No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the author.
Carceral Passages: Coming of Age in Prison America
Existing research provides conflicting accounts of whether indirect exposure to the American carceral state mobilizes geographically proximate community voters. One possible reason for these mixed findings may be a missing connection between electoral participation and expectations of change in criminal legal policies. To remedy this problem, I leverage the inclusion of a well‐publicized ballot initiative in California, Proposition 47. The 2014 measure would substantially reduce the incarcerated population in the state and lower sanctions for non‐violent criminal offenses. Using census tract‐level vote returns and incarceration rates, I show that increasing levels of tract incarceration are associated with an increase in turnout during the year of Proposition 47 (3.8 to 6.9 pp) relative to past turnout levels. In addition, I show that higher tract incarceration rates are associated with more support for the Proposition (6.9 pp. difference). These results suggest that carceral state exposure may affect community political engagement differently based on the direct policy relevance of a given election for changing carceral state functioning.
Solitary confinement is a severe form of incarceration closely associated with long-lasting psychological harm and poor post-release outcomes. Estimating the population prevalence, we find that 11% of all black men in Pennsylvania, born 1986 to 1989, were incarcerated in solitary confinement by age 32. Reflecting large racial disparities, the population prevalence is only 3.4% for Latinos and 1.4% for white men. About 9% of black men in the state cohort were held in solitary for more than 15 consecutive days, violating the United Nations standards for minimum treatment of incarcerated people. Nearly 1 in 100 black men experienced solitary for a year or longer by age 32. Racial disparities are similar for women, but rates are lower. A decomposition shows that black men’s high risk of solitary confinement stems primarily from their high imprisonment rate. Findings suggest that harsh conditions of U.S. incarceration have population-level effects on black men’s well-being.
The paper outlines different modes of inference that researchers are able to make from interview data. Rather than championing one correct mode of inference, I argue that most open-ended and semi-structured interviews contain (a) open contexts in which we can cautiously infer about other situations from the interview; (b) contexts that we should treat as hermetically closed; and (c) refracted contexts in which the relationship between the interview and other situations is patterned but not direct. Having outlined these contexts, the paper focuses on two forms of refracted relations between interviews and other contexts of action, analyzing interviews as refracted images of both people’s landscapes of meaning and talk’s promissory aspect. In doing so, the article makes two contributions. First, it seeks to clarify how researchers should think about the inferences they can make from in-depth interviews. Second, it is also meant as a contribution to our understanding of the relationship among situations by stressing how actors’ talk sets up collective action in ways that often end up supporting the projects they narrate.
Research findings on the psychological effects of solitary confinement have been strikingly consistent since the early nineteenth century. Studies have identified a wide range of frequently occurring adverse psychological reactions that commonly affect prisoners in isolation units. The prevalence of psychological distress is extremely high. Nonetheless, use of solitary confinement in the United States vastly increased in recent decades. Advocates defend its use, often citing two recent studies to support claims that isolation has no significant adverse psychological effects, including even on mentally ill people. Those studies, however, are fundamentally flawed, their results are not credible, and they should be disregarded. Critically and comprehensively analyzing the numerous flaws that compromise this recent scholarship underscores the distinction between methodological form and substance, the danger of privileging quantitative data irrespective of their quality, and the importance of considering the fraught nature of the prison context in which research results are actually generated. Solitary confinement has well-documented adverse effects. Its use should be eliminated entirely for some groups of prisoners and greatly reduced for others.
This study examines black adolescents’ reports of the most helpful types of social support that they receive from and provide to family members, and whether family support exchanges vary by ethnicity (African American vs. Black Caribbean) and gender. Data for this study are from the National Survey of American Life Adolescent Supplement (NSAL-A), a national, probability sample of African American and Black Caribbean youth (ages 13–17). Overall, youth reported financial support, followed by emotional assistance and practical support as the most helpful types of support that they received. Practical and emotional assistance characterized the most commonly reported types of support that they provided to family members. Black Caribbean adolescents were more likely than African American adolescents to report financial and practical assistance as the most helpful types of support that they received from family members; no ethnic differences were observed in the provision of support to relatives. There were no significant gender differences in the receipt of support, but adolescent girls reported greater involvement in providing emotional support and caregiving than adolescent boys. The results of this paper reveal that African American and Black Caribbean adolescents are involved in a complex pattern of reciprocal support exchanges with their extended family members. Study findings also reinforce the importance of research focused on racial/ethnic and gender differences in family support exchanges in order to develop a more nuanced understanding of family support behaviors within these groups.
Throughout my career, I have pursued three theories related to intergroup prejudice-each with a different mentor. Each theory and its supporting research help us to understand prejudice and ways to ameliorate the problem. This autobiographical review article summarizes some of the advances in these three areas during the past six decades. For authoritarianism, the article advocates removing political content from its measurement, linking it with threat and dismissive-avoidant attachment, and studying how authoritarians avoid intergroup contact. Increased work on relative deprivation made possible an extensive meta-analysis that shows the theory, when appropriately measured, has far broader effects than previously thought. Increased research attention to intergroup contact similarly made possible a meta-analysis that established the pervasive effectiveness of intergroup contact to reduce prejudice under a wide range of conditions. The article closes by demonstrating how the three theories relate to each other and contribute to our understanding of prejudice and its reduction. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology Volume 67 is January 03, 2016. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates.
The social category “children” defines a group of individuals who are perceived to be distinct, with essential characteristics including innocence and the need for protection (Haslam, Rothschild, & Ernst, 2000). The present research examined whether Black boys are given the protections of childhood equally to their peers. We tested 3 hypotheses: (a) that Black boys are seen as less “childlike” than their White peers, (b) that the characteristics associated with childhood will be applied less when thinking specifically about Black boys relative to White boys, and (c) that these trends would be exacerbated in contexts where Black males are dehumanized by associating them (implicitly) with apes (Goff, Eberhardt, Williams, & Jackson, 2008). We expected, derivative of these 3 principal hypotheses, that individuals would perceive Black boys as being more responsible for their actions and as being more appropriate targets for police violence. We find support for these hypotheses across 4 studies using laboratory, field, and translational (mixed laboratory/field) methods. We find converging evidence that Black boys are seen as older and less innocent and that they prompt a less essential conception of childhood than do their White same-age peers. Further, our findings demonstrate that the Black/ape association predicted actual racial disparities in police violence toward children. These data represent the first attitude/behavior matching of its kind in a policing context. Taken together, this research suggests that dehumanization is a uniquely dangerous intergroup attitude, that intergroup perception of children is underexplored, and that both topics should be research priorities.
A critical pathway for conceptual innovation in the social is the construction of theoretical ideas based on empirical data. Grounded theory has become a leading approach promising the construction of novel theories. Yet grounded theory–based theoretical innovation has been scarce in part because of its commitment to let theories emerge inductively rather than imposing analytic frameworks a priori. We note, along with a long philosophical tradition, that induction does not logically lead to novel theoretical insights. Drawing from the theory of inference, meaning, and action of pragmatist philosopher Charles S. Peirce, we argue that abduction, rather than induction, should be the guiding principle of empirically based theory construction. Abduction refers to a creative inferential process aimed at producing new hypotheses and theories based on surprising research evidence. We propose that abductive analysis arises from actors’ social and intellectual positions but can be further aided by careful methodological data analysis. We outline how formal methodological steps enrich abductive analysis through the processes of revisiting, defamiliarization, and alternative casing.
Emerging adulthood is proposed as a new conception of development for the period from the late teens through the twenties, with a focus on ages 18–25. A theoretical background is presented. Then evidence is provided to support the idea that emerging adulthood is a distinct period demographically, subjectively, and in terms of identity explorations. How emerging adulthood differs from adolescence and young adulthood is explained. Finally, a cultural context for the idea of emerging adulthood is outlined, and it is specified that emerging adulthood exists only in cultures that allow young people a prolonged period of independent role exploration during the late teens and twenties.
This paper explores the possibility of constructing a field of
investigation based in African American Studies and borrowing from
queer theory and Black feminist analysis that is centered around the
experiences of those who stand on the (out)side of state-sanctioned,
normalized, White, middle- and upper-class, male heterosexuality. This
would entail a paradigmatic shift in how scholars of Black politics and
more broadly African American Studies think and write about those most
vulnerable in Black communities—those thought to be morally
wanting by both dominant society and other indigenous group members.
Using a theoretical framework for studying Black politics that
highlights the construction and malleability of categories as well as
the work of processes of normalization found in queer theory in tandem
with the detailed understanding of power, in particular as it is
structured around and through axes such as race, gender, and class
found in African American Studies, we might gain new insights into the
everyday politics of those at the bottom in Black communities.
Relative deprivation (RD) is the judgment that one is worse off compared to some standard accompanied by feelings of anger and resentment. Social scientists use RD to predict a wide range of significant outcome variables: collective action, individual achievement and deviance, intergroup attitudes, and physical and mental health. But the results are often weak and inconsistent. The authors draw on a theoretical and meta-analytic review (210 studies composing 293 independent samples, 421 tests, and 186,073 respondents) to present a model that integrates group and individual RD. RD measures that (a) include justice-related affect, (b) match the outcome level of analysis, and (c) use higher quality measures yield significantly stronger relationships. Future research should focus on appropriate RD measurement, angry resentment, and the inclusion of theoretically relevant situational appraisals. Such methodological improvements would revitalize RD as a useful social psychological predictor of a wide range of important individual and social processes.
We examine "subjective weathering" among females entering adulthood, using three waves of a national study. Subjective weathering is a social psychological component of aging that is associated with "physical weathering" previously observed in research on physical health. We examine the influence of stressors from childhood and adolescence on subjective weathering and depressive symptoms in emerging adulthood. Childhood abuse is associated with early menarche, as anticipated in research on physical weathering. Early menarche and child abuse are in turn associated with intimate partner violence exposure in adolescence. Both early menarche and intimate partner violence are associated with early parenthood and diminish the likelihood of high school graduation. These experiences culminate in subjective weathering associated with depressive symptoms in emerging adulthood. Our findings connect physical and subjective weathering within the stress process paradigm.
The U.S. population of former prison inmates is large and growing. The period immediately after release may be challenging for former inmates and may involve substantial health risks. We studied the risk of death among former inmates soon after their release from Washington State prisons.
We conducted a retrospective cohort study of all inmates released from the Washington State Department of Corrections from July 1999 through December 2003. Prison records were linked to the National Death Index. Data for comparison with Washington State residents were obtained from the Wide-ranging OnLine Data for Epidemiologic Research system of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Mortality rates among former inmates were compared with those among other state residents with the use of indirect standardization and adjustment for age, sex, and race.
Of 30,237 released inmates, 443 died during a mean follow-up period of 1.9 years. The overall mortality rate was 777 deaths per 100,000 person-years. The adjusted risk of death among former inmates was 3.5 times that among other state residents (95% confidence interval [CI], 3.2 to 3.8). During the first 2 weeks after release, the risk of death among former inmates was 12.7 (95% CI, 9.2 to 17.4) times that among other state residents, with a markedly elevated relative risk of death from drug overdose (129; 95% CI, 89 to 186). The leading causes of death among former inmates were drug overdose, cardiovascular disease, homicide, and suicide.
Former prison inmates were at high risk for death after release from prison, particularly during the first 2 weeks. Interventions are necessary to reduce the risk of death after release from prison.
Thousands of pregnant women pass through our nation's jails every year. What happens to them as they carry their pregnancies in a space of punishment? In this time when the public safety net is frayed, incarceration has become a central and racialized strategy for managing the poor. This book explores how jail has, paradoxically, become a place where women can find care. Focusing on the experiences of incarcerated pregnant women as well as on the practices of the jail guards and health providers who care for them. The book describes the contradictory ways that care and maternal identity emerge within a punitive space presumed to be devoid of care. It argues that jail is not simply a disciplinary institution that serves to punish, rather, when understood in the context of the poverty, addiction, violence, and racial oppression that characterize these women's lives and their reproduction, jail can become a safety net for women on the margins of society.
Criminalization is the process by which people are classified by authorities as criminal and become subject to the control of criminal justice agencies— police, courts, and correctional departments. “Careers in criminalization” refers to sustained criminal justice involvement through repeated incarceration and ongoing police and court contact. Careers in criminalization are produced through a mutually reinforcing process of system-induced harms and criminal justice traps that combine to prolong surveillance and penal control. System-induced harms are physical, psychological, and reputational
injuries that may be criminogenic or otherwise impede adjustment to community life. Criminal justice traps are cycles of involvement created through intensive surveillance, compliance enforcement, and system marking. The idea of careers in criminalization has special relevance for understanding prisoner reentry, in which criminal justice institutions and officials sustain surveillance and penal control, delaying social integration.
This article examines an important and thorny problem in interview research: How to assess whether what people say motivated their actions actually did so? We ask three questions: What specific challenges are at play? How have researchers addressed them? And how should those strategies be evaluated? We argue that such research faces at least five challenges— deception, recall error, reasonableness bias, intentionality bias, and single-motive bias—that more than a dozen strategies have been deployed to address them; that the strategies have been external, internal, or interactional in nature; and that each class of strategies demands distinct evaluation criteria. Researchers will likely fail to uncover motivation if they ignore the possibility of each challenge, conflate one challenge with another, or deploy strategies unmatched to the challenge at hand. Our work helps systematize the evaluation of interview-based studies of motivated action and strengthen the scientific foundations of in-depth interview research.
Over 277,000 African Americans migrated to Chicago between 1900 and 1940, an influx unsurpassed in any other northern city. From the start, carceral powers literally and figuratively created a prison-like environment to contain these African Americans within the so-called Black Belt on the city's South Side. A geographic study of race and gender, this book casts light upon the ubiquitous—and ordinary—ways carceral power functions in places where African Americans live. Moving from the kitchenette to the prison cell, and mining forgotten facts from sources as diverse as maps and memoirs, the book explores the myriad architectures of confinement, policing, surveillance, urban planning, and incarceration. In particular, it investigates how the ongoing carceral effort oriented and imbued black male bodies and gender performance from the Progressive era to the present. The result is an essential interdisciplinary study that highlights the racialization of space, the role of containment in subordinating African Americans, the politics of mobility under conditions of alleged freedom, and the ways black men cope with—and resist—spacial containment. A timely response to the massive upswing in carceral forms within society, the book examines how these mechanisms came to exist, why society aimed them against African Americans, and the consequences for black communities and black masculinity both historically and today.
How do parents weigh police presence and police activity in their assessments of a neighborhood’s suitability for raising children? How do place-bound institutions relate to neighborhood frames? This article introduces located institutions as a way of articulating how certain institutions—here, the police—become a lens through which parents make meaning of places and thus express preferences for particular neighborhoods or communities. By drawing from 73 interviews with a diverse sample of parents in Cuyahoga County, Ohio, this article shows how parents draw on their perceptions of the police as an attractive amenity or a public nuisance as a way of articulating neighborhood frames and making sense of their residential preferences. More broadly, this article envisions the perception of institutions as a key mechanism that shapes neighborhood frames and residential preferences.
The standard account of policy feedback holds that social policy can be self-reinforcing: policies provide resources that promote economic security and well-being, and they also encourage beneficiaries to engage with government. Criminal justice policies have typically had the opposite effect: they embolden those with interests in a punitive policy agenda, while disempowering those most affected by the policies. This is of particular concern for children and adolescents in race-class subjugated communities (RCS), whose first encounters with government beyond public schooling often come through police contact and carry adverse social and political consequences at a critical developmental stage. In this article, we reimagine youth engagement with the state, arguing for substantial reductions in police surveillance of young people and for the promotion of youth attachment to civic life. We call for an investment in institutions, both state-based and community-based, that reinforce political inclusion and civic belonging.
Qualitative coding procedures emanating from grounded theory were limited by technologies of the 1960s: colored pens, scissors, and index cards. Today, electronic documents can be flexibly stored, retrieved, and cross-referenced using qualitative data analysis (QDA) software. We argue the oft-cited grounded theory framework poorly fits many features of contemporary sociological interview studies, including large samples, coding by teams, and mixed-method analysis. The grounded theory approach also hampers transparency and does not facilitate reanalysis or secondary analysis of interview data. We begin by summarizing grounded theory’s assumptions about coding and analysis. We then analyze published articles from American Sociological Association flagship journals, demonstrating that current conventions for semistructured interview studies depart from the grounded theory framework. Based on experience analyzing interview data, we suggest steps in data organization and analysis to better utilize QDA technology. Our goal is to support rigorous, transparent, and flexible analysis of in-depth interview data. We end by discussing strengths and limitations of our twenty-first-century approach.
With evidence comprising three years of ethnographic research in child support courts and 125 in-depth interviews with formerly incarcerated fathers, the author shows how criminal justice and child support provisions work in tandem to create complicated entanglements for fathers. She develops the concept of incarcerated fatherhood—a matrix of laws, policies, and institutional practices that shape formerly incarcerated men’s relationship to parenting. On the one hand, she analyzes the debt of imprisonment, or the material costs of paternal incarceration; on the other, she examines the imprisonment of debt, or the punitive costs of child support debt. She then brings these two entanglements together to analyze their effects on men’s lives as fathers. Instead of “piling up” in men’s lives, these entanglements work in circular ways to form feedback loops of disadvantage that create serious obstacles for men as parents and complicate precisely those relationships proven essential for reintegration after prison: familial relations of care, reciprocity, and interdependence.
"When I testify in court, I am often asked: 'What is the damage of long-term solitary confinement?' Many prisoners emerge from prison after years in solitary with very serious psychiatric symptoms even though outwardly they may appear emotionally stable. The damage from isolation is dreadfully real." -Terry Allen Kupers Imagine spending nearly twenty-four hours a day alone, confined to an eight-by-ten-foot windowless cell. This is the reality of approximately one hundred thousand inmates in solitary confinement in the United States today. Terry Allen Kupers, one of the nation's foremost experts on the mental health effects of solitary confinement, tells the powerful stories of the inmates he has interviewed while investigating prison conditions during the past forty years. Touring supermax security prisons as a forensic psychiatrist, Kupers has met prisoners who have been viciously beaten or raped, subdued with immobilizing gas, or ignored in the face of urgent medical and psychiatric needs. Kupers criticizes the physical and psychological abuse of prisoners and then offers rehabilitative alternatives to supermax isolation. Solitary is a must-read for anyone interested in understanding the true damage that solitary confinement inflicts on individuals living in isolation as well as on our society as a whole.
Men and women who go to prison are poor and involved in violence. This article explores the connection between poverty and violence for a sample of former prisoners who left incarceration and settled in the Boston area. Analysis of life history data indicates that violence arises in poor contexts across the life course because they are often chaotic and lack informal sources of social control; under these conditions, violence often comes to be positively valued. This situational perspective on violence diverges from the criminal justice perspective, in which offenders and victims represent distinct classes of people and punishment involves the assessment of individual culpability.
Beginning with W.E.B. Du Bois's The Philadelphia Negro and Ida B. Wells's Southern Horrors, this review revisits and examines sociological research on urban Black Americans from the late nineteenth century to the present. Focusing on the approaches, frameworks, and sociological insights that emerged over this period, we examine this scholarship within two broad frames: the deficit frame and the asset frame. The deficit frame includes scholarship emphasizing both the structures that negatively affect Black urban life (e.g., disappearance of work, residential segregation, poor education, urban poverty) and the cultural “deficits” that either are adaptations to those structural realities or (as some deficit scholars argue) are the cause of urban Black hardships. The asset frame includes scholarship focusing on the agency and cultural contributions of urban Black Americans. Detailing the historical origins and contemporary use of these frames, we demonstrate how the sociology of urban Black America remains a reflection of the possibilities and problems of the broader discipline. The review concludes by outlining new conceptual opportunities offered by what we refer to as chocolate city sociology.
This article provides a ground-level investigation into the lives of penal inmates, linking the literature on race making and penal management to provide an understanding of racial formation processes in a modern penal institution. Drawing on 135 days of ethnographic data collected as an inmate in a Southern California county jail system, the author argues that inmates are subjected to two mutually constitutive racial projects—one institutional and the other microinteractional. Operating in symbiosis within a narrative of risk management, these racial projects increase (rather than decrease) incidents of intraracial violence and the potential for interracial violence. These findings have implications for understanding the process of racialization and evaluating the effectiveness of penal management strategies.
Studies of social stratification and factors that contribute to inequalities by indices such as race, ethnicity, and gender are core contributions sociologists make to the discipline and to general discourse. The measurement and construction of such indices play a crucial role in the understanding or misunderstanding of inequalities in society. Focusing on within-group heterogeneity of persons of Hispanic origin, the authors examined the percentage of incarceration to demonstrate the varied understandings that arise from the changing definitions and categorizations of racial and ethnic groups in the United States. As social scientists, we often ask the general question of if and how racial and ethnic categorizations affect a specific area; however, we tend to pay less attention to how the exclusion of incarcerated persons from many of the national surveys that inform our areas of study affects the knowledge we produce. This is particularly important because the U.S. incarcerated population consists mostly of persons from marginalized groups. Not taking incarcerated populations into account paints a misleading picture of the United States regarding racial and ethnic inequalities. It is imperative that we recognize the implications of using race and ethnicity in studies such that our findings do not contribute to inaccurate representations of society.
An unrelenting prison boom, marked by racial disparities, characterized the latter third of the twentieth century. Drawing upon broadly representative survey data and qualitative interviews, Children of the Prison Boom describes the devastating effects of America's experiment in mass incarceration for a generation of vulnerable children. Parental imprisonment has transformed from an event affecting only the unluckiest of children-children of parents whose involvement in crime would have been quite serious-to one that is remarkably common, especially for black children. Even for high-risk youth, Children of the Prison Boom shows that paternal incarceration makes a bad situation worse, increasing mental health and behavioral problems, infant mortality, and child homelessness. These findings have broad implications for social inequality. Contrary to a great deal of research on the consequences of mass incarceration for inequality among adult men, these harms to children translate into large-scale increases in racial inequalities at the aggregate level. Parental imprisonment has become a distinctively American force for promoting intergenerational social inequality that should be placed alongside a decaying urban public school system and highly concentrated disadvantaged populations in urban centers as factors that distinctively touch-and disadvantage-poor black children. More troubling, even if incarceration rates were reduced dramatically in the near future, the long-term harms of incarcerating marginalized men have yet to be fully revealed. Optimism about current reductions in the imprisonment rate and the resilience of children must therefore be set against the backdrop of the children of the prison boom-a lost generation now coming of age.
This essay investigates the discrepancy between the negative impact incarceration has on life outcomes and offenders’ subjective
perception of incarceration as a positive turning point. Building on three years of fieldwork with 23 juvenile offenders in
Boston and Chicago, this essay contends that the institutional structures of juvenile justice encourage the teenagers to frame
their incarceration a positive turning point. At the same time, the punitive framework of incarceration restricts the young
men’s ability to exercise creative agency in relation to their desired non-deviant identity. Consequently, they are unable
to develop viable strategies of action that could sustain desistance after their release.
Although growth in the U.S. prison population over the past twenty-five years has been widely discussed, few studies examine changes in inequality in imprisonment. We study penal inequality by estimating lifetime risks of imprisonment for black and white men at different levels of education. Combining administrative, survey, and census data, we estimate that among men born between 1965 and 1969, 3 percent of whites and 20 percent of blacks had served time in prison by their early thirties. The risks of incarceration are highly stratified by education. Among black men born during this period, 30 percent of those without college education and nearly 60 percent of high school dropouts went to prison by 1999. The novel pervasiveness of imprisonment indicates the emergence of incarceration as a new stage in the life course of young low-skill black men.
The degree and scope of criminal justice surveillance increased dramatically in the United States over the past four decades. Recent qualitative research suggests the rise in surveillance may be met with a concomitant increase in efforts to evade it. To date, however, there has been no quantitative empirical test of this theory. In this article, I introduce the concept of "system avoidance," whereby individuals who have had contact with the criminal justice system avoid surveilling institutions that keep formal records. Using data from Add Health (n = 15,170) and the NLSY97 (n = 8,894), I find that individuals who have been stopped by police, arrested, convicted, or incarcerated are less likely to interact with surveilling institutions, including medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions, than their counterparts who have not had criminal justice contact. By contrast, individuals with criminal justice contact are no less likely to participate in civic or religious institutions. Because criminal justice contact is disproportionately distributed, this study suggests system avoidance is a potential mechanism through which the criminal justice system contributes to social stratification: it severs an already marginalized subpopulation from institutions that are pivotal to desistance from crime and their own integration into broader society.
Precocious adoption of adult roles and responsibilities at an early age often has been linked to substance abuse and criminal behavior. Yet, much of the existing research suggests that early offending behaviors induce precocious movement into adulthood; less attention has focused on the way in which early adoption of adult roles and responsibilities might itself contribute to the onset of offending. In the following article, we examine the cumulative impact of early transitions into adult roles and responsibilities on the onset of methamphetamine (MA) use. Through inductive analyses of interviews with women methamphetamine users, we identified a range of adult roles and responsibilities that women described as facilitating their initiation into MA use, including family caretaking, motherhood, independent living, and peer and romantic associations with adults. Such findings have theoretical implications for both life‐course perspectives and feminist pathways research. They highlight the importance of attending to the timing and sequencing of experiences as well as highlight the gendered nature of these processes.
This chapter introduces the innovative field-based studies on disadvantaged men that are featured in this volume. Together, these studies of disadvantaged men from diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds and both urban and nonurban settings complement and extend recent discussions of emerging adulthood, which typically conceptualizes the transition to adulthood as a normative and linear process. The authors offer that the research presented here provides a more accurate rendering of the transition to adulthood for young disadvantaged men. For disadvantaged young men, the transition to adulthood is often complex and nonlinear, and features a diversity of pathways that are often overlooked in contemporary research on transitions to adulthood. The chapter ends with a call for research and theory that better reflects the precarious nature of pathways to adulthood for disadvantaged men in urban and nonurban settings. Researchers are encouraged to draw on findings from field-based studies to inform policies and practices directed at minimizing the marginalization of disadvantaged men from mainstream society. © 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
Today, ethnographers and qualitative researchers in fields such as urban poverty, immigration, and social inequality face an environment in which their work will be read, cited, and assessed by demographers, quantitative sociologists, and even economists. They also face a demand for case studies of poor, minority, or immigrant groups and neighborhoods that not only generate theory but also somehow speak to empirical conditions in other cases (not observed). Many have responded by incorporating elements of quantitative methods into their designs, such as selecting respondents `at random' for small, in-depth interview projects or identifying `representative' neighborhoods for ethnographic case studies, aiming to increase generalizability. This article assesses these strategies and argues that they fall short of their objectives. Recognizing the importance of the predicament underlying the strategies — to determine how case studies can speak empirically to other cases — it presents two alternatives to current practices, and calls for greater clarity in the logic of design when producing ethnographic research in a multi-method intellectual environment.
Using data from the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics and Census Bureau, I estimate death rates of working-age prisoners and
nonprisoners by sex and race. Incarceration was more detrimental to females in comparison to their male counterparts in the
period covered by this study. White male prisoners had higher death rates than white males who were not in prison. Black male
prisoners, however, consistently exhibited lower death rates than black male nonprisoners did. Additionally, the findings
indicate that while the relative difference in mortality levels of white and black males was quite high outside of prison,
it essentially disappeared in prison. Notably, removing deaths caused by firearms and motor vehicles in the nonprison population
accounted for some of the mortality differential between black prisoners and nonprisoners. The death rates of the other groups
analyzed suggest that prison is an unhealthy environment; yet, prison appears to be a healthier place than the typical environment
of the nonincarcerated black male population. These findings suggest that firearms and motor vehicle accidents do not sufficiently
explain the higher death rates of black males, and they indicate that a lack of basic healthcare may be implicated in the
death rates of black males not incarcerated.
To explain the astounding over-representation of blacks behind bars that has driven mass imprisonment in the United States, one must break out of the `crime-and-punishment' paradigm to reckon the extra-penological function of the criminal justice system as instrument for the management of dispossessed and dishonored groups. This article places the prison in the historical sequence of `peculiar institutions' that have shouldered the task of defining and confining African Americans, alongside slavery, the Jim Crow regime, and the ghetto. The recent upsurge in black incarceration results from the crisis of the ghetto as device for caste control and the correlative need for a substitute apparatus for the containment of lower-class African Americans. In the post-Civil Rights era, the vestiges of the dark ghetto and the expanding prison system have become linked by a triple relationship of functional equivalency, structural homology, and cultural fusion, spawning a carceral continuum that entraps a population of younger black men rejected by the deregulated wage-labor market. This carceral mesh has been solidified by changes that have reshaped the urban `Black Belt' of mid-century so as to make the ghetto more like a prison and undermined the `inmate society' residing in U.S. penitentiaries in ways that make the prison more like a ghetto. The resulting symbiosis between ghetto and prison not only perpetuates the socioeconomic marginality and symbolic taint of the black subproletariat, feeding the runaway growth of the carceral system. It also plays a pivotal role in the remaking of `race', the redefinition of the citizenry via the production of a racialized public culture of vilification of criminals, and the construction of a post-Keynesian state that replaces the social-welfare treatment of poverty by its penal management.
Objectives:
I investigated the differential impact of the dose-response of length of stay on postprison mortality among parolees.
Methods:
Using 1989-2003 New York State parole administrative data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics on state correctional facilities, I employed multinomial logistic regression analyses and formal demographic techniques that used the life table of the populations to deduce changes in life expectancy.
Results:
Each additional year in prison produced a 15.6% increase in the odds of death for parolees, which translated to a 2-year decline in life expectancy for each year served in prison. The risk was highest upon release from prison and declined over time. The time to recovery, or the lowest risk level, was approximately two thirds of the time served in prison.
Conclusions:
Incarceration reduces life span. Future research should investigate the pathways to this higher mortality and the possibilities of recovery.
With the tremendous rise in the United States' incarceration rates over the last four decades, historically high numbers of young African Americans are spending their "emerging adulthood" (as theorized by Arnett) in close contact with the penitentiary. In contrast to the exploration of future possibilities facilitated by academic, military, and professional institutions geared toward people in this life stage, imprisonment typically restricts one's social, occupational, and civic opportunities during and after confinement. In this article, I draw on in-depth interviews with young men who had recently exited state prison and their intimate partners to probe the meanings of incarceration for emerging adults in the neoliberal era. This investigation invokes Merton and Barber's concept of sociological ambivalence, Blankenship's discussion of sociological thriving, and Bourdieu's notion of amor fati to analyze the paradoxically positive accounts offered by young people when describing their early experiences with the prison. I argue that these narratives must be interpreted in the broader context of diminished social welfare and intensified socioeconomic disadvantage that force poor people to turn to a punitive institution as a "resource" for the social goods distributed through valorized channels to their more privileged peers. This analysis invites further research by highlighting the necessity of developing a thorough understanding of the dominant role of the prison as a shaping institution at a critical juncture in the lives of those born into poverty.
This article presents an emergent conceptual model of childhood adultification and economic disadvantage derived from 5 longitudinal ethnographies of children and adolescents growing up in low-income families. Childhood adultification involves contextual, social, and developmental processes in which youth are prematurely, and often inappropriately, exposed to adult knowledge and assume extensive adult roles and responsibilities within their family networks. Exemplar cases from the ethnographies are integrated in the discussion to illustrate components of the model. Four successive levels of adultification are described: precocious knowledge, mentored-adultification, peerification/spousification, and parentification. The developmental assets and liabilities children incur also are discussed. Recommendations for school, health care, and social service practitioners working with low-income families and children are provided.
We compared mortality rates among state prisoners and other state residents to identify prisoners' health care needs.
We linked North Carolina prison records with state death records for 1995-2005 to estimate all-cause and cause-specific death rates among black and white male prisoners ages 20-79 years and used standardized mortality ratios (SMRs) to compare these observed deaths with the expected number on the basis of death rates among state residents.
The all-cause SMR of black prisoners was 0.52 (95% confidence interval, 0.48-0.57), with fewer deaths than expected from accidents, homicides, cardiovascular disease, and cancer. The all-cause SMR of white prisoners was 1.12 (95% confidence interval, 1.01-1.25) with fewer deaths than expected for accidents but more deaths than expected from viral hepatitis, liver disease, cancer, chronic lower respiratory disease, and HIV.
The mortality of black prisoners was lower than that of black state residents for both traumatic and chronic causes of death. The mortality of white prisoners was lower than that of white state residents for accidents but greater for several chronic causes of death. Future studies should investigate the effect of prisoners' preincarceration and in-prison morbidity, the prison environment, and prison health care on prisoners' patterns of mortality.
By quadrupling the number of people behind bars in two decades, the United States has become the world leader in incarceration. Much has been written on the men who make up the vast majority of the nationâs two million inmates. But what of the women they leave behind? Doing Time Together vividly details the ways that prisons shape and infiltrate the lives of women with husbands, fiancés, and boyfriends on the inside. Megan Comfort spent years getting to know women visiting men at San Quentin State Prison, observing how their romantic relationships drew them into contact with the penitentiary. Tangling with the prisonâs intrusive scrutiny and rigid rules turns these women into âquasi-inmates,â eroding the boundary between home and prison and altering their sense of intimacy, love, and justice. Yet Comfort also finds that with social welfare weakened, prisons are the most powerful public institutions available to women struggling to overcome untreated social ills and sustain relationships with marginalized men. As a result, they express great ambivalence about the prison and the control it exerts over their daily lives. An illuminating analysis of women caught in the shadow of Americaâs massive prison system, Comfortâs book will be essential for anyone concerned with the consequences of our punitive culture.
Recognizing Invisible Violence: A Thirty-Year Ethnographic
- Philippe Bourgois
- Goffman Alice