Introduction

Author(s):  
Carolyn Sufrin

This introductory chapter provides a snapshot of maternal care in jails and how it reveals two deeply entrenched crises in U.S. society: mass incarceration and health care inequalities. Jail and the broader system of incarceration, referred to as the “carceral system,” have become an integral part of U.S. society's social and medical safety net. The chapter illustrates a historical trajectory that is peculiar to the United States and that represents one of its greatest tragedies, defined by the whittling away of public services for the poor, coupled with an escalation in the number of jails and prisons serving as sites for the care of that same population. Statistics on the disproportionate number of incarcerated women and people of color are also discussed. Finally, the chapter provides an overview of jailcare conditions in San Francisco's jail, which serves as the case study for this volume.

Author(s):  
Penelope Debs Keough

Alarming statistics presented by the United States Department of Education reveal a disproportionate number of students of minority language (English language learners) qualify for special education. As far back as 2007, the DOE recognized there was a concerted effort needed to reduce racial and ethnic disproportionality in racial and ethnic identification, placement, and disciplinary actions for minority students' representation in special education. This chapter will examine and address solutions to prevent the over identification of English language learners in special education specifically in the area of identification. As a further objective, the ramifications of this over representation will be examined, and the authors hypothesize about why the over representation occurs. Confusion over the Unz Initiative (1998, Proposition 227) may have inadvertently led to the over identification. A case study, leading to case law, concludes the chapter.


2022 ◽  
pp. 22-40
Author(s):  
Paula Cronovich ◽  
Jacqueline Mitchell

This case study delineates changes enacted in the cultural program for beginning-level Spanish language students at a private, faith-based university. Given the restrictions of the pandemic insofar as virtual teaching and learning, as well as the national and international context of racial strife and inequities, the instructors took the opportunity to utilize antiracist pedagogy in order to reach the goals of meaningful content and measurable student outcomes. One of the General Education learning outcomes demonstrates how well students understand the “complex issues faced by diverse groups in global and/or cross-cultural contexts.” Within the context of Latin America and the Latina/Latino experience in the United States, the assignments focus on the intersections of race and gender as they relate to cultural expressions, ensuring that the approach does not obfuscate contributions nor realities of people of color.


Home Free ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
David S. Kirk

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to analyze why criminal recidivism rates remain persistently high and to reorient the search for solutions to recidivism by focusing on the importance of place of residence. This chapter situates the study by describing the facts about mass incarceration and prisoner reentry in the United States, including the fact that half of exiting prisoners are reincarcerated within three years of prison release. Many social critics have claimed that “nothing works” to rehabilitate prisoners. However, this book argues that residential change is an overlooked solution to chronic recidivism. This chapter introduces Hurricane Katrina as a natural experiment for examining the question of whether residential relocation away from an old neighborhood can lead to desistance from crime. Katrina provided an alternate reality for examining the relationship between where people live and their behavior.


2016 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth K. Brown

The development of mass incarceration in the United States has occurred unevenly across American states. Prior time series, fixed effect, and case study research have failed to fully illuminate the determinants of incarceration rate change in states with varying patterns of growth. As a supplement to previously utilized approaches, the present research uses group-based trajectory modeling to consider patterns of incarceration rate growth across 48 U.S. states in relation to crime, political, structural, and institutional variables. In order to account for periodicity, group-based trajectory models of state incarceration rates are estimated separately for 1977–1990, 1990–2000, and 2000–2010. Findings suggest that political and economic factors vary in their relationships to incarceration growth over time and that, controlling for crime, the percentage of young Black males in state populations was the most consistent predictor of incarceration rate growth, particularly among high incarcerating states from 2000 to 2010. The implications of these findings for “the criminology of mass incarceration” are considered.


2021 ◽  
pp. 543-556
Author(s):  
Tony G. Butler ◽  
Peter W. Schofield

This chapter provides a public health analysis of imprisonment (the loss of personal freedom for short or long periods—including life sentences): the individual and population effects upon morbidity and mortality including suicide and homicide, drug addiction, and mental health. These effects impact the life course of former prisoners and their families, employment, and life expectancy, and have intergenerational impacts upon the children of incarcerated parents. While international data are presented for comparison of the magnitude and characteristics of imprisonment worldwide, this chapter examines the United States most closely. America is an atypical but instructive case study: the nation with the world’s largest number of prisoners and highest rate of imprisonment. Mass incarceration is not seen in other developed democratic nations but the case of America represents an important natural experiment, demonstrating precisely how high rates of imprisonment can become socially ‘toxic’, with damaging consequences for population health, societal well-being, and human rights.


2022 ◽  
pp. 302-320
Author(s):  
Penelope Debs Keough

Alarming statistics presented by the United States Department of Education reveal a disproportionate number of students of minority language (English language learners) qualify for special education. As far back as 2007, the DOE recognized there was a concerted effort needed to reduce racial and ethnic disproportionality in racial and ethnic identification, placement, and disciplinary actions for minority students' representation in special education. This chapter will examine and address solutions to prevent the over identification of English language learners in special education specifically in the area of identification. As a further objective, the ramifications of this over representation will be examined, and the authors hypothesize about why the over representation occurs. Confusion over the Unz Initiative (1998, Proposition 227) may have inadvertently led to the over identification. A case study, leading to case law, concludes the chapter.


2021 ◽  
pp. 147447402110036
Author(s):  
Rashad Shabazz

In the United States, Black cultural production is bound up with geographic containment, restrictions on mobility, and racial segregation. Jazz, hip-hop, house music, and the Minneapolis Sound (the music associated with late recording artist, Prince) were mid-wifed by some of the most repressive systems of geographic order. Indeed, containment and creativity, geographies of trouble and hope are hallmarks of Black cultural production. This dialectic calls into question the belief that art can only be created in conducive or untroubled spaces. Hip-hop provides a perfect case study to challenge this assumption. Born in the Bronx, NY in the early 1970’s, hip-hop was a cultural movement that emerged in against the backdrop of racial and economic segregation, mass incarceration, and joblessness. Yet, hop-hop “danced its way of these constrictions” and created geographies of hope. In doing this, hip-hop shows that Black cultural production and the radical imagination from which it springs, have the capacity to create counter-spatial imaginaries that challenge those under which it was produced. To that end, this article addresses the relationship between creativity and containment. Through linking the rise of carceral power, racially restrictive housing practices, a deindustrializing economy, and expanding prison populations with the hip-hop, I demonstrate the dialectic between systematic spatial containment of poor and working-class Black and Latinx Americans and the role it played in creation of the world’s most powerful cultural force.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Neil A. (Tony) Holtzman

AbstractDespite being the wealthiest and one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world, the United States has the greatest number of Covid-19 cases and deaths. What accounts for this failure? The dismantling of the country’s public health infrastructure has crippled contact tracing and exacerbated inequality as a disproportionate number of poor people and people of color have fallen ill with Covid-19. Inadequate regulation of the private for-profit sector has adversely affected the efficiency and quality of testing for the virus, and the prescription of costly drugs whose benefit and safety in treating infected patients have not been established. More stringent regulation of the commercial sector has led to the development of efficacious vaccines in a remarkably short time. Still, questions remain about the vaccines’ effectiveness in the real world, and their safety.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Scheibelhofer

This paper focuses on gendered mobilities of highly skilled researchers working abroad. It is based on an empirical qualitative study that explored the mobility aspirations of Austrian scientists who were working in the United States at the time they were interviewed. Supported by a case study, the paper demonstrates how a qualitative research strategy including graphic drawings sketched by the interviewed persons can help us gain a better understanding of the gendered importance of social relations for the future mobility aspirations of scientists working abroad.


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