0 / SPK / specialcollections@tulane.edu

In the past 40 years, the U.S. has experienced its largest expansion of incarceration. Sociological research has begun to examine the effects the dramatics rises in incarceration in the United States on other areas of social life. One area of research has examined the effects of parental incarceration on children. In this study, I examined the effects of parental incarceration on intragenerational and intergenerational socioeconomic mobility using data from nationally-representative sample of respondents who had been studied from adolescence to young adulthood. Specifically, I examined the effects of parental incarceration prevalence and duration on three measures of socioeconomic status—household income, occupational prestige, and educational attainment—at young adulthood while controlling for measures of parental socioeconomic status and socioeconomic status during adolescence. I found that the presence of parental incarceration, especially when it occurred before adulthood, exerted significant negative effects on all three measures of socioeconomic status at young adulthood. These effects were rather consistent throughout my results. The duration of parental incarceration among those who experienced it exerted few significant effects on socioeconomic status. I also found that the main mechanisms through which parental incarceration affected social mobility were early economic disadvantage and criminal justice contact. Parental incarceration had a significant negative effect on household income during adolescence. It also had a significant positive effect on arrests during adulthood. Low levels of household income during adolescence and high levels of arrests during adulthood, then, were associated with diminished socioeconomic life chances. Some of the effects of parental incarceration on social mobility were moderated by gender, race, and other demographic and contextual control variables, but the nature of those moderating effects was not consistent throughout my analyses. These findings indicate parental incarceration helps set in motion a process of cumulative disadvantage and a process of the intergenerational transmission of offending (and the negative social and economic consequences that come with it). The effects of both of these processes are that children of parents who’ve been “locked up” are then “locked out” of economic opportunities. This process may help form and reinforce social class boundaries.

Thesis advisor: Gregory Fried / An unprecedented number of Americans are being held in prison as punishment. This thesis outlines the political and psychological effects of incarceration in relation to John Rawls’ theory of justice: one of the most pervasive political theories of the past 60 years. First, I test the statistically-supported consequences of incarceration on the economic wellbeing of individuals most directly impacted by incarceration against Rawls’ principles of justice to determine if incarceration is politically just. Next, guided by the writings of alienation philosopher Axel Honneth, I expand upon Rawls’ references to mental states to uncover psychological criteria for Rawlsean justice. Finally, I test incarceration against this criteria. I find that the American criminal justice system fails to provide a suitable bare-minimum amount of economic and psychological justice for all citizens due to punitive incarceration, no matter one’s proximity to incarceration. Incarceration, thus, is a barrier to America becoming a well-ordered society. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2024. / Submitted to: Boston College. Morrissey School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Philosophy. / Discipline: Departmental Honors.

American justice systems are among the most punitive in the world. Young people who come into conflict with the law should be diverted into community-based programs, instead of being adjudicated by courts and sent to systems of incarceration. Research demonstrates the ineffectiveness of incarceration as a means of delinquency control and the ways it actually worsens juveniles’ circumstances.

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Thesis advisor: Stephen Pfohl / Thesis advisor: David Karp / This work uses the method of autoethnography to explore and present the story of one family's struggle with the incarceration of the primary wage earner. This thesis was structured around major defining moments or events in my “career” as the daughter of a white-collar criminal, and the ways in which my identity has shifted as a result of my experience. Each chapter outlines a specific milestone or experience along my career path--from learning of my father's arrest, to visiting him in prison two years later. This thesis presents the contagious spread of shame and “guilt by association” with my father’s alleged “deviance” is outlined, and illustrates the ways in which the experience of incarceration can function as a form of collective punishment for every member of the family. Borrowing from Goffman’s dramaturgical model of interaction, (Goffman, 1959) this paper is heavily influenced by the notion of what happens to actors when their roles are suddenly and drastically altered? How do these actors cope with the change within themselves—how they conceptualize their identity, how they interact with their previous environment or stage, and how they interact with other actors. The change in identity that comes from the arrest and subsequent incarceration of a family member is a long and daunting process, and this paper attempts to catalogue the tumultuous journey towards self-understanding and self-acceptance after this major shift in status. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2012. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology Honors Program. / Discipline: Sociology.

Every day, I write letters to prisoners. I have done this for years now, and have written literally thousands of letters. Somewhere along the way the correspondence gave birth to an art vision—an aggregation of objects and content that has provided the source material for work that I have been creating since 2013.

Thesis (M.A. (MW))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2008.

This dissertation consists of three essays on the historical roots of racial disparity in incarceration in the United States. The first essay examines the origins of racial inequality in convict leasing in the postbellum U.S. South. Following emancipation, white southerners feared two primary challenges to the region's agricultural economy and social order: African Americans' flight from farms to cities, and African Americans' ability to procure land. In their capacities as accusers and jurors, white civilians exercised considerable discretion over the arrest and conviction of African Americans for minor offenses such as property crimes. Using archival administrative records of the Georgia convict lease system, combined with the complete 1880 U.S. Census, I find that African-American men living in urban counties or in counties where the per-capita value of land owned by African Americans was high were much more likely to be incarcerated for property crimes than similar individuals in rural counties or in counties where African Americans were largely excluded from landownership. The second essay traces a portion of the rise of racial inequality in incarceration in northern and southern states to increasing rates of African-American migration to the North between 1880 and 1950. It employs three analytical strategies. First, it introduces a decomposition to assess the relative contributions of geographic shifts in the population and regional changes in the incarceration rate to the increase in racial disparity. Second, it estimates the effect of the rate of white and nonwhite migration on the change in the white and nonwhite incarceration rates of the North. Finally, it uses macro- and microdata to evaluate the mechanisms proposed to explain this effect. The third essay has two objectives. First, it provides a descriptive account of trends in racial inequality in imprisonment from the late 1980s through the first decade of the twentieth century. Second, it asks whether prison growth and regional variation in racial disparity in imprisonment have common causes. Although absolute racial disparity grew markedly between 1981 and 2002, relative racial disparity did not increase. Disparity in drug admissions spiked dramatically between 1985 and 2005, particularly in the Northeast and Midwest, but disparity in admissions for non-drug crimes was also high. In some years, the drug and homicide admissions rate for whites and African Americans was higher in counties with greater poverty and unemployment rates and lower per-capita income, but changes in poverty, employment, and income were not strongly associated with changes in drug admissions. Taken together, these results suggest that racial disparity in imprisonment is not solely a product of the recent history of the prison boom. / Sociology

This dissertation seeks to build on the growing research literature concerning the intergenerational consequences of paternal imprisonment for their children. The existing literature has explored the cumulative process of disadvantage that can result in negative outcomes for these children. However, there is little evidence of the mechanisms by which this occurs. This dissertation explores the possibility of the mediators outlined by Kaplan’s (1986) self-referent theory and Giordano’s (2010) symbolic interactionsist approach by which the intergenerational transmission of delinquency occurs using a unique dataset with information collected from multiple generations. This longitudinal dataset compiles information from 2,722 adolescents aged 11-18 that report their race, gender, level of self-esteem, parental relations, parental deviant behavior/characteristics, and peers and teacher stigmatization. The dataset also contains information on their fathers, 4,212 of the first generation participants, who report the frequency and causes of their own incarceration. Various models were estimated to test whether the association between paternal incarceration and delinquency was significant, the mediating effects of negative self-feelings, agency, identity, and emotion, and the moderating effect of both race and gender. The results indicate that the association between paternal incarceration and delinquency is significant. The relationship is mediated by negative self-feelings, identity, and anger. Race did not moderate the relationship but gender did. These findings were independent of a litany of individual, family, and structural factors. The implications and significance of these findings are discussed.