REDUCING CRIME THROUGH THE THEATRE: AN ANALYSIS OF FOLUKE OGUNLEYE’S JABULILE

This study examines the connection between family conditions and the criminal behaviours of children. Over the years, drama has been used to address the socio-political, economic and security challenges in different societies. The goal of these dramatists is to chart the way forward for a harmonious political, economic and social system. It is in this wise that, Foluke Ogunleye used her knowledge of drama to address serious issues affecting the progress and stability of the nation. This study finds that the explosion of crime in the nation is linked to the fragile family system surrounding the children’s upbringing by their respective families. This paper analyzes one of Foluke Ogunleye’s plays, Jabulile in an attempt to educate Nigerian families on what is expected of them as far as the issue of national security is concerned. This is done with the recognition that the family is the first unit of socialization. This study recommends that proper socialization of children by their parents is therefore a stepping stone for a harmonious socio-political system.

Playing games to re-story troubled family narratives in Danish maximum-security prisons

Narrative criminology has successfully demonstrated how the construction and structure of self-narratives are important for prisoners’ process of change and desistance from crime. However, much of this work has tended to focus narrowly on the offender and how he or she uses self-narrative to relate to the offense, the victim, past childhood, the family, or projected hopes for future change. In an effort to extend prior work, this study takes a complementary approach by analyzing how children and their long-term incarcerated fathers in Danish maximum-security prisons talk about family relations and cohesiveness during imprisonment. To address the gap in research and methodology, we introduce the notion of family narratives, and through microanalyses of in-depth interviews with seven prisoners and seven children, we extract three kinds of family narratives. These narratives were prompted by using a board game recently implemented into the visiting program in Danish prisons to help children and prisoners to re-construct disrupted family relations. Our findings illuminate how the design of a game can be a novel method for collecting data on children and incarcerated fathers and how family narratives can serve as lenses for studying fragile family identity, masculinity, and child–parent relations.

Trajectories of Willingness to Compromise and Critical Marital Conflict Behaviors after Childbirth

Contemporary research has used group-based trajectory modeling to uncover distinct trajectories of marital conflict behaviors after childbirth. However, most studies have focused on conflict frequency, not characteristics of conflict; used stringent sample inclusion criteria, which might not capture contemporary family complexity; and have not treated the dyad as the unit of analysis. Using six waves of data from 807 married couples in the Fragile Family and Child Wellbeing (FFCWB) study, and simultaneously modeling the development of spouses’ willingness to compromise and critical marital conflict behaviors over the first nine years of the target child’s life, we identified two classes of couples. Marital conflict frequency, marital duration, race, immigration status, and the child’s birthweight differentiated between classes. Classes were also distinguished by adolescents’ perceptions of their parents’ relationship 15 years after the baseline assessment. We conclude by providing both theoretical and practical implications for changes and stability in conflict tactics.

Cohabiting parents’ marriage plans and marriage realization

The purpose of this study is to examine how cohabiting partners’ plans to marry after the birth of their child were associated with marriage realization or continued cohabitation when their child was 1, 3, and 5 years old. Possible parents’ gender differences, couple agreement, and the longitudinal associations were examined. Using four waves of data from the Fragile Family and Child Wellbeing Study, results from logistic regressions showed that (1) the majority of cohabiting mothers and fathers had plans to marry their partner after the birth of their child; (2) in general, mothers’ plans to marry were significantly associated with couples’ marriage realization whereas fathers’ were not; (3) agreements between partners in their marriage plans were associated with marriage realization. Other relational and demographic characteristics were also considered. Research and clinical implications of the findings were discussed.

Bracero Guest Worker Program

This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. Please check back later for the full article. On August 4, 1942, the Mexican and U.S. governments launched the bi-national guest worker program, most commonly known as the Bracero Program. An estimated five million Mexican men between the ages of 19 and 45 separated from their families for three-to-nine-month contract cycles at a time, in anticipation of earning the prevailing U.S. wage this program had promised them. They labored in U.S. agriculture, railroad construction, and forestry, with hardly any employment protections or rights in place to support themselves and the families they had left behind in Mexico. The inhumane configuration and implementation of this program prevented most of these men and their families from meeting such goals. Instead, the labor exploitation and alienation that characterized this guest worker program and their program participation paved the way for, at best, fragile family relationships. This program lasted twenty-two years and grew in its expanse, despite its negative consequences, Mexican men and their families could not afford to settle for being unemployed in Mexico, nor could they pass up U.S. employment opportunities of any sort. The Mexican and U.S. governments’ persistently negligent management of the Bracero Program, coupled with their conveniently selective acknowledgement of the severity of the plight of Mexican women and men, consistently cornered Mexican men and their families to shoulder the full extent of the Bracero Program’s exploitative conditions and terms.