Elizabeth M. "Becky" Pettit (born February 4, 1970)[1] is an American sociologist with expertise in demography.
[2] For instance, in her 2012 book Invisible Men: Mass Incarceration and the Myth of Black Progress, she argues that mass incarceration in the United States has distorted our perception of racial equality because government surveys tend to undercount prisoners.
[5][6] When, in this book, she added prisoners to these surveys, she found that the status of black Americans has not significantly improved since the 1960s.
[9] With Bruce Western, she has also studied other social consequences of incarceration, such as decreased earnings for former prisoners.
[2] She is currently an advisory editor for Social Problems[12] and a member of the editorial board of American Sociological Review.