff on class, including sociologist Dylan Riley's piece on Bourdieu's Class Theory ... catalyst-journal.com/2017/11/bour...

I also found Will Atkinson's book Class, from
@politybooks.bsky.social Key Concepts series, very helpful as an overview, especially on Bourdieu's approach to class. www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...