Effects Of Mass Incarceration Research Articles

Training on Corrections and Health Within U.S. Academic Health Professions Education: A Scoping Review.

Despite the scale, inequity, and consequences of mass incarceration, health care provider knowledge and awareness on correctional health remain limited. Understanding the educational experiences of health professions learners and the studies used to evaluate them can provide useful information about current gaps to guide future curricular improvement. To address this need, we conducted a scoping review of peer-reviewed studies examining United States-based academic health professions educational programs on correctional health. Studies were coded based on study characteristics, learner outcomes, and degree to which they contained elements described in relevant position statements by two professional medical associations. Overall, 27 articles (1975-2021) were included. Learner outcomes were primarily documented at the "reactions" (93%) and "learning" (52%) levels of the Kirkpatrick model (1979), relative to "behaviors" (11%) and "long-term outcomes" (0%). Comparison of curricula to select position statements revealed multiple content gaps in the realms of prevalent conditions requiring expertise (e.g., violence and self-harm); ethical and medical-legal considerations (e.g., privatization of correctional health care); and correctional health care systems, structures, and administration. Taken together, findings highlight gaps in, and opportunities for, correctional health educational programs. Addressing health care workforce training needs is a necessary yet insufficient step to achieving health equity for populations affected by incarceration.

Brazilian prisons in times of mass incarceration: Ambivalent transformations

AbstractMost of the scholarship on the ‘punitive turn’ has claimed that there have been two main trends in punishment since the 1970s: the rise of incarceration rates (quantitative dimension) and the worsening of prison conditions (qualitative dimension). Scholars argue that, in parallel with the rise of mass incarceration, there has been a fall of the rehabilitative ideal. In this view, prisons in core countries have basically operated as a warehouse, working towards neutralisation and incapacitation. Both trends are also viewed as reflecting a global convergence of penal policies. The analysis of the Brazilian case challenges this supposed universality. Drawing on official prison data, reports from non‐governmental organisations, and secondary data, I argue that mass incarceration has not been accompanied by the same qualitative changes to prisons in ‘Western countries’ and Brazil. First, features of the so‐called warehouse prison, such as low levels of prison activities, have always been present in Brazilian prisons, and are not an effect of mass incarceration. Furthermore, the consequences of mass incarceration in Brazilian prisons have, in fact, been ambivalent and, in some cases, may have alleviated inmates’ suffering, rather than intensifying experiences of confinement. Finally, instead of neutralising and controlling criminals, Brazilian prisons under mass incarceration have contributed to the emergence, empowerment, recruitment and organisation of gangs, whose powers now transcend the physical barriers of prison walls.

Justice for Incarcerated Moms Act of 2021: Reflections and recommendations.

In the last five decades, the number of women behind bars in the United States has risen exponentially. It is now estimated that there are nearly 58,000 admissions of pregnant people—disproportionately women of color—to jails and prisons each year. Recognizing the urgency and consequences of mass incarceration on pregnant people, their families, and communities, House Resolution 948: Justice for Incarcerated Moms Act of 2021 was introduced to Congress as a part of the Black Maternal Health Momnibus. The Justice for Incarcerated Moms Act aims to improve health care and promote dignity for incarcerated pregnant and parenting people through an array of policies and oversight. In this article, we review and reflect on the components of this bill within their broader public health and reproductive justice contexts. We close with recommendations for policymakers and professionals committed to promoting equity and justice for pregnant and postpartum incarcerated people.

Set up to fail: The politics, mechanisms, and effects of mass incarceration

The rise of the citizen security paradigm has complemented, rather than curtailed, authoritarian legacies in Latin America and the Caribbean. Notably, criminal justice and law enforcement policies continue to feed a wave of mass incarceration, evidenced in a dataset on incarceration in 21 countries for 1995–2020. El Salvador stands out as a unique case study, with the second-highest incarceration rate in the world. We analyze four key mechanisms driving mass incarceration in the country—increasing discretionary arrests, diluting due process guarantees, escalating criminalization, and harshening of sentences—, and unpack its uses and effects. Mass incarceration has criminalized transgressive identities and the poor, strengthened gangs organizationally, made gangs’ criminal activity more complex, and turned them into significant actors in Salvadoran political life. These effects are hallmarks of El Salvador’s notoriously failed “mano dura” strategy and pose major obstacles for desistance from crime and violence, as well as reentry after incarceration.

Black “Crime,” Public Hysteria, and the Cinema of Containment: Black Cinema Aesthetics from Willie Dynamite to The Interrupters and a/k/a Mrs. George Gilbert

This essay will explore the ways in which African American visual culture has attempted to negotiate criminalization and the current situation of what Richard Iton rightfully characterizes as “hyperincarceration.” It will explore the ways in which contemporary African American visual culture is engaged in negotiating between the literal material realities and consequences of mass incarceration and aesthetic constructions of violence. While mass incarceration is increasingly becoming understood as “the New Jim Crow” for African American political organizing, Black criminality has become the key lens through which questions of masculinity, class exclusion, gender, and selfhood get negotiated in African American visual culture. This essay will argue that the “subtext of ongoing Black captivity” is the pretext for much of what drives Black action genres and African American representation in general as a key signifier of a racialized identity and as an indicator of a Black subjectivity fraught with complexities of non-belonging.

Protective Factors to Promote Health and Flourishing in Black Youth Exposed to Parental Incarceration.

Mass incarceration of Black fathers and mothers in the United States has had an undeniably negative effect on the health and well-being of their children, families, and communities. Nearly 1 in every 9 Black youth in the United States has had an incarcerated parent compared to 1 in every 17 White youth. To mitigate the consequences of such historical and structural racism, family and community protective factors that promote health and flourishing in Black youth need exploration. The aim of this study was to understand the associations of protective family, school, and neighborhood factors of overall health and flourishing in Black youth ever exposed to parental incarceration. Using the 2016-2019 National Survey of Children's Health, secondary data analyses were conducted of Black youth ages 6-17 years exposed to parental incarceration (n = 839). Multivariable logistic regression models predicted the associations among protective family and community factors and two child outcomes of interest: overall good health status and flourishing. Overall good health status was measured dichotomously comparing children in "good, very good, or excellent" health to children in "fair or poor" health. Flourishing was measured as a count score using three survey questions designed to assess the child's curiosity and discovery about learning, resilience, and self-regulation. Protective factors of interest included family resilience and connectedness, neighborhood support and safety, and school safety. Other child and caregiver demographics and health characteristics were also included as covariates. Across all models, higher levels of family connectedness were associated with greater odds of having overall good health and flourishing in Black youth exposed to parental incarceration after adjusting for covariates and neighborhood and school protective characteristics. No significant associations were found between neighborhood or school protective factors and either outcome. To achieve health equity and maximize opportunities for all youth, we must remove the obstacles and consequences of mass incarceration. Improving the health and flourishing of Black youth who have had incarcerated parents requires greater investment in structural supports to bolster family connectedness and better evidence on how to support families affected by mass incarceration and structural racism.

Community consequences of mass incarceration: sparking neighborhood social problems and violent crime

ABSTRACT Punitive criminal justice policies caused incarceration and reentry rates to sharply increase in the era of mass incarceration. Disadvantaged communities of color have been disproportionately affected by those policies through heightened levels of prison cycling, which is the flow of individuals into and out of prison. Community-level prison cycling has harmful neighborhood consequences, including increased violent crime. This Boston-based study investigates how prison cycling influences crime by exploring three potential pathways. First, prison cycling may undermine beneficial social behavior, reduce collective efficacy, and create an environment susceptible to crime; second, prison cycling may stimulate neighborhood social problems that encourage crime; and third, prison cycling may simply have a direct, toxic relationship with neighborhood violent crime. The analysis employs Boston crime and prison cycling data,and neighborhood social environment data from the 2008 Boston Neighborhood Survey. Contrary to existing theoretical and empirical research, results suggest that prison cycling is not associated with collective efficacy. However, results indicate that prison cycling predicts neighborhood social problems and community violent crime, offering support for alternative theories on the prison cycling and crime relationship. The study concludes with recommendations for future research and policy implications.

Governing Marginality: Coercion and Care in Probation

Abstract While the scale and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States have been well-documented over the past two decades, sociologists have focused less attention on mass probation and the expansion of community supervision. Originally designed as a rehabilitative alternative to imprisonment, probation represents the largest form of penal control and a critical intersection between criminal justice and welfare—two systems that govern citizens at the margins. We analyze qualitative data from over 100 focus groups conducted in 2016-2017 with adults on probation and probation officers in several jurisdictions across the country to show the enmeshing of coercion and care in probation. Drawing on the concept of carceral citizenship, we detail the duties, burdens, and perverse benefits of supervision across four domains: relationships with probation officers, access to services and programs, time and financial constrictions, and the threat of revocation (or incarceration for non-compliance). We argue that probation provides barebones welfare services for some of the most vulnerable adults, while also imposing the unique harms of a criminal record, burdens of supervision, and risk of incarceration.

Portraying Issues of Incarceration and (In)Justice for Young Readers

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...

Turismo penitenciário e arranjos institucionais de mercado

A partir de pesquisa realizada em um município do extremo oeste do estado de São Paulo e convertido em complexo penitenciário, foi possível analisar as especificidades do sistema prisional paulista mediante o que se configurou como turismo penitenciário. O objetivo do artigo é analisar à luz da Sociologia Econômica os efeitos do encarceramento em massa a partir do recorte de mercado. O método consistiu em etnografia e entrevistas semi-estruturadas. A pesquisa conclui que o fluxo das visitantes, identificadas pela categoria nativa mulher de preso, reconverte não só o comércio local como já observado por outras pesquisas como igualmente seus significados, conforme observa Zelizer. Se os presos situam-se num lugar a parte, a política de interiorização dos presídios e sua respectiva dinâmica de mercado inserem as suas famílias num lugar a parte e aprofundam desigualdades. 
 Palavras-chave: Prisões. Turismo penitenciário. Estado. Mercado. Consumo.

Beyond Recidivism: An Outcome Evaluation of A Federal Reentry Court and A Critical Discussion of Outcomes that Matter

Relatively little empirical research has documented reentry courts’ effectiveness. Even less scholarship has critically evaluated their varied goals. A quasi-experimental outcome evaluation of a federal reentry court reveals that the program increases access to social services, decreases probation revocations, and increases future employment. However, the program does not reduce the likelihood of new arrests. These findings are interpreted in the context of the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, a desistance from crime lens, and a human rights perspective.

Mass Probation from Micro to Macro: Tracing the Expansion and Consequences of Community Supervision

Between 1980 and 2007, probation rates in the United States skyrocketed alongside imprisonment rates; since 2007, both forms of criminal justice control have declined in use. Although a large literature in criminology and related fields has explored the causes and consequences of mass incarceration, very little research has explored the parallel rise of mass probation. This review takes stock of our knowledge of probation in the United States. In the first section, I trace the expansion of probation historically, across states, and for specific demographic groups. I then summarize the characteristics of adults on probation today and what we know about probation revocation. Lastly, I review the nascent literature on the causal effects of probation for individuals, families, neighborhoods, and society. I end by discussing a plan for research and the growing movement to blunt the harms of mass supervision.

Low-Income Black Mothers Parenting Adolescents in the Mass Incarceration Era: The Long Reach of Criminalization

Punitive and disciplinary forms of governance disproportionately target low-income Black Americans for surveillance and punishment, and research finds far-reaching consequences of such criminalization. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 46 low-income Black mothers of adolescents in urban neighborhoods, this article advances understanding of the long reach of criminalization by examining the intersection of two related areas of inquiry: the criminalization of Black youth and the institutional scrutiny and punitive treatment of Black mothers. Findings demonstrate that poor Black mothers calibrate their parenting strategies not only to fears that their children will be criminalized by mainstream institutions and the police, but also to concerns that they themselves will be criminalized as bad mothers who could lose their parenting rights. We develop the concept of “family criminalization” to explain the intertwining of Black mothers’ and children’s vulnerability to institutional surveillance and punishment. We argue that to fully grasp the causes and consequences of mass incarceration and its disproportionate impact on Black youth and adults, sociologists must be attuned to family dynamics and linkages as important to how criminalization unfolds in the lives of Black Americans.

Prison Public Memory in the Era of Mass Incarceration

Prison Public Memory in the Era of Mass Incarceration Liz Ševčenko (bio) Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape. Edited by Brigitte Sion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014. 356 pages. $35.00 (paper). Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment. By Michael Welch. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2015. 304 pages. $70.00 (cloth). $34.95 (paper). “It is estimated that one in ten Australians has a convict ancestor,” reads a panel at the Hyde Park Barracks Museum in Sydney reassuringly. The government-run museum encourages visitors to embrace incarceration as part of a shared national heritage, suggesting, “Ask someone in your family if you have a convict ancestor.”1 In the United States, as many as one in three people have been arrested; that means tens of millions have friends or family members who have.2 And if you count ancestors? Americans laugh at one in ten. While the carceral state is deeply divided by race, at this point, almost no one lives outside it. Yet imagine the American analogue to Australia’s Historic Houses Trust, the US National Park Service, posing that question at Alcatraz. Where prison museums in other parts of the world are opening to critique penal systems and humanize those affected by them, Mary Rachel Gould argues that “the prison-turned-tourist attraction makes a contribution to the silent acceptance of mass incarceration in the U.S.” (Sion 268). In her excellent essay on Alcatraz in Brigitte Sion’s Death Tourism: Disaster Sites as Recreational Landscape, Gould notes that the island prison was opened as a museum in 1972, the dawn of the era of mass incarceration. This coincidence supports Michelle Brown’s argument that “dead prisons reconfigure living prisons, not in a clear chain of direct institutional transformation but in a larger cultural imaginary.”3 As we teeter on the apex of this era of incarceration, it is time to find the connections between the public memories and public policies that have sustained it. A vast number of “death tourism” sites, defined as visits to [End Page 823] sites of violent death, are former prisons and sites of detention, from Alcatraz to Auschwitz. Sion’s brilliant collection moves beyond the eye rolls and snide commentary that dominate many descriptions of such sites, which often stop with pointing out the many obvious ironies produced when trauma and tourism are combined. Instead, Sion’s authors start by taking these sites seriously—their political economy, the contesting constituencies behind their development, and the varied experiences of their visitors. In this way, the collection powerfully demonstrates that death tourism “is complex and deserves serious and thorough scholarship” (6). Michael Welch’s Escape to Prison: Penal Tourism and the Pull of Punishment brings a criminologist’s focus to prison museums and the roles they play in constructing cultural understandings of crime and punishment. Sion’s scholars, paired with Welch’s criminological perspectives, provide new tools to explore the interplay of public memory and public policy, and imagine alternatives. Literature on the popular creation, representation, and dissemination of history and memory has emerged from wildly dispersed locations, including public history (a largely US concern born from social history movements of the 1960s and 1970s), museum studies (emerging from art history and anthropology), transitional justice (a field of international law concerned with how states confront past crimes as part of transitioning to democracy), hospitality and tourism (concerned with marketing and management), and even some neuroscience (seeking to understand impact by studying visitors’ brain patterns). The works reviewed here further diversify the existing literature’s methodological approaches. The scholars in Sion’s collection are concerned with culture, but from a variety of perspectives: performance studies, drama, visual studies, anthropology, and other fields. Welch, on the other hand, is a criminologist who has written extensively on the causes and consequences of mass incarceration in the United States. Whatever their disparate points of entry, both collections ground themselves in a common concept: dark tourism. Popularized by John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, who are credited with coining the term in 1996, the idea has become a generative framework for a whole generation of travel writing, tourism and cultural studies, an...

The Unintended Consequences of the Carceral State: Chicana/o Political Mobilization in Post-World War II America

The twenty-first century has witnessed an explosion of scholarly interest in the expansion of the carceral state in the post–World War II United States. This scholarship centers on how repressive laws, combined with more aggressive policing and sentencing guidelines, fueled the 500 percent rise in the nation’s prison population since the 1960s. With black and Latino men imprisoned at several times the rate of white males, the consequences of mass incarceration have fallen primarily on these men, their families, and their communities. Another facet of the literature focuses on how increasingly aggressive police practices, such as police stop-and-frisk tactics, have greatly expanded in recent years. Due to the Supreme Court’s “reasonable suspicion” doctrine, police officers have almost unfettered freedom in choosing whom they stop and interrogate on the street. To cite but one example, more than 80 percent of stops made by the New York Police Department between 2004 and 2012 were of blacks and Latinos. These aggressive and biased law enforcement tactics, the scholarship tells us, have lessened civic engagement, endangered the children of incarcerated individuals, and stigmatized whole generations of brown and black men as criminals.1 The destructive consequences of the carceral state are real. They do not, however, tell the whole story. Populations negatively impacted by overly aggressive policing and mass

How the Scholars Strategy Network Helps Academics Gain Public Influence

Many American professors are looking for innovative ways to engage policymakers and fellow citizens—and the boldest new endeavor is the fast-growing Scholars Strategy Network. Since 2011, “SSN” (as it is called) has enrolled more than 470 scholars from many disciplines working at over 140 colleges and universities. Many members participate in issue-oriented groups to address major national challenges—ranging from voting rights and the effects of mass incarceration, to health reform implementation, and to women’s roles in politics and government. SSN also supports nineteen regional chapters operating autonomously in states and metropolitan areas from Maine to Hawaii and Minnesota to Texas. Each member presents research findings in vividly written two-page briefs. In turn, SSN staffers and volunteer leaders link members and their research to journalists and bloggers, to policymakers and their staffs, and to citizens associations and advocacy groups concerned with public issues. The Network as a whole is not aligned with any ideology, political party, or candidate. Members espouse varied views and make individual choices about civic engagement, yet they share a belief that scholars should reach beyond the ivory tower and draw from academic research to improve public policy and enhance democracy.

The prison industry and the marketplace

It is not surprising that an industry has arisen regarding reentry. The US penal system spawns industry. For nearly two decades, when the New York Times published its list of the fastest-growing job titles, justice-related positions justice related positions, typically some sort of corrections worker, were regularly featured. It is inconceivable, in the American context, that economic interests would not be closely tied to the growth of the prison industrial complex. At its core are prison jobs themselves, including business in the short term with its construction and development, and long-term employment created through staffing, such an efficient engine of job creation that it was inevitable a reentry enterprise would follow suit.That is, prison growth produced reentry growth, which in turn created the foundation for a prisoner reentry industry. For it to have been otherwise would have been very odd. What's so bad about that? It means jobs, after all; usually good-paying jobs with job security and benefits?often with union protection. What's to complain about? There are three layers of problems. The first is technical and has to do with opportunity costs. The prison industrial complex has created jobs, yes; and the pay these jobs provide leads to expenditures in the marketplace, boosting the economy. That is a plus. But what value, really, do these jobs create? One might argue that the jobs fall within an industry that produces community safety and in that way they represent "value added." But with all the recent research on the limited crime prevention capacity of the prison, combined with the now powerfully persuasive research about the collateral consequences of mass incarceration, it is no longer possible to say, credibly, that the prison industry is a major component of public safety. The technical problem is, we receive get far less from the investment in the prison sector than we might have, compared to an investment made elsewhere.. This is the point the advocates of "justice reinvestment" make: we ought to use the

The Impact of Adult Incarceration on Child Poverty: A County-Level Analysis, 1995-2007

Traditionally, research on the tremendous variation in the use of incarceration across time and space has focused on the issue of whether imprisoning more offenders reduces crime. More recently, research has begun to explore the collateral consequences of mass incarceration for the families and communities of those imprisoned. The current study adds to this burgeoning literature by examining the impact of incarceration rates on child poverty rates. Using a panel design for North Carolina county data, 1995-2007, we use instrumental variable techniques to disentangle the effect of incarceration on poverty from the effect of poverty on incarceration. The results indicate that increases in incarceration are associated with increases in child poverty rates. The impact of adult incarceration on child poverty appears especially pronounced in counties with a high proportion of non-white residents.

The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America; Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy; and Punishment and Inequality in America

The Prison and the Gallows: The Politics of Mass Incarceration in America. By Marie Gottschalk. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. 466p. 28.99 paper.Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy. By Jeff Manza and Christopher Uggen. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. 384p. $29.95.Punishment and Inequality in America. By Bruce Western. New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2006. 224p. $29.95.The American penal system has acquired an alarming rap sheet: Incarceration rates more than quadrupled from 1970 to 2005; African Americans are seven times more likely to be incarcerated than whites; more than five million Americans are barred from voting because of a felony conviction; and the United States incarcerates a greater proportion of its citizens than any nation in the world. Each of the three books reviewed here begins with some incantation of these daunting statistics, and from there they grapple with questions of the political causes and consequences of mass incarceration. What drives the contemporary prison boom, and how does mass incarceration in turn influence the distribution of political power, the mobilization of interest groups, and the citizenship of all those living under the ever-expanding criminal justice net?

Through Thick and Thin: Surveillance after 9/11

Through Thick and Thin: Surveillance after 9/11