Children of Incarcerated Parents

well as Harvard's Department of Sociology. He is a member of the Library of Congress
Scholars Council.
Wilson was an original board member of the progressive Century Institute, and a current
board member at Philadelphia-based Public/Private Ventures as well as PolicyLink and
the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. He was Dr. Sudhir Venkatesh's advisor
when Venkatesh was a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago.
Published Works
He is the author of numerous publications, including Power Racism and Privilege: Race
Relations in Theoretical and Sociohistorical Perspectives (1973, 1976), The Declining
Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions (1978, 1980, 2012),
winner of the American Sociological Association's Sydney Spivack Award; The Truly
Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987, 2012), which
was selected by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the 16 best
books of 1987, and received The Washington Monthly Annual Book Award, the Society
for the Study of Social Problems' C. Wright Mills Award and the American Political
Science Association’s Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award; When Work
Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor (1996), which was selected as one of
the notable books of 1996 by the editors of the New York Times Book Review and
received the Sidney Hillman Foundation Award and the American Political Science
Association’s Aaron Wildavsky Enduring Contribution Award; and The Bridge Over the
Racial Divide: Rising Inequality and Coalition Politics. More recently, he is the co-author
of There Goes the Neighborhood: Racial, Ethnic, and Class Tensions in Four Chicago
Neighborhoods and Their Meaning for America (2006), and Good Kids in Bad
Neighborhoods: Successful Development in Social Context (2006); and author of More
than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner City (2009).
In The Declining Significance of Race: Blacks and Changing American Institutions
(1978) Wilson argues that the significance of race is waning, and that for African
Americans, class is comparatively more important in determining their life chances. In
The Truly Disadvantaged: The Inner City, the Underclass, and Public Policy (1987),
Wilson was one of the first to enunciate at length the "spatial mismatch" theory for the
development of a ghetto underclass. As industrial jobs disappeared in cities in the wake
of global economic restructuring, and hence urban unemployment increased, women
found it unwise to marry the fathers of their children, since the fathers would not be
breadwinners. In The Truly Disadvantaged Wilson also argued against Charles Murray's
theory of welfare causing poverty.
In Wilson's most recent book, More Than Just Race: Being Black and Poor in the Inner
City (2009), he directs his attention to the overall framing of pervasive, concentrated
urban poverty of African Americans. He asks the question, "Why do poverty and
unequal opportunity persist in the lives of so many African Americans?" In response, he
traces the history and current state of powerful structural factors impacting African
Americans, such as discrimination in laws, policies, hiring, housing, and education.
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