High Rates Of Incarceration Research Articles

Strategien der Bearbeitung sozialer Marginalität.

In recent literature state action strategies and collective sensibilities condense to complex regimes of dealing with deviance and marginality. Thereby, national practices of handling social difference combine with public sentiments and mentalities to form coherent cultures of social control. In this article we investigate whether homogeneous cultures of control can be observed in a sample of European countries. Cluster analysis identifies three distinct regimes of governing social marginality: (1) an inclusive regime wherein generous welfare provision and little incarceration merge with low levels of fear of crime and public punitiveness, against the backdrop of considerable trust in public institutions; (2) an exclusionary regime of modest welfare benefits and high imprisonment rates, wherein fear of crime, punitive attitudes and low confidence in governmental institutions are widespread; and (3) a hybrid regime in which inclusive and exclusionary elements form a fragile alliance. The inclusive regime can be found mainly in Scandinavia, the exclusionary regime is implemented particularly in Eastern Europe.

Beyond the retributive public: governance and public opinion on penal policy

The notion of a retributive public underlies many explanations of the USA's high incarceration rate. However, accounting for political context may undermine the retributive public assumption. Jonathan Simon's ‘governing through crime’ perspective provides one theory about the relationship between political context and public opinion on punitive penal policies. From this perspective, public support for punitive policies mirrors politicians’ focus on incapacitation and inadequate courts. Using data from a national telephone survey conducted in 1995 during the height of the public's concern about crime, this study uses logistic regression analyses to examine the relationship between beliefs about sentencing goals, distrust in courts, and support for mandatory sentencing. Consistent with agoverning through crime perspective, the results suggest that wanting to separate offenders from society and distrusting the courts increases the likelihood of supporting mandatory sentencing. Further analyses also suggest that the governing through crime perspective could be expanded to include the role of racial bias in support for punitive penal policies, especially as racist attitudes may interact with beliefs about sentencing goals. These findings call into question the retributive public assumption and point toward new directions for explaining public support for punitive policies in the USA.

Further Marginalization: The Link Between Incarceration Rates and State Medicaid Enrollments

Although the penal system and public assistance programs play significant roles in the lives of disadvantaged populations in the United States, the relationship between the two institutions is not well understood. This is particularly true of publicly financed health care coverage. In this article, the authors study how state-level incarceration rates shape the provision of publicly financed health care and health insurance (Medicaid), using two theoretical frameworks as a guide: a collateral consequences model and a punitive regime model. The authors use state-level panel data to estimate how the size of the incarcerated population is related to Medicaid enrollments across states and within them over time. These analyses suggest that incarceration rates do have a substantial and positive effect on Medicaid rates within states over time. Across states, the relationship is less clear. On average, states with higher incarceration rates had somewhat fewer Medicaid enrollments until the early 1990s. After this point, Medicaid enrollments began to increase with the size of the incarcerated population. These findings suggest that though states’ efforts to control crime and poverty may be linked, whereby states that use incarceration liberally are also stingy with Medicaid, the collateral consequences of mass incarceration undermine these efforts by producing greater demands for social welfare services.

Smart Reform is Possible: States Reducing Incarceration Rates and Costs While Protecting Communities

Since President Richard Nixon first announced the War on Drugs 40 years ago, the United States has adopted tough on criminal justice policies that have given it the dubious distinction of having the highest incarceration rate in the world. These past 40 years of criminal justice policymaking have been characterized by overcriminalization, increasingly draconian sentencing and parole regimes, mass incarceration of impoverished communities of color, and rapid prison building. These policies have also come at a great expense to taxpayers. But budget shortfalls of historic proportions are finally prompting states across the country to realize that less punitive approaches to criminal justice not only make more fiscal sense but also better protect our communities.This report highlights six traditionally tough on states – Texas, Mississippi, Kansas, South Carolina, Kentucky, and Ohio – that recently passed significant bipartisan reforms to reduce their prison populations and budgets. These states experienced declines in their crime rates while these new policies were in place. The report also highlights national trends in criminal justice legislation and offers a number of recommended ways that lawmakers in other states can reform their pre-trial, sentencing, parole, and probation systems. Smart Reform is Possible serves as an exciting and essential blueprint for states on the cusp of considering the reform of their corrections systems.

The Effect of Paternal Incarceration on Material Hardship.

High rates of incarceration among American men, coupled with a high prevalence of fatherhood among the incarcerated, have led to millions of children and families whose fathers are, or have been, in the nation's jails and prisons. This study uses data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Survey to estimate the extent to which paternal incarceration increases family material hardship. Analyses from a series of longitudinal regression models suggest that material hardship is statistically significant and positively associated with paternal incarceration. These hardships are found to reflect not only a reduction in fathers' income and financial contributions but also an increase in financial and other family strains. The findings underscore the challenges facing families with incarcerated fathers. They also emphasize the need for efforts by criminal justice agencies and social service providers to help mitigate the risks associated with paternal incarceration.

Working the Streets of Post-Katrina New Orleans: An Interview with Deon Haywood, Executive Director, Women with a Vision, Inc.

While most people living in the United watched, with sympathy and horror, the dismantling of New Orleans s infrastructure in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, the levee breaks displacing nearly all its residents and killing nearly sixteen hundred people, leaving behind those without even the most basic necessities, few are aware of the seismic shifts the city has undergone during the recovery process. Activist and political journalist Jordan Flaherty succinctly expressed what many of us felt during the initial recovery period, following the storm: There were practically no conversations that didn't reference Katrina. The storm defined every aspect of life in the city, not just the large-scale damage done but also in the small details. Traffic lights hadn t been fixed. Street signs were gone. Packs of abandoned dogs roamed the streets. . . . Walking in your own neighborhood in those initial few months, you couldn't believe you were in New Orleans. You couldn't believe you were in the United States (2010, 54). As residents who were able to return to their homes focused on managing the day-to-day challenges that the storm engendered, city officials began the arduous process of resto ring basic civil services such as housing, education, and care at health facilities, in addition to tackling the mountains of debris that lined the city streets. At main thoroughfares, plastic signs were crowded together at intersections, advertising any kind of imaginable service, from tree cutting to legal services to gutting houses. Out-of-towners, primarily men - manual laborers, contractors, and white-collar professionals - descended on the city, camping out in abandoned parking lots or squatting in neglected houses, taking up residence in hotels in Baton Rouge or towns across Lake Pontchartrain. Neighborhood associations became more active as residents united to have basic utilities restored, street lights fixed, and debris removed. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers hosted town hall-style meetings, addressing questions and comments from agitated crowds; high-profile urban planners, hired by the city, developed a rash of visionary plans for the city's future; and law enforcement officials (with the help of the National Guard) imposed a mandatory curfew, attempting to curtail the rampant theft occurring in the city's most desolate and destroyed neighborhoods. All this was occurring as people mourned the dead and still missing in neighborhoods that looked as though they had been blasted by bombs. Between 2006 and 2010, a new political, social, and economic landscape emerged in Katrina's aftermath, affecting every aspect of urban life, including the replacement of nearly all public housing with mixed-income developments, the firing of thousands of unionized teachers and subsequent emergence of a charter school system, and the return of violent crime in abandoned, largely low-income African American neighborhoods. These issues became hot topics for New Orleans's activist groups, many of whom created alliances that would protect the city's most vulnerable populations and neighborhoods. Sadly, but not surprisingly, the hard work of rebuilding social and political networks carried out by social justice groups such as Critical Resistance, Common Ground, and People's Hurricane Relief Fund and women's groups such as INCITE: Women of Color Against Violence, the Women's Health and Justice Initiative, and Women with a Vision (WWAV) went unnoticed in the mainstream media.1 More than five years later, problems surrounding the recovery persist, as activists and legal and social justice advocates continue to organize around issues related to police brutality, high incarceration rates for young African Americans, sexual violence, and housing discrimination based on race, gender, and economics. In August 2010, 1 attended the event Community and Resistance: Five Years After Katrina at the Community Book Center, a hub of African American activism and resistance in the city's Seventh Ward, to hear grassroots activists, artists, and journalists speak about the pressing social problems still facing New Orleans. …

A private‐sector, incentives‐based model for justice reinvestment

Research Summary Justice reinvestment is a recent strategy designed to reduce the use of incarceration and divert the savings to improve the circumstances of communities that have high incarceration rates. More than a dozen states have mounted justice reinvestment projects. While support for justice reinvestment remains high, actual results have been mixed. In particular, the “community reinvestment” aspect of justice reinvestment has been disappointing. An approach that focuses on the private sector and creates incentives for private justice reinvestment could resolve some of these current limitations of the method. Policy Summary Advocates for justice reinvestment would be able to address some of the problems in the approach by developing financial incentives that involve the private sector in justice reinvestment activity.

‘We Now Breach More Kids in a Week Than We Used to in a Whole Year’: The Punitive Turn, Enforcement and Custody

The high rates of child incarceration that have characterized the youth justice system in England and Wales for almost two decades are frequently attributed to the impact of a punitive turn in the early part of the 1990s. While previous authors have considered the mediating influence of legislative shifts and changing patterns of sentencer decision-making, it has nonetheless been argued that analyses of the mechanisms that link punitivism and youth custody remain underdeveloped. The current article focuses on the role of enforcement as an indicator of changes in youth justice practitioner culture to explore how practice has become less tolerant in the face of a harsher environment towards children in conflict with the law.

Imprisonment and women's health: concerns about gender sensitivity, human rights and public health

The health of prisoners is among the poorest of any population group and the apparent inequalities pose both a challenge and an opportunity for country health systems. The high rates of imprisonment in many countries, the resulting overcrowding, characteristics of prison populations and the disproportionate prevalence of health problems in prison should make prison health a matter of public health importance.Women prisoners constitute a minority within all prison systems and their special health needs are frequently neglected. The urgent need to review current services is clear from research, expert opinion and experience from countries worldwide. Current provision of health care to imprisoned women fails to meet their needs and is, in too many cases, far short of what is required by human rights and international recommendations. The evidence includes a lack of gender sensitivity in policies and practices in prisons, violations of women's human rights and failure to accept that imprisoned women have more and different health-care needs compared with male prisoners, often related to reproductive health issues, mental health problems, drug dependencies and histories of violence and abuse. Additional needs stem from their frequent status as a mother and usually the primary carer for her children.National governments, policy-makers and prison management need to address gender insensitivity and social injustice in prisons. There are immediate steps which could be taken to deal with public health neglect, abuses of human rights and failures in gender sensitivity.

LBO-1.3 Syphilis infection and associated behaviours among transgender women, Chicago 2010

BackgroundTransgender women are an underserved and understudied population with unique medical and behavioural risk profiles. High rates of STIs and HIV in this population have been reported, although accurately quantifying...

Special Issue: Challenges, Disparities and Experiences of African American Males

The need for more research involving African American males across the life course has never been in greater demand than the present. Multiple indicators of health and well-being continue to suggest that this segment of the population is confronted by a host of environmental, psychological, and social challenges. Consequently, African American males tend to fare poorly with regard to social indicators of health and well-being – regardless of age. Recent studies have indicated that African American infants and young children between 0–4 years of age are approximately four times more likely to be a victim of homicide than their White counter-parts (Bennett et al., 2006). Moreover, the most recently available data provided by the Centers for Disease Control National Center for Injury Prevention and Control indicates that homicide is the leading cause of death for African American males between the ages of 15 and 24 (Centers for Disease Control [CDC], 2010). Further, recent data suggest that patterns of homicide offending among African American male adolescents and young adults are similar to patterns of homicide victimization for this group (Snyder & Sickmund, 2006). That is, African American males are not only disproportionately victims of homicide, but also commit violent offenses (including homicide) at a rate disproportionate rate as well. The challenges faced by African American males are not limited to violence. There is a wide disparity in the public high school graduation rates of White and African American students. In 2003, the national graduation rate for White students was 78%, compared with 55% for African American students (Greene & Winters, 2006). This disparity is even more pronounced when one examines graduation rates by race and gender. Nationally, about 5% fewer White male students graduate than their female counterparts. While 59% of African American females graduated, only 48% of African American males earned a high school diploma (Greene & Winters, 2006). The relatively low high school graduation rate among African American males is believed by some to be directly linked to the rapid growth of the number of young African American males whose educational opportunities are truncated in elementary and middle school because of multiple suspensions and expulsions, referral to special education curricula (Day-Vines & Day-Hairston, 2005) as well as involvement and/or incarceration in the criminal/juvenile justice system (Mincy, Charles, Lewis, & Han, 2006). Moreover, some have argued that employment and earnings of African American males may be negatively affected by a prior history of incarceration (Western, 2002; Western & Pettit, 2005). Further, high rates of incarceration among African American males may even reduce employment prospects for those African American males with no criminal background (Holzer, Raphael, & Stoll, 2006). African American males are also confronted with a number of challenges related to their physical health. For example; recent data indicates that the incidence rate of cancer among African American males is 19% higher than that of White males. Moreover, the mortality rate of cancer is 37% higher among African American males than it is for White males (Jemal et al., 2008). Further, African American males have the highest incidence and mortality rates of prostate cancer in the world and die from the disease at a rate 2.3 times that of White men (Woods, Montgomery, Belliard, Johnson, & Wilson, 2004). African American males have also been found to be at increased risk for hypertension (Hefferman, Jae, Wilund, Woods, & Fernhall, 2008), diabetes (Liburd, NamageyoFuna, Jack, & Gregg, 2004), heart attack, and stroke (CDC – Office of Minority Health, 2009). Consequently, African American males have an average life expectancy of 69.7 years compared to 77.7 years for all US population groups (Arias, 2010; Harper, Lynch, Burris, & Smith, 2007). Mental health is yet another area of challenge for African American males. The onset of chronic stress, depression, somatization, and other forms of mental illness may be linked

Overview of “The past as prologue? Decarceration in California then and now”

Overview of “The past as prologue? Decarceration in California then and now”

The past as prologue?

The past as prologue?

Schizophrenia and serious violence: A clinical-profile analysis incorporating impulsivity and substance-use disorders

ObjectivesThis study is an exploration of the role of SUD and impulsivity in individuals with schizophrenia who are at higher risk of serious violence (SV). MethodsMultiple correspondence analysis (MCA) and cluster analysis (CA) were performed on a sample of 139 males meeting DSM-IV diagnostic criteria for schizophrenia-spectrum disorders (SSD). ResultsImpulsivity was the main dimension differentiating individuals. SUD and SV were strongly linked. CA yielded four clusters; one related to serious violence, SUD and a higher incarceration rate. ConclusionsSubgroups of SSD at risk of SV were found. SUD appear to be a major risk factor for SV and incarceration.

Fear and Loathing: Public Feelings in Antiprison Work

For antiprison organizers, one potential source of hope in the current economic recession has been increased willingness of budget-conscious state officials to reconsider mass incarceration. Starting in 2009, many states have tried to decrease prison-related expenses through the expansion of parole and the implementation of early release programs. These efforts to cut costs have inspired a national backlash, its core concern summarized in a 2010 New York Times headline, Safety Is Issue as Budget Cuts Free Prisoners. In response to a proposed early release initiative in Oregon, an anticrime group aired radio advertisements portraying the outcomes in alarming tones. ? woman's asleep in her own apartment/ a narrator said. 'Suddenly, she's attacked by a registered sex offender and convicted burglar' (Davey 2010, 2). Politicians - unwilling to be perceived as soft on crime or emotionally out of tune with victims' rights - backpedaled in Colorado, Illinois, Michigan, and other states. After less than 2 percent of the approximately seventeen hundred people released on a meritorious good time push were rearrested, the Illinois governor distanced himself from his administration's actions, labeled the move to decrease prison populations as a mistake (Garcia 2009), and subsequently replaced the head of the Illinois Department of Corrections (Dai 2010).1 The debate regarding early release programs or other attempts to reduce or reform the US criminal justice system demonstrates that challenging mass incarceration requires grappling directly with questions and feelings of safety, and in particular, how a gendered fear (of sexual assault of women by men) is publicly deployed to augment the prison system. For antiprison organizers and thinkers, this work to challenge mass incarceration as a public strategy is made difficult by how common sense the ideas of both incarceration and exclusion appear, as well as how frightening the prospect of dismantling the current criminal justice system can seem. In this essay, we explore the connections between the private and public feelings of both fear and safety, and the construction of policing and incarceration as commonsense solutions to feelings of fear and disgust. From our varied locations as organizers, educators, researchers, queers, caregivers, and community members, this essay explores the centrality of feelings to the carcerai state, or the prison industrial complex (PIC), and the difficulty of making both structural and local shifts in public feelings.2 First, we frame how feelings are central to the maintenance and expansion of the PIC. Second, we focus on to describe how all too often is framed in public and private discourses as absence, rather than a positive value. Third, we offer some organizations that challenge popular constructions of as absence and suggest how these organizations engage in affect-oriented antiprison organizing. Our work starts from two premises. First - by any measure - the tough-on-crime public project in the United States is a failure. More than 2.3 million people are now housed in prisons and jails across the United States, 1 in every 99.1 adults (Pew Center 2008). Compared with all other nations, the United States has the highest incarceration rate and the largest number of people (poor, African Americans, and Latinos) locked behind bars. This expanding punitive system harms low-income communities of color and is the direct result of public policy failures, including the war on drugs, mandatory minimum sentences, three-strikesand-you're-out laws, and immigration policies (Davis 2003; Mauer 1999; Rodriquez 2008). The impact of the PIC continues beyond life in prison: according to a 2007 report from the Sentencing Project, 5.3 million Americans, or one in forty-one adults, have currently or permanently lost their voting rights as a result of a felony conviction (2007, l). In addition to this diminishment of civil rights, the very state systems set up for promoting safety in communities of color expose their residents to increased risk of premature death (Gilmo re 2007) through overcrowding in unhealthy facilities and substandard physical, dental, and mental health care (Human Rights Watch 2003; Von Zielbauer 2005). …

Approaches to reducing both imprisonment and crime

The excellent and broad-ranging article by Durlauf and Nagin (2011, this issue) represents a wise policy document that builds on their excellent previous article (Durlauf and Nagin, in press), which provided a strong analysis of the issue of factors contributing to deterrence of offending. In this review, I build on what I see as the strongest points of their article, particularly their contrast of the relative importance of certainty and severity and their highlighting of certainty over severity. That observation, which many would have difficulty challenging today as the United States has the highest incarceration rate in the world, strongly argues for reduction of severity as reflected in the sentences imposed on convicted offenders. In exchange, it argues for using the resources thereby made available for increasing the certainty of punishment to strengthen the deterrent effect. Their primary emphasis is on providing resources to policing as a means of increasing certainty of arrest. This is certainly one important approach to using the deterrent sanction more effectively. But it also opens the door to using those resources in other ways that could contribute to less crime, thereby achieving their fundamental goal of less imprisonment (shorter sentences) and less crime: increasing certainty or pursuing other actions enabled by those resources to reduce crime. In this essay, I would like to pick up on Durlauf and Nagin’s (2011) basic objectives and discuss other approaches that should be considered as part of the policy agenda. It may well be that more and stronger policing is the best way to use those resources, but that case is far less clear than the desirability of reducing severity. Then, there should be examination in a broader systems context of the costs and benefits of a variety of other means of generating less crime.

Incidence of primary hepatitis C infection and risk factors for transmission in an Australian prisoner cohort

BackgroundHepatitis C virus (HCV) infection is common in prisoner populations, particularly those with a history of injecting drug use (IDU). Previous studies of HCV incidence have been based on small case numbers and have not distinguished risk events in prison from those in the community.MethodsHCV incidence was examined in a longitudinal cohort of 488 Australian prisoners with a history of IDU and documented to be seronegative within 12 months prior to enrolment. Inmates were tested for anti-HCV antibodies and viremia, and interviewed about demographic and behavioral risk factors for transmission.ResultsThe cohort was predominantly male (65%) with high rates of prior imprisonment (72%) and tattooing (73%), as well as longstanding IDU (mean 8.5 years). Ninety-four incident HCV cases were identified (incidence 31.6 per 100 person years). Independent associations were observed between incident infection and prior imprisonment (p = 0.02) and tattooing (p = 0.03), and surprisingly also with methadone maintenance treatment (MMT) (p < 0.001).ConclusionsHigh rates of new HCV infection were found in this prisoner cohort reflecting their substantive risk behavior profile, despite having remained uninfected for many years. The association with MMT is challenging and highlights the need for better understanding of prison-specific HCV transmission risks, as well as the uptake and effectiveness of prevention programs.

Keeping the doors to the community open.

Polls show that Americans of all races now believe that social class and national origin are more potent bases for discrimination than race. However, this assessment is rendered more complicated by (a) the high rate of exclusion of people on the basis of behavioral characteristics and (b) the strikingly disparate impact of such decisions on people of color. America’s high rates of (a) incarceration in the criminal and juvenile justice system, (b) visa denials, detention, and removal in the immigration system, and (c) suspensions and expulsions in the schools all have the effect of excluding many Latinos and African Americans from ordinary life in the community. Although norms of inclusion are adaptive for communities, such an approach is intrinsically difficult to achieve. Attention should be given to (a) facilitation of the exercise of moral leadership and (b) design of settings that ‘‘demand’’ notice of, and care for, all participants.

Heterogeneity in the rise and decline of city-level homicide rates, 1976–2005: A latent trajectory analysis

This study applies latent trajectory methods to the analysis of temporal changes in homicide rates among large US cities across recent decades. Specifically, annual homicide rates for 157 large US cities are analyzed for the 30 years from 1976 to 2005. We address the fundamental questions: Did all of cities experience similar levels and patterns of rise and decline in homicide rates over these three decades? Or is there hidden or unobserved heterogeneity with respect to these temporal patterns, thus leading to the identification of more homogeneous groupings of the cities? And if latent homogeneous groupings surface, is membership due to specific structural characteristics found within those cities? Evidence is found for the existence of four latent homicide rate trajectories. After identifying and classifying the cities into these four groups, multivariate statistical techniques are used to determine which social and economic characteristics are significant predictors of these distinct homicide trends. Criminal justice measures are also included as controls. It is found that larger cities located in the South with higher levels of resource deprivation/concentrated poverty, higher income inequality, higher percentages of the adult male population that are divorced, higher unemployment rates, higher percentages of youth, higher percentages of the population who are Hispanic and higher numbers of police per capita are more likely to be in a higher than a lower homicide trajectory group. Higher percentages of the population enrolled in colleges and universities and locations in states with higher incarceration rates are characteristics of cities associated with membership in a lower homicide trajectory group.

Humans: High imprisonment rates localized: Cynicism, hopelessness common in ‘incarceration hot spots’

Humans: High imprisonment rates localized: Cynicism, hopelessness common in ‘incarceration hot spots’