This study offers a rhetorical analysis of George Jackson’s Soledad Brother, informed by class critical and critical race theory. Recent rhetorical studies scholarship has taken up the problem of prisons, mass incarceration, and resultant issues of race, yet without paying attention to the nexus of black radicalism and criticisms of capital. This study views George Lester Jackson as a rhetorician in his own right and argues that his combination of critical race and class critical perspectives is an important move forward in the analysis of mass incarceration. Jackson is able to combine these ideas in a plain-writing style where he employs intimacy, distance, and the strategy of telling it like it is. He does this in epistolary form, calling forth a long tradition of persuasive public letter writing. At this study’s end, ideas of circulation re engaged to show the lines of influence Jackson has and may continue to have. Through rhetorical analysis of Soledad Brother, this study demonstrates the utility of uniting class critical criticism and critical race theory for rhetorical studies, and suggests further avenues of research consistent with this approach.

A disturbing average of 600 Palestinian children are prosecuted by Israeli military courts every year. Three fourths of the children experience some form of physical violence during their arrest, interrogation, and/or detention. On the contrary, Jewish Israeli children never face the brutality of a military court system with a 99.74% conviction rate of Palestinian minors. The aim of this thesis is to examine the “legal” systems responsible for discriminatorily incarcerating an average of 200 children in military jails on a monthly basis. Central questions to my thesis ask: is this behavior legal and legitimate by Israeli legal standards? Can the same be said about the standards set by international law? What defines and distinguishes a legal system? Finally, how should we punish children, if at all? This thesis argues there is a severe lack of legality and legitimacy behind Israel’s rampant and unrestricted incarceration of Palestinian minors, be it by Israeli or international measures.

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the black – white wage gap narrowed significantly, but has remained constant since the late 1980s. The black – white wage gap in the recent period may reflect differences in human capital. A key component of human capital is labor market experience. The first chapter of this dissertation examines how differences in the returns and patterns of experience accumulation affect the black – white wage gap. Accounting for differences in the nature of experience accumulation does not explain the very large gap in wages between blacks and whites. Instead, the wage gap seems to be driven by constant differences between blacks and whites which may represent unobserved differences in skill or the effects of discrimination. The second chapter of the dissertation examines the role of discrimination in explaining the wage gap by asking whether statistical discrimination by employers causes the wages of never incarcerated blacks to suffer when the incarceration rate of blacks in an area increases. I find little evidence that black incarceration rates negatively affect the wages of never incarcerated blacks. Instead, macroeconomic effects in areas with higher incarceration rates play a more important role in explaining the variation in black wages. The third and final chapter of the dissertation examines the black – white wage gap and its determinants across the entire wage distribution to determine if the factors that are driving the wage gap vary across the distribution. I find that at the top of the conditional distribution, differences in the distribution of characteristics explain relatively more of the black – white wage gap than differences in the prices of characteristics. At the bottom of the conditional distribution, differences in the distribution of characteristics explain relatively more of the wage gap—although this finding varies across different specifications of the model.

The purpose of the study is to examine young children's internalizing and externalizing behaviors in the context of post paternal incarceration by focusing on both risks (i.e., parental depressive symptoms), protective factors (i.e., coparenting alliance), and their impact considered together. The final sample included 426 previously incarcerated fathers and the biological mothers of their three-year-old children. Using hierarchical multiple regression, I examined three sets of analyses: 1) the association between parental depressive symptoms and children's behavior outcomes, 2) the association between coparenting alliance and children's behavior, 3) the association between parental depressive symptoms and children's behavior as moderated by coparenting alliance. Expectedly, higher paternal depressive symptoms were associated with higher externalizing behavioral problems in children. Unexpectedly, higher maternal depressive symptoms were associated with lower externalizing behavioral problems. Also, unexpectedly, the associations between maternal and paternal coparenting alliance and both child behavioral outcomes were not statistically significant. Further, when mothers reported lower coparenting alliance with their child's father, the negative association between fathers' depressive symptoms and children’s internalizing behavioral problems was not attenuated; in fact, children had higher internalizing behavioral problems. My findings suggests father's depressive symptoms are an important point of consideration given the deleterious effects parental depressive symptoms can have on children, and the risks for depressive symptoms among formerly incarcerated fathers. Further, my findings have implications for addressing and treating fathers' depressive symptoms when children are relatively young in order to lower internalizing behavior problems from persisting across and beyond childhood.

This case study discusses rape theories by performing a case study of a convicted serial rapist, hereafter referred to as “Carl Criminal.” This pseudonym has been used throughout this research effort in order to avoid the additional contributing to the celebrity status of the true rapist who has committed these vicious sexual assaults. Locations have also been changed in order to prevent contribution of further clues that may help identify the rapist and avoid embarrassment, humiliation, and further mental anguish for the rape victims. On January 18, 1999, Carl Criminal, a 38-year-old white male Sheriff’s Deputy with a local sheriff’s office was arrested and initially charged with five counts of aggravated rape. The charges were later amended to include a sixth charge of aggravated rape. At the time of his arrest, Carl Criminal was a veteran law enforcement officer for over nineteen years and had served as a plainclothes sergeant with the Juvenile Division. Carl Criminal’s arrest ended an extensive years-long rape task force investigation into a series of rapes that occurred between 1986 and 1997. Carl Criminal, upon being interviewed at his place of incarceration, admitted that he committed eleven rapes during the period of his criminal activity while serving as a sheriff’s deputy. This research project explores Carl Criminal’s history and chronicles his career as a law enforcement officer and as a rapist. The project represents a searched for possible explanations, causation, and motivation for his criminal behavior. This study attempts to dissect his aberrant behavior and analyze potential causes related to his nurturing. Furthermore, the study examines his relationships and attempted to discern early patterns of social deviance. Carl Criminal himself stated, “I wish someone could tell me what’s wrong with me.” This research study attempts to furnish answers to his question. This case study explores Carl Criminal’s current thoughts regarding the trauma he brought to his victims’ lives. Carl Criminal lamented the pain he now realizes his victims experienced. The research identified incidents in Carl Criminal’s youth that may now serve as markers to assist in identifying potential criminal behavior in the lives of other adolescents.

For fragile families, external shocks to parents such as incarceration, illness, abuse, death, and divorce can be enough to push the entire family into homelessness. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, I find statistically significant evidence that paternal incarceration, spousal abuse, and parental illness all increase the probability of childhood homelessness. However, I am unable to find a significant correlation between divorce and child homelessness. These findings imply large external shocks to the father, as well as both major external shocks and daily life habits such as drug abuse in the mother, can increase a child’s chance of homelessness. Additionally, I find that these results have a greater effect when they happen earlier in the child’s life, suggesting that policy directed at supporting fragile families with incarcerated fathers, abused mothers, and sick parents would be effective for decreasing childhood homelessness in the United States.

Thesis advisor: Christopher P. Wilson / For more than a century, the chain gang has been glamorized, criticized, abhorred, and often explained away as an economic necessity or natural byproduct of historical circumstances. After Emancipation, this centuries-old approach to punishing criminals offered an immediate palliative for southern plantation owners in need of field hands, northern coal and steel interests and railroad tycoons in search of blasters and miners, and eventually government officials who identified the South's antiquated infrastructure as its greatest barrier to integration into a regional and national economy. Heavily influenced by Hollywood, the blues, oral histories and folkways, archived photographs, and literary representations, many people now view the chain gang as a relic of a bygone era of southern prejudice and brutality. After all, history does not cast the men and women who served on chain gangs as heroic workers and, if they are acknowledged at all, they are only occasionally figured as victims of the political, social, and economic forces that led to their convictions and servitude. And yet, paradoxically, labor historians and others have argued convincingly that the chain gang, even with all its warts and abuses, actually made southern economic progress possible. Entering this still-vibrant, contested territory, "Restricted Movement" and Coordinates of Freedom focuses on depictions of chain gangs in selected literary works and films from 1901 to 2000, including Charles W. Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901) and All the King's Men (1946) by Robert Penn Warren and the films I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1932), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Defiant Ones (1958), and O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000). This dissertation attempts to make sense of a multitude of historical and social conditions that bear specifically on chain gangs and convict labor, including black criminality, white supremacy, the Good Roads Movement, race-based electoral politics, and industrialization. In addition to exploring these vexed arguments about servitude and progress, this dissertation also explores how the chain gang, real and imagined, serves as its own special form of segregation. Beginning with the work of Edward L. Ayers, Alex Lichtenstein, Matthew Mancini, and others in the 1980s and 1990s, a handful of southern and labor historians broadened the study of postbellum race, crime, and punishment to consider whether convict-leasing programs and chain gangs in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries really did result in a form of "neo-slavery." In other words, these historians asked, did these practices actually "re-enslave" African Americans in the American South between 1865 and 1940? And if so, what were the social, political and cultural implications of this re-enslavement? How did these practices shape the experience and consciousness of both blacks and southern whites? Moreover, in a culture that speaks so often of slavery's terrible legacies, how might a deeper understanding of convict leasing and chain gangs offer its own particular lessons about race, history, and justice in the United States since the Civil War? My hope is that the methods and approaches laid out in this dissertation will invite other scholars to grapple with the ways in which chain gang history and cultural history inform one another. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: English.

This research examines the effects of maternal incarceration in the United States with a specific focus on the short- and long-term risks to which children are exposed when they live with their mothers pre-incarceration. It synthesizes the pre-existing body of research concerning the effects of maternal incarceration and places it in dialogue with the author’s unfolding personal narrative—a story of resilience. Employing an autoethnographic approach and analyses of the letters her mother wrote to her while in a state penitentiary, the author examines her own life relative to the relational communication patterns between her and her mother before, during, and after her mother’s incarceration.

abstract: The thesis for this study is that structural racism within the U.S. criminal system causes Black mothers to assume the emotional work of caring for incarcerated sons. This project was designed using an interpretive approach that employed a combination of qualitative and auto-ethnographic methods, drawing on grounded theory principle. Six interviews were conducted with mothers in order to gain in-depth insight into their lived experiences. An auto-ethnographic method was used to analyze the author’s own personal experiences as a family member of the incarcerated in dialogue with the experiences of the broader research population. Studies on the key finding of the psycho-social impacts on mothers with incarcerated sons have explored the relationship between the mental depression of mothers and their son’s incarceration. They have found that financial challenges, dwindling social connections, lousy parenting evaluations, as well as the burden of care of the grandchildren of the incarcerated sons are some of the mediating factors of this relationship. A second key finding also showed that incarceration have had social-economic effects on the prisoner’s families. These families experience extreme financial hardship as a result of incarcerated loved ones. Another finding showed the unique coping strategies for mothers included assuming care taking responsibility, maintaining family relationships, and budget control. Finally, this study found that there are challenges to re-entry experienced by mothers with incarcerated sons when their released. Research findings and original contribution to scholarly knowledge uncovered that Black mothers of the incarcerated in addition to working the Second Shift, are experiencing the phenomena of what is coined to be the “Third Shift.” / Dissertation/Thesis / Masters Thesis Social Justice and Human Rights 2019

Abstract Mass incarceration is a popular term in today’s society that is means to describe the high incarceration rate in the United States. Because of this, the United States has the largest prison population in the world. Mass incarceration is a movement that truly began to make headway during Reagan’s presidency and his declaration of a War on Drugs. The sensationalization of the dangers of crack cocaine sparked a “tough on crime” mentality and a long series of punitive measures that would come to disproportionately affect the black community. Today, mass incarceration has become an extremely controversial topic. The debate has centered on whether this country is too punitive and how current policies may be disproportionately affecting black men as they make up 33% of the prison population but only 12% of the general population (Alexander, 2010). However, regardless of the controversy, mass incarceration continues to affect millions of individuals in this country. Thus, the question is why individuals continue to be imprisoned at such alarming rates. Not only has the prison system take a strong foothold in this country but its power and influence continue to grow with the prison industrial complex. Therefore, ensuring that future generations will continue to be affected. In order to stop mass incarceration, we must consider alternatives to our prison system, such as a focus on rehabilitation rather than deterrence. Or perhaps an abolition of our prison system altogether.