Prison-based therapeutic community (TC) programming is derived from the perspective that drug addiction is primarily symptomatic of cognitive dysfunction, poor emotional management, and ...underdeveloped self-reliance skills, and can be addressed in a collaborative space where a strong ideological commitment to moral reform and personal responsibility is required of its members. In this space, evidence of rehabilitation is largely centered on the client's relationship to language and the public adoption of a “broken self” narrative. Failure to master these linguistic performances can result in the denial of material and symbolic resources, thus participants learn how to use TC language to present themselves in ways that support existing institutionalized hierarchies, even if that surrender spells their self-denigration. This research examines the interview narratives of 300 former prisoners who participated in a minimum of 12 months of prison-based TC programming, and described how programming rhetoric impacted their substance abuse treatment experiences. While many of the respondents described distressing experiences as TC participants, White respondents were more likely to eventually embrace the “addict” label and speak of privileges and reintegrative support subsequently received. Black respondents were more likely to defy the treatment rhetoric, and either fail to complete the program or simulate a deficit-based self-narrative without investing in the content of those stories. The following explores the significance of language and identity construction in these carceral spaces, and how treatment providers as well as agency agendas are implicated in the reproduction of racial disparities in substance abuse recovery.
•Individual perceptions of prison-based drug treatment utility vary by race.•Prison-based drug treatment rhetoric mimics larger racial hierarchies in society.•Critical Race and Critical Disability Studies advance health disparities research.
Researchers have linked police officers' concerns with appearing racist-a kind of stereotype threat-to racial disparities in the use of force. This study presents the first empirical test of the ...hypothesized psychological mechanism linking stereotype threat to police support for violence. We hypothesized that stereotype threat undermines officers' self-legitimacy, or the confidence they have in their inherent authority, encouraging overreliance on coercive policing to maintain control. Officers (n = 784) from the patrol division of a large urban police force completed a survey in order to test this hypothesis. Respondents completed measures of stereotype threat, self-legitimacy, resistance to use of force policy, approval of unreasonable force, and endorsement of procedurally fair policing. Structural equation models showed that elevated stereotype threat was associated with lower self-legitimacy (β = −.15), which in turn was associated with more resistance to restrictions on force (β = −.17), greater approval of unreasonable force (β = −.31), and lower endorsement of fair policing (β = .57). These results reveal that concerns about appearing racist are actually associated with increased support for coercive policing-potentially further eroding public trust.
Public Significance Statement
This study links police officers' concerns with appearing racist when interacting with community members to diminished confidence in their legitimate authority and greater support for coercive policing. In this respect, negative stereotypes of police officers can potentially undermine officer morale and public safety.
Proactive policing, the strategic targeting of people or places to prevent crimes, is a well-studied tactic that is ubiquitous in modern law enforcement. A 2017 National Academies of Sciences report ...reviewed existing literature, entrenched in deterrence theory, and found evidence that proactive policing strategies can reduce crime. The existing literature, however, does not explore what the short and long-term effects of police contact are for young people who are subjected to high rates of contact with law enforcement as a result of proactive policing. Using four waves of longitudinal survey data from a sample of predominantly black and Latino boys in ninth and tenth grades, we find that adolescent boys who are stopped by police report more frequent engagement in delinquent behavior 6, 12, and 18 months later, independent of prior delinquency, a finding that is consistent with labeling and life course theories. We also find that psychological distress partially mediates this relationship, consistent with the often stated, but rarely measured, mechanism for adolescent criminality hypothesized by general strain theory. These findings advance the scientific understanding of crime and adolescent development while also raising policy questions about the efficacy of routine police stops of black and Latino youth. Police stops predict decrements in adolescents’ psychological well-being and may unintentionally increase their engagement in criminal behavior.
Objective
This paper demonstrates that localized and chronic stop‐question‐and‐frisk (SQF) practices are associated with community members’ utilization of emergency department (ED) resources. To ...explain this relationship, we explore the empirical applicability of a legal epidemiological framework, or the study of legal institutional influences on the distribution of disease and injury.
Data and Study Design
Analyses are derived from merging data from the Philadelphia Vehicle and Pedestrians Investigation, the National Historical Geographic Information System, and the Southeastern Philadelphia Community Health database to zip code identifiers common to all datasets. Weighted multilevel negative binomial regressions measure the influence that local SQF practices have on ED use for this population. Analytic methods incorporate patient demographic covariates including household size, health insurance status, and having a doctor as a usual source of care.
Principal Findings
Findings reveal that both tract‐level frisking and poor health are linked to more frequent use of hospital EDs, per respondent report. Despite their health care needs, however, reporting poor/fair health status is associated with a substantial decrease in the rate of emergency department visits as neighborhood frisk concentration increases (IRR = 0.923; 95% CI: 0.891, 0.957). Moreover, more sickly people in high‐frisk neighborhoods live in tracts that have greater racial disparities in frisking—a pattern that accounts for the moderating role of neighborhood frisking in sick people's usage of the emergency room.
Conclusions
Findings indicating the robust association reported above interrogate the chronic incompatibility of local health and human service system aims. The study also provides an interdisciplinary theoretical lens through which stakeholders can make sense of these challenges and their implications.
This article uses ethnographic and interview data to explore how halfway house and community corrections staff in a women’s halfway house in the northeastern region of the U.S. police women’s ...sexuality and the ensuing complications of being queer and under supervision. In this setting, women are required to create a Reentry Home Plan that is approved by Community Corrections Officers, putting into tension some women’s newly emerging queer identity and/or nonnormative relationship schema that they see as “healthier” and more stable than heterosexual relationships, with Probation or Parole Officers’ heteronormative ideals that disapprove nontraditional home plans. This study shows how these women negotiate a marginalized sexual identity and resist biased forms of heteronormative surveillance that extend beyond the legislative parameters of community corrections supervision. It also illustrates the tensions between correctional staff, who view residents’ nonnormative relationships as potential sources of risk, and the supervised women, as they develop community release plans.
This study leverages critical race and legal epidemiological frameworks to illustrate the race-based historical evolution of U.S. rehabilitation paradigms directed at imprisoned heroin and opioid ...users. What began as a racist early-20th-century federal antinarcotic trafficking effort has since assumed a state-based treatment agenda whose programmatic operations are largely based in correctional settings disproportionately reserved for poor substance abusers of color. Even in contemporary carceral facilities, where incarcerated populations are teeming with White addicts, in the aggregate, White drug abusers have been protected from the depraved, incorrigible, and inherently pathological drug-using caricature assigned to their non-White counterparts. This historical examination demonstrates how links between broader drug policy and prison-based drug treatment support a legally codified White supremacist narrative that erodes health and wellbeing for program participants of color, and the communities to which they inevitably return.
Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are touted as a much-needed remedy to address police misconduct. Proponents argue that BWCs can serve not only as an accountability instrument, but that their use will lower ...costs attributed to investigation and evidence collection in the event of a civilian or internal complaint. However, the push for furnishing patrol officers with BWCs in order to bolster accountability, professionalism, and faith in institutional legitimacy might be a misguided effort. The argument that public perception of police officers' use of force will be improved once officers are outfitted with a surveillance mechanism is unfounded for at least two reasons. First, evidence suggests that because they are aware of their being recorded, wrongdoing police officers may plant weapons and invoke language at a crime scene that corroborates a justified response to suspects who pose a threat. Second, civilians and officers alike have always known images of unjust state violence and that the presentation of even the most damning evidence does not necessarily deter officers from violating constitutional protections, or reduce the likelihood of being acquitted when they do. Drawing from the narratives offered by 68 Black Baltimore City residents who were interviewed on the heels of Freddie Gray's death in 2015, this study explores what surveilled community members think of BWCs and their disutility, as well as center their suggestions for true and lasting improvements in police-civilian interaction. Theoretical implications for critical race theory, legal legitimacy, and legal cynicism are also discussed.
Your Pants Won’t Save You Kerrison, Erin M.; Cobbina, Jennifer; Bender, Kimberly
Race and justice,
01/2018, Letnik:
8, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The politics of “Black Respectability” foreground Black citizens’ individual and collective responsibility to prioritize self-policing, polish, and propriety. Proponents believe that the steady ...performance of restraint and decorum is critical and that any departure from that repertoire can result in punishment. The belief that racially minoritized youth must earn respect and autonomy, rather than see those rights protected as a standard afforded to all community members, may not be widely held by younger Black people. The following study makes use of interview data collected from 23 Black Baltimore City millennials who shared their perspectives on the social and political contexts that led to Freddie Gray’s death while in Baltimore Police custody. When discussing police officers’ pursuit of citizens who match Freddie Gray’s outward appearance, younger respondents resisted the demands of Black Respectability Politics and, instead, asserted their right to pass through their neighborhoods absent state-sanctioned harassment. This study features an exploration of how generational membership moderates legal socialization, attitudes about personal responsibility for police profiling, and beliefs about the right to the same full spectrum of freedoms and protections enjoyed by majority citizens. Implications for critical race theory, legal cynicism, and intergenerational coalition building are also discussed.
In Terry v. Ohio, the US Supreme Court relied on a balancing test to uphold the reasonableness of the practice known as “stop and frisk,” balancing the contribution of the practice to effective crime ...prevention and detection against the nature and quality of the intrusion to individual rights. In recent years, statistics have been powerfully deployed by legal scholars, jurists, and policymakers to challenge the assumption that stop and frisk leads to frequent discovery of contraband or other criminal behavior, and to address stark racial and ethnic disparities in the deployment of stop and frisk. However, the other side of the Terry equation—the nature and quality of the intrusion—has received far less attention from the legal community. With few exceptions, Terry jurisprudence portrays the Terry frisk simply as a brief pat‐down of the outer clothing and treats each Terry stop as an isolated encounter for purposes of measuring the harm involved. Yet there is a robust social science literature on the effects of stop and frisk on individuals, including data on its effects on individuals from marginalized or vulnerable groups, on individuals over time, and on communities as a whole. Moreover, stop and frisk in the current era has evolved from a tool in the arsenal of individual officers to a systematic, widely deployed strategy. This article argues that the failure to grapple with the application of modern knowledge to modern policing practices leads to a mismeasurement on both sides of the Terry equation. Not only does stop and frisk cause a wide range of emotional and psychological harms; these harms may also interfere with the ability of law enforcement to prevent and investigate crime. Even apart from any legal doctrinal implications for stop and frisk jurisprudence, recognizing the flawed assumptions described in this article should encourage all the relevant stakeholders to re‐evaluate the consequences of the Terry regime.
Using a sample of 118 drug-involved women originally released from prison in the 1990s and re-interviewed between 2010 and 2011, this paper examines the role motherhood played in the desistance ...process from crime and substance abuse. Interview narratives revealed that motherhood rarely functioned as a turning point per se that activated desistance, but caring for children did serve to solidify prosocial identities once offenders had transformed their addict/criminal identities. Despite their identity transformations, however, the journey of desistance for the majority of mothers was still a long and arduous path. The reality for these mothers most often resembled a hostile terrain marked by the competing demands of battling addiction, finding employment and suitable housing with a criminal record, establishing visitation and custody rights in family court, and regaining the trust of children and family members who had long ago lost faith in their commitment to their families. This research illuminates the complexities inherent in the desistance process for a contemporary sample of drug involved adult women entrenched within the criminal justice system.
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