‘I can't say I am a recovering addict. I am recovered’: Latinx Testimonies of Pentecostal Healing

2020 Rise to the challenge

The provision of mental health services in American jails requires a working understanding of the societal forces that shape the American criminal legal system and the culture and experiences of those who are incarcerated. Structural inequities that exist in American society have led to the overrepresentation of certain racial and sexual minorities in the criminal legal system, which, in turn, can impact clinical presentations and decision-making by correctional health care staff. This chapter will provide an overview of the relationship between race, sexual and gender identity, and jail incarceration in the United States. It will apply this information to the correctional clinical setting and provide guidance and tools to help mental health clinicians working in jails deliver clinical care that is culturally and structurally informed.

We performed a rigorous, comprehensive literature search using multiple databases. The 38 included articles addressed multiple types of chronic traumas, including historical trauma, poverty, minority stress, mass incarceration, and ACEs. A variety of definitions of community resilience were cited, several of which stressed the ability to thrive despite risk factors and the safety and wellbeing of residents. Few articles operationalized community resilience within the context of ACEs, suggesting significant gaps in the literature. This review can serve as an important building block to develop expanded definitions of community resilience for chronic traumas and assist communities in promoting community-wide responses to ACEs.

America, all things not being equal

Rights, Gifts, Repair

This special issue of the Journal of Islamic Law started with one question: how do Islamic legal traditions, whether in theory or in practice, inform contemporary debates on racial justice and equality, particularly with the notable rise of mass incarceration? Exploring this question appeared to us critical in several respects. First, race continues to be a major fault line in today’s world—W. E. B. Dubois’s color line persists. Race also continues to affect the way Black people and other people of color—including many Muslims—are treated on a day-to-day basis. Second, the Black Lives Matter moment brought realist approaches to law out of law reviews and into the mainstream conversation through its focus on structural inequalities, mass incarceration, and the policing of communities of color and immigrants in the United States. No matter what law said it did, one had to look at what it actually did to affect (different segments of) society. Third, Muslims, be it in the United States or in the Global South, were not simply subjects or victims of the law or of its systems. We recognized that they are actors shaping the course of the developments in law and society that touch on racial equality, criminal justice, and equality; and they sometimes draw on Islamic traditions in doing so. We sought to examine how.

From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation is an insightful and historical analysis of racism, structural inequality, mass incarceration, and police violence against blacks in the triumphantly dubb...

This special issue of the Journal of Islamic Law started with one question: how do Islamic legal traditions, whether in theory or in practice, inform contemporary debates on racial justice and equality, particularly with the notable rise of mass incarceration? Exploring this question appeared to us critical in several respects. First, race continues to be a major fault line in today’s world—W. E. B. Dubois’s color line persists. Race also continues to affect the way Black people and other people of color—including many Muslims—are treated on a day-to-day basis. Second, the Black Lives Matter moment brought realist approaches to law out of law reviews and into the mainstream conversation through its focus on structural inequalities, mass incarceration, and the policing of communities of color and immigrants in the United States. No matter what law said it did, one had to look at what it actually did to affect (different segments of) society. Third, Muslims, be it in the United States or in the Global South, were not simply subjects or victims of the law or of its systems. We recognized that they are actors shaping the course of the developments in law and society that touch on racial equality, criminal justice, and equality; and they sometimes draw on Islamic traditions in doing so. We sought to examine how.

The HIV/AIDS infection rate today among African American women is twenty times higher than for non-Hispanic white women. Some recent public health studies suggest that the disparities we see in HIV/AIDS between black women and other groups is linked to disproportionately high rates of incarceration for black men in the United States. The connection between the HIV/AIDS epidemic and mass incarceration needs to be examined. Moral and political issues arise insofar as police profiling and racial bias in sentencing are fueling the HIV/AIDS crisis in African American communities.

Announcements

Portraying Issues of Incarceration and (In)Justice for Young Readers Ramona Caponegro (bio) 2020 marked the tenth anniversary of Michelle Alexander's groundbreaking work, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, which brought unprecedented attention to the ongoing discrimination present in the US criminal justice system and its many devastating effects, particularly in Black and Latinx communities. In the preface to the tenth anniversary edition, Alexander states, "It has been an astonishing decade. Everything and nothing has changed" (ix). Alexander is describing the seemingly rapid changes and ongoing stagnation in how the United States deals with its racial (racist) history and the use of mass incarceration as a means of racial and social control. Numerous other scholarly and popular works, fiction and nonfiction, have also continued to address the inequities built into the US legal system. These representations and analyses have been accompanied by steps both forward and backward in terms of the law's evolution and its enforcement. As more frequent discussions about the criminal justice system have entered the public consciousness again, more books about trials, prisons, and the effects of mass incarceration have been published for children and young adults. I wrote my first graduate term paper on children's books about prisons in 2004, and I finished my dissertation about representations of the legal system for young readers in the Victorian era and the contemporary era—two periods of massive prison expansion—in 2010. Since completing this project, I've been heartened to see not only more books about incarceration being published, but also that these books explore legal systems and issues of incarceration in increasingly complex ways and from a greater variety of perspectives, while often gaining more critical attention.1 For example, in Milo Imagines the World (2021), written by Matt de la Peña and illustrated by Christian Robinson, a new, more expansive take on the [End Page 351] visiting-an-incarcerated-parent picture book emerges, in which Milo is able to envision multiple possibilities for the people he observes on the subway ride to the prison, just as he sees his mother as far more than a person who is currently behind bars. As Milo's picture of his family indicates, her incarceration does not wholly define their relationship, nor is it the focus of the book, which emphasizes the limitations of people's outward appearances to reveal their stories. Kimberly Brubaker Bradley's middle grade novel Fighting for Words (2020) also includes a mother who is incarcerated, albeit one who appears far less loving than Milo's mother. However, the novel focuses more on how two sisters deal with the traumatic aftermath of sexual abuse, including their decisions about testifying against their abuser. While Bradley makes it abundantly clear that numerous institutions, including the legal system, let the sisters down horribly, Della, the younger sister, still sees the courtroom and prison as the best defenses against their abuser, both for them and for society. In contrast, the young adult verse novel Punching the Air (2020) by Ibi Zoboi and Yusef Salaam, one of the Exonerated Five, highlights the repeated failures of the US criminal justice system, first in sending Amal to prison and then in its continual efforts to dehumanize him and the other inmates. Zoboi and Salaam, echoing points made by Alexander, stress the connections between slavery and incarceration: My life, my whole damn lifebefore that courtroombefore that trialbefore that nightwas like Africa And this door leads to a slave shipAnd maybe jail maybe jailis is America. (61) These three books, aimed at three different audiences and focused on characters with different connections to the legal system, tell readers vastly different stories, though none of the stories present the system in a fully positive light. Of course, the stories vary because of their different intended audiences and formats, but also because the legal system is so complicated, making it essential for young readers to learn about it from multiple perspectives while they're growing up. The audiences for these stories include future voters and, ideally, changemakers, emphasizing the need to present people in the criminal justice system as complex, fully...

Prison's second death row

Trauma is a popular but poorly defined concept. As a psychological phenomenon, people use the term trauma to refer to a range of diagnosable conditions as well as to a generalized, subclinical feeling of distress. As a community-level phenomenon, collective trauma has been conceptualized in diverse manners across various contexts, such as post-war societies, communities that have experienced a natural disaster or a terrorist attack, and social groupings that have experienced persecution across multiple generations. Rarely, however, has collective trauma been theorized as an outgrowth of neighborhood violence in U.S. cities. The objective of this study is to quantify the prevalence of psychological trauma, as well as to explore the nature of collective trauma, in neighborhoods that experience chronic, pervasive community violence. Conceptualizing collective trauma at the neighborhood level involves investigating the extent to which community-level responses to neighborhood violence adhere to existing theoretical constructs for collective trauma. It also requires expanding existing theory to account for the ways in which collectivities experience and culturally process chronic social suffering. By quantifying psychological trauma and by more precisely defining collective trauma in Boston neighborhoods, this study offers insights as to how communities can recover from or process trauma, whether existing programming can adequately address psychological and collective trauma, and what policies or structures may contribute to both individual and community recovery and resilience. This study uses primary and secondary survey analysis, as well as qualitative data from focus groups and in-depth personal interviews, to understand the individual impact of living in micro-neighborhoods in Roxbury, Boston that have experienced a high level of current and/ or historical violence, and to infer patterns across individual responses that may indicate collective impact. Based on primary data collection from the Understanding and Responding to Trauma Survey (URTS), the study finds that rates of PTSD in these micro-neighborhoods exceed estimates aggregated at the zip code and city level, but that clinical mental health services may be insufficient and/ or underutilized due to knowledge, confidence, and availability gaps. Also, this study uses factor analysis to create and test indices for neighborhood narrative frames that may indicate the presence of collective trauma. Residents who have a personal or proximate experience of violence in their neighborhood understand and frame their neighborhood's history and identity in substantively different ways than individuals who have not directly experienced violence in the neighborhood; on average, they have a stronger sense of critical consciousness about external stigmatization and structural inequities between neighborhoods and have higher levels of internalized stigma toward their neighborhoods. In addition, individuals who have experienced neighborhood violence display higher levels of civic activism, on average. By testing the narrative frames indices derived from the Boston survey within the larger, multi-level PHDCN 1994-1995 Community Survey dataset, this study further finds that individuals who reside in neighborhoods with higher current levels of violent victimization also display higher levels civic activism, higher levels of critical consciousness about structural inequities between neighborhoods, and higher levels of internalized stigma, independent of their personal experience of violence. Based on corroboration with qualitative individual and group interviews, these three indices-civic activism, critical frames, and stigma frames-constitute quantifiable indices of collective trauma related to neighborhood violence. These indices, as well as PTSD, are further associated with embeddedness in neighborhood social networks, participation in neighborhood social and civic groups, and feelings of attachment to neighborhood collective identity. Qualitative data from a focus group and interviews reinforce the finding that that collective trauma is a phenomenon related to specific framings of neighborhood collective identity and adheres to a model of cultural trauma proposed by scholars of post-conflict, national contexts. Despite the limitations of using individual responses to describe a social concept via measures of central tendency, by testing and expanding theoretical conceptions of community-level trauma, this study creates indices for collective trauma that can enable comparison between neighborhoods and thus serve as a basis for further study of the collective impact of chronic, pervasive violence on marginalized communities. This research also expands conceptualizations of collective trauma and demonstrates that the theory of cultural trauma may be applied to a context of ongoing neighborhood violence. In addition, the results for this study indicate several recommendations for the development of appropriate interventions and responses to mitigate the negative effects of chronic, pervasive violence.

Structural Inequities and the Impact of COVID-19 on Latinx Children: Implications for Child and Adolescent Mental Health Practice

The idea of migration as an adaptation strategy has gained traction in the debates on climate change and mobility. It emphasises migrants’(economic) agency and praises remittances as source of funding for household and community resilience. The environmental determinism of the previously dominant narratives on ‘climate refugees’ gives way to more accurate understanding of how environmental conditions interact with migration processes, thereby facilitating a convinced engagement by the migration and development communities. This article interrogates the discourses on migration as adaptation through the long-standing ‘migration and development’ debates. We show that, despite their aura of novelty within climate policy, the ‘new’ discourses build on ‘old’ foundations – i.e. the optimistic swings of the “migration anddevelopment pendulum” (de Haas 2012). Moreover, the ‘migration as adaptation’ thesis has not come with a deeper engagement with the structural inequalities that (re)produce socio-ecological vulnerabilities, impeding the mobility of some while forcing others into displacement. Rather, it mirrors the neoliberal version of the classical optimist take on the migration-development nexus, through which mainstream international agendas have tried to foster development and discipline mobility in the last few decades. The extent to which this proves a positive turn in climate (migration) policy is up to debate.