Research shows that penal state involvement facilitates a wide range of detrimental consequences, yet existing theoretical accounts tend to focus on stigma or exclusion, leaving the role of individual decision-making underspecified. To address this gap, I advance the concept of collateral decision-making: the process by which individuals, embedded in a criminal legal institution, make decisions that carry adverse consequences in another institution, whether within or beyond the criminal legal sphere. Through this process, individuals reframe how they navigate a particular institution to mitigate negative experiences generated by a criminal legal institution. I analyze in-depth interviews with 65 pretrial detainees simultaneously embedded in jails and criminal courts—two state institutions that constitute distinct structural constraints, functions, and decision-making points. The findings expose why and how the disadvantage of pretrial detention recalibrates decision-making and translates into unfavorable court outcomes, as detainees accept plea agreements to escape violence, the misery of court holding tanks, poor jail conditions, and address primary-caregiver role strain—even while maintaining their innocence. The analysis also reveals that detainees sometimes forgo the potential benefit of legal counsel, offering a compelling account of how this decision appears reasonable within the structural constraints of jail detention, yet ultimately reproduces institutional disadvantage. The findings illustrate how penal state involvement cascades across institutional boundaries, shaping individual behavior and reinforcing social disparities.

Protracted armed conflicts increasingly drive long‐term displacement, yet demographic frameworks often treat forced migration from conflict settings as a response to acute, singular events. This study introduces a typology of displacement grounded in the tempo and form of conflict‐related insecurities—anticipatory, chronic, and imminent—and examines their consequences for women displaced from Myanmar to Thailand. Using survey data from 390 women, latent class analysis identified distinct pre‐displacement insecurity profiles and linked them to post‐displacement outcomes, including parallel insecurity profiles, mobility constraints, and labor exploitation. We also examined legal status and residence type as additional understudied yet policy‐relevant post‐displacement outcomes. Most respondents fled under anticipatory or chronic conditions rather than acute violence, underscoring that displacement from protracted conflict settings is often propelled by cumulative structural harm. Regression models showed that women who fled under chronic or imminent insecurity were substantially more likely to experience continued precarity after migration, including camp residence and insecure legal status. These findings highlight the need for temporal nuance in migration theory and humanitarian policy, recognizing conflict displacement as a prolonged process with enduring insecurities for women, families, and future generations, rather than a discrete event.

Theorizing the importance of the state in regulating sexuality and how sexuality shapes the state has been key to understanding state control and definition. Monogamy has been treated as an implicit aspect of sexual regulation, but its significance in defining the state has yet to be theorized. The lack of explicit attention to monogamy dovetails with a lack of attention to colonial and racial histories in state boundary-work. This article theorizes the monogamous state to uncover a grid of intelligibility that connects colonial understandings of perverse sexuality to polygamy, in contradistinction to moral and productive monogamy. Drawing on the case of France, I examine how the state defined itself against a racialized, polygynous Other as part of its civilizing mission to make monogamy central to citizenship and public order. I identify three historical periods that demonstrate the building, consolidation, and reinforcement of the monogamous state.

Prevailing theories of family change and the relevance of marriage in the United States hinge on the steady rise in births to unmarried women that unfolded during the latter half of the twentieth century and into the 2000s. This increase was concentrated among individuals with lower education levels, raising concern about inequality in children's family circumstances. Despite theoretical expectations that this trend would continue, the proportion of births to unmarried women plateaued during the 2010s. By examining trends in union formation and childbearing patterns by union status using data from the 2006‒2023 American Community Survey, this study investigates the ongoing link between marriage and childbearing underlying this plateau. Birth and marriage rates fell throughout the 2010s. However, in a reversal, married women became increasingly likely to have children relative to their unmarried peers, particularly among those with a high school education or less. These findings challenge theories about the changing social meaning of marriage, suggesting that norms regarding marriage remain robust rather than becoming deinstitutionalized. Furthermore, this study highlights how the declining marriage rate has contributed to the ongoing decline in the birth rate in the United States, implying that barriers to marriage may also create barriers to childbearing.

Over the past 170 years, the United States has undergone demographic, structural, and cultural changes that are reflected in—and a reflection of—changes in living arrangements. In this research note, we link living arrangements and life expectancy to calculate expected life years spent across different living arrangements by sex for the U.S. population for the period 1850–2021. We decompose changes in this measure by age group and describe change across cohorts. We use harmonized data from the Integrated Public Use Microdata Samples, classifying living arrangements into alone, with primary kin only (partners, parents, and children), and in extended households; more detailed subcategories include, for example, single-parent households and extended families. Three historical ages of U.S. living arrangements emerge: a “large household” system (1850–1940) characterized by relative stability in the extended household, when primary kin arrangements incorporate the majority of the substantial gains in life expectancy; an era of “primary kin” dominance (1940–1980) when life years spent only with primary kin increase faster than life expectancy, while the prevalence of extended households declines; and a “diversified” phase (1980–onward) characterized by a decline in two-parent households in favor of greater diversity, including living alone and with extended family.

Research on interracial marriage has only begun to incorporate the growing mixed-race population. Using the 2010–2019 pooled American Community Survey, we explore the likelihood of a range of spousal pairings relative to racial endogamy for multiracial people while accounting for group size and controls for education, age, and immigration status. A distinguishing feature of marriage for multiracial individuals is the possibility of a partial overlap in racial identification—having one component race in common with one's partner. We find that exact racial endogamy for many multiracial individuals is relatively quite high, once we adjust for group size, and that partial endogamy through overlap increases the likelihood of a union. Furthermore, partial overlap in racial identification between multiracial and monoracial partners reveals the importance of racial classification regimes determining how multiracial individuals are treated in the marriage market. We find no evidence of a general affinity among multiracial individuals who do not share racial ancestry or that multiracial individuals’ partner choices are less affected by race than the choices of monoracial individuals. These patterns have implications for the significance of established racial boundaries and the ongoing churning of racial categories, even as those categories become more ancestrally complex.