His research has established relationships among unemployment, economic inequality, social welfare, race, and incarceration in modern Western democracies.
[2][3] He has also used quantitative analysis of complex networks to develop dynamic relational models of legal policies and management practices of employers in the United States.
[citation needed] Sutton's first book, Stubborn Children: Controlling Delinquency in the United States, 1640-1981, won the C. Wright Mills Award[6] and was recognized for its integration of theory, quantitative analysis, and primary research.
Reviewers described it as a corrective to aspects of Karl Marx, Michel Foucault, and Max Weber,[7][8][9] and also as having described previously unexplored features of the history of American legal institutions.
[7][8][10] Sutton's textbook, Law/Society: Origins, Interactions, and Change, is also noted for the breadth of its theoretical scope[11] and the integration of that theory with empirical examples.