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Sociology

Contact Information

317 Garland Hall
615-322-7515

Research Interests

  • Correctional Populations
  • Health and Mortality
  • Formal Demography

Education

PhD, University of Pennsylvania, 2007

Curriculum Vitae


Evelyn J. Patterson

Associate Professor of Sociology
Associate Professor of Law
Affiliated Faculty, Centers for Medicine, Health and Society for the Study of Democratic Institutions
Health Policy Associate, Center for Health Policy at Meharry Medical College

Evelyn Patterson studies how the U.S. judicial system creates and perpetuates inequality. Drawing on her training in sociology, demography, and criminology, she studies the intergenerational transfer of inequality in America with a particular focus on organizations and institutions. Most of her work to date examines the role of the U.S. judicial system in creating and perpetuating inequality. Interaction with the judicial system disproportionately impacts marginalized populations by limiting their social mobility, blocking their economic opportunities, ensuring poor health outcomes, and minimizing their opportunities to escape the self-sustaining system of inequality embedded in America’s social structure. Specifically, her work situates the consequences of the use of incarceration in an array of social processes, interrogating how incarceration as a social institution reconfigures and mutates other primary social institutions such as education, kinship, and law.

Selected Publications

Patterson, Evelyn J. 2017.  “The Strategies, Complexities, and Realities of Zero Prison Population Growth.” Social Sciences 6(60). http://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/6/2/60.

Brown, Tony, Mary L. Bell, and Evelyn J. Patterson. 2016. “Imprisoned by and Freed from Empathy: Familial Incarceration and Psychological Distress among African American Men in the National Survey of American Life.” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 57(2): 240-256. * ASA Award for Best Publication in Mental Health, 2018

Patterson, Evelyn J. and Helena Dagadu. 2016. “Fractures in the Color Line: Consequences of Constructions of Race and Ethnicity on Measures of Imprisonment.” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 2(1): 10-26.

Patterson, Evelyn J. and Chris Wildeman. 2015. “Mass Imprisonment and the Life Course Revisited:Cumulative Years Lost to Incarceration for Working-Age White and Black Men.” Social Science Research 53: 325-337.

Zuberi, Tukufu, Evelyn J. Patterson, and Quincy T. Stewart. 2015. “Race, Methodology, and Social Construction in the Genomic Era.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 661: 86-108.

Patterson, Evelyn J. 2013. “The Dose-Response of Time Served in Prison on Mortality: New York State, 1989-2003.”  American Journal of Public Health 103(3): 523-528.

Patterson, Evelyn J. 2010. “Incarcerating Death: Mortality in U.S. State Correctional Facilities, 1985-1998.” Demography 47(3): 587-607. * ASA Award for Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship in Population, 2012