Katherine Irwin

• PhD Sociology University of Colorado, Boulder
• Professor at University of Hawaii System

Beginning in the 1990s, scholars have been attuned to the ways that punitive frameworks within criminal justice institutions have been diffused to U.S. schools, often characterizing this trend as the “schools-to-jails” pathway and the criminalization of U.S. students. Looking at empirical trends, researchers have consistently found that schools pri...

Since at least the 1980s, researchers (especially criminologists) have been keen to examine the structural causes of youth violence and, more often than not, they have tended to place economic inequalities and neo-liberal politics as central explanations in their work. The result is that racial and gender oppressions have tended to be sidelined in...

Innovations in the trauma-informed care (TIC) field have promised to transform youth-serving institutions by asking practitioners to pay attention to the developmental needs of young people facing maltreatment. Despite notable TIC innovations, our knowledge about childhood trauma tends to be adult-centric, presenting youth as passive recipients of...

The 1980s brought a sharp upturn in punitive practices in U.S. schools. One negative result of harsh school discipline has been that poor students of color have been punished at disproportionate rates, with the racial disparity in sanctions being dramatic among girls. Some have argued that support services can undermine multiple inequalities in pun...

On the topic of choosing field research settings, Lofland et al. (2006, p. 9) advocate for " starting where you are " —a productive guide for many new ethnographers. Few who embrace this mantra, however, would think to study where they were many years ago and, thus, observing teenagers falls well outside of the opportunistic research tradition (Rie...

A glance across ethnographic methods terrain reveals multiple controversies and divisive critiques. When training graduate students, these debates and controversies can be consequential. We offer suggestions for teaching graduate ethnographic methods courses that, first, help students understand some of the common epistemological debates in the fie...

This study examines whether different dimensions of ethnic identity are associated with reduced risk of violence among an understudied population: Asian American and Pacific Islander adolescents. Drawing from survey data of 298 Native Hawaiian, Samoan, Japanese, and Filipino adolescents in Hawai‘i, this study focuses on whether three dimensions of...

Based on a nine years of ethnographic research, the authors examine multiple inequalities that underscore youth violence. They feature the experiences of inner city as well as rural girls and boys in Hawai‘i who face racism, sexism, poverty, and political neglect in the context of two hundred years of American colonial control in the Pacific. The a...

Since the 1980s, delinquency researchers and urban ethnographers have increasingly placed girls' violence in the center of their inquiries. Within recent scholarship, there are several looming questions such as how much of girls' violence is shaped by the same forces motivating violent boys and how much is shaped by concerns unique to girls. This s...

Despite the general agreement that US schools have become increasingly punitive since the 1980s, researchers are uncertain about what types of schools use tough-on-crime measures. Some assert that punitive control is concentrated in poor, predominantly ethnic minority schools. Governing-through-crime scholars argue that US schools with mostly middl...

Violence and masculinity, as many criminologists have argued, are tightly coupled in the United States. According to the current masculinity and crime perspectives, men who confront multiple oppressions (e.g., class, race, and political) are particularly apt to use violence because, while marginalized men lack economic power, they possess power in...

This issue of the Journal of Prisoners on Prisons (JPP) is dedicated to my father, John Irwin, who was many things to many people. To some, he was the original felonious criminologist, a member of the Prisoners’ Union, and the founder of Project Rebound, a program to turn former prisoners into college students. To others, my father was a prison sch...

Shortly after the National Institute on Drug Abuse (NIDA) was established in 1974, physicians and scientists expressed concern about the effects of drug use during pregnancy. In 1974 Public Law 94-371 mandated that drug abuse and dependence among women be given

Background: Studies of youth violence have usually examined social capital using qualitative methods, but remain limited by small sample sizes. In addition, few studies examine violence among Asian/Pacific Islander (API) youth, even though they are one of the fastest-growing youth populations in the USA. Aims: To contribute to a better understandin...

This article explores the boundaries of neighborhoods as subjectively constructed by 37 adolescents and 33 parents across four census-defined block groups in a Western city. We examine the degree of consensus among participants on the spatial boundaries of their neighborhoods, the stability of participants' subjectively constructed neighborhood def...

p class="MsoNormal">En este artículo, reflejo algunos de los debates con respecto a la intimidad y explotación examinando mi relación con mi informante clave. Recorro la manera en que, a pesar de mis intentos de seguir las guías éticas existentes, reforcé varias y grandes desigualdades en mi postura íntima. Sostengo que nuestras discusiones sobre m...

In this article, we review criminological perspectives of girls’ violence. To do this, we first look at the 20th-century tendency to view violent girls as being the same as violent boys or as taking up dangerous types of masculinity. Second, we consider the contemporary ways that researchers have tried to move beyond male-centered and masculinized...

Relational, covert, and indirect aggression among girls has recently caught the attention of those interested in school violence prevention. In the name of being gender responsive, violence prevention or antibullying programs are being encouraged to include this form of aggression among the sorts of behaviors one seeks to prevent. The authors revie...

In this important new work, two respected criminologists challenge the characterization of the new 'bad girl' arguing that it is only a new attempt to punish girls who are not the stereotypical depiction of good. Through interviews with young women, educators and people in the criminal justice system, Beyond Bad Girls exposes the formal and informa...

In response to critiques from feminist, existential, and postmodern qualitative researchers, the idea of maintaining objective and distant relationships with research subjects gave way to the belief that researchers could and, in some cases, should become intimately connected to research participants. These traditions opened the door for contempora...

Without Abstract

This article examines the experiences of 43 adolescents living in Denver, Colorado, from 1994 to 1996—the 2-year period following the peak of the youth violence epidemic. Where the dominant theories explaining inner-city violence tend to focus on disadvantaged communities, this study sampled youths from 5 neighborhoods with varying crime, poverty,...

As science-based programs become more readily available to practitioners, the need for identifying and overcoming problems associated with the process of implementation becomes critical. A major goal of the Blueprints for Violence Prevention initiative has been to enhance the understanding of program implementation by studying the influence of huma...

Arguing that the deviance literature has presented an overly negative image of norm breaking, some researchers in the 1980s and 1990s began to argue for a category of positive deviance that included studies of individuals who exceed social norms (Ben-Yehuda 1990; Dodge 1985; Heckert 1989, 1997, 1998). The positive deviance perspective inspired seve...

Once considered low class or dangerous symbols, tattoos began to be defined as hip, trendy, and glamorous in the 1990s. Using the increasing popularity of tattoos among nineties youth as an example of moral passage, this article examines some of the interpretive processes at work in the de-stigmatization of deviance. Whereas researchers have positi...

The Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence (CSPV) at the University of Colorado at Boulder identified 11 prevention and intervention programs that met a strict scientific standard of program effectiveness. This bulletin describes the CSPV's selection criteria in choosing model programs (e.g., evidence of deterrent effect when using a stron...

In the June issue ofSociological Forum, several authors addressed the question, What's Wrong with Sociology. Answers included increased fragmentation of the discipline, and the lack of an identifiable cumulative core of sociological knowledge. This paper examines many of the claims made by the contributors to the June 1994Sociological Forum, refram...

A grounded theory was developed to describe how pregnant crack cocaine users perceived their problems and responded to them. A basic social psychological process, salvaging self, was identified from constant comparative analysis of in-depth interviews with 60 pregnant or postpartum women who used crack cocaine an average of at least once per week i...

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Colorado, 2001. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 207-226). Photocopy.