The aim of the study was to examine the effects of incarceration terms on the well-being of African American families. This cross-sectional, quantitative study surveyed 72 participants, over the age of eighteen who has experienced a loved one incarcerated. The questionnaire of 25 items measured the participants' well-being and family structure. A Pearson's correlation test revealed a p of 0.49, indicating there is a statistically significant relationship between well-being of families and incarceration terms. The results of one-way ANOVA also revealed (F (4, 65) = 2.664, p< .05 indicating there is a statistically significant difference in levels of well-being, based on the relationship type. This research shows that cousins reported the lowest level of well-being. This holds implications for the social work profession. It suggests the need to understand the significance of collectivism in African American families. Collectivism is important because one's well-being is associated with that of their loved ones.

Military veterans are disproportionately represented in United States (U.S.) jails and prisons, with nearly 10% of current inmates being veterans. Veterans’ criminal justice involvement is often precipitated by underlying mental health and substance abuse that are connected to their military service. Veterans’ treatment courts are the judicial response to a need for more coordinated provision of mental health and substance abuse services to veterans involved in the criminal justice system. Modeled after drug courts and mental health courts, veterans treatment courts are a judicial innovation that aim to honor the service of veterans by providing them an alternative to incarceration. There are currently 551 veterans’ treatment courts in 42 states throughout country, including five in Kentucky. This exploratory descriptive study uses Andersen’s healthcare utilization model and a social control theoretical perspective as a framework to examine veterans’ treatment court outcomes from a sample of participants (N=58) in Kentucky. Univariate and bivariate analyses were used to provide a description of the sample and to examine relationships between personal characteristics and during-program occurrences and the outcomes of program completion and criminal recidivism. The findings of this study indicate that gender, sanctions, drug screens, and treatment sessions each have a significant association with program completion, and both age and housing status have a significant association with recidivism. Findings for each outcome variable are discussed, along with possible explanations, as well as limitations of the study, implications of this research for social work practice, and suggestions for future research.

This project explores the barriers to reunification with their children for incarcerated mothers in an effort to provide more support to child welfare social workers who engage with this population. Project participants were selected from one regional office of a child welfare agency in Southern California to complete qualitative interviews. Participants included seven Social Service Practitioners (SSPs), two Supervising Social Service Practitioners (SSSPs), and one Data Analysist. Each participant’s interview was digitally recorded, transcribed, and analyzed following the systematic manual coding method with the assistance of Microsoft Word (Ose, S, 2016). Five common barriers were identified: child visitations with incarcerated parents, variances of social worker’s knowledge of services and programs provided by institutions, presence of guidance and support, maintaining contact with incarcerated parents, and length of sentence. At the conclusion of the project, the researcher provided findings to study participants and the Deputy Director of the child welfare agency.

The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) accumulates annual data from state department of corrections. The information that the BJS accumulates annually is relevant to this study because it shows the possibility of the many African American women as well as other women in need of assistance while their loved one is incarcerated. The purpose of this study was to explore lived experiences of African American women involved with an incarcerated spouse, partner, or mate. The focal point of interest was how lived experiences affect African American women's physical and psychological well-being. The theoretical framework for this study comprised both the resilience theory and Bandura's self-efficacy theory. The research question that guided this study was: What are the significant experiences acquired during the incarceration process of the spouse, partner, or mate? Data were collected using semi structured interviews conducted with African American women over the age of 18 from a metropolitan city in the northeastern United States with incarcerated spouses, partners, or mates. NVivo software was used to find emergent themes from the data. The conclusions from the research, has endorsed positive social change by enlightening the helping professional. There are psychological implications that these women encountered during their lived experiences such as anxiety disorder, depression, trauma, stigma and shame, as well as criminality by association by staying in the relationship. The community should sustain these anguished women and be a factor in their well-being during the incarceration of their spouses, partners, or mates, as well as guiding them through the penal system via a resource center.

Adjustment to prison culture may influence the development of psychological issues for some individuals and may contribute to the difficulties of reentry to society, potentially contributing to the high rates of recidivism. The purpose of this study was to explore prisonization and its potential psychological effects from the perspective of individuals who experienced it. The theoretical foundation used to guide this study was the constructivist self-development theory, which can be used to explain how individuals may or may not have been affected by their traumatic experience. The participants for this phenomenological study included 10 individuals who experienced incarceration to fulfill the purpose of exploring psychological effects that may have developed during incarceration. The open-ended research questions that were used in this study were designed to obtain a full description of the prisonization and postincarceration experience, including any psychological issues that may have resulted from the incarceration experience. The process of explicitation, which included bracketing, extracting unique themes, and summarizing, was used to analyze the collected data. The interviews suggested that symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder may result from the prisonization experience. It is hoped that the results of this study may bring to awareness the psychological effects that can develop in some individuals during incarceration and may contribute to the difficulties of successful reentry to society.

Heroin addiction is a growing epidemic in the United States. The need for proper treatment programs accessible by heroin users who wish to or are mandated to participate in recovery programs is a growing need, and pathways to sobriety for ex-offenders have presented in literature as understudied. The purpose of this study was to examine heroin-addicted offenders' experiences prior to and after release on their paths to sobriety. This study followed a qualitative phenomenological approach based on the theory of personal causation, which posits that individuals see events in life as either driven by themselves or caused by others, both of which affect internal motivation. An empirical phenomenological approach was used to explore how this group of individuals perceived or experienced heroin addiction and their subsequent attempts at sobriety A purposeful sample of 15 heroin-addicted offenders were interviewed in a jail in a rural county of Wisconsin. Upon re-entry, 4 participants completed follow- up interviews. The results showed that external motivators such as social and treatment factors were separate from internal factors, although external motivators could influence the way a person makes internal choices. Results were obtained by performing coding on the semi-structured interviews both by hand and within the Atlas-ti analysis program. The theory of personal causation supports and is supported by the findings of this study. Implications for positive social change include a better understanding of the needs of heroin-addicted offenders moving from incarceration to release in treatment program development, thereby reducing harm to the heroin user, family members, and communities by decreasing relapse, recidivism, and chances of overdose and death.

In this project, I sought to understand how evidence-based practices are understood and implemented by individuals who work within the criminal justice system, with specific focus on the Iowa Correctional Institution for Women (ICIW). I collected interviews in the summer and fall of 2016 and observations at local criminal justice agencies from summer 2016 to summer 2017. Thirty-eight individuals agreed to be interviewed, including ICIW staff, Department of Corrections (DOC) staff, prison volunteers, and prisoner advocates. I found that how individuals understand “what works” in prison policy and practice is shaped by three main factors. First, their ideological standpoints on what purpose prison ought to serve influenced how they thought evidence should be used to inform policy, whether they believed it should achieve humanitarian goals of giving offenders second chances, utilitarian goals of keeping the community safe, or bureaucratic goals of ensuring that prisons are run efficiently and rationally. Second, their experiences with prisoners shaped their acceptance or skepticism of certain types of evidence, and respondents placed more value in experiential and anecdotal evidence in the case of women-centered policies. Third, the respondents’ stereotypes about who women are and what their place is in the larger correctional system contributed to more ready acceptance of women-centered practices, and more skepticism of statewide or uniform evidence-based practices. In turn, these different interpretations of evidence and the policies based upon it contributed to conflict and resistance to statewide DOC policy, as well as greater feelings of frustration and disenchantment among correctional stakeholders.

This dissertation examines early-nineteenth-century Native American incarceration in the upper Mississippi Valley between 1803 and 1849. Drawing upon military and government documents, court records, treaties, and legal questions under the Trade and intercourse Acts--as well as upon memoirs, travel narratives and newspaper articles--it explores how and why United States officials routinely incarcerated Native American men living on those lands which now comprise the states of Missouri, Illinois, Iowa, Wisconsin and Minnesota. It details the experiences of Indian prisoners held in military fort guardhouses and small town jails as they endured and negotiated the terms of their incarcerations, with the assistance of family and tribal communities on the "outside." During the early nineteenth century, before the establishment of large state penitentiaries in the upper Mississippi Valley--Native American men in the region faced two forms of incarceration: they were either held in municipal and county jails as "murder" suspects for civil trial, or they were detained in military fort guardhouses as hostages for the future "good conduct" of their respective villages, bands and/or tribes. I argue that in both cases, imprisonment was intended to be both punitive and reformative and was inseparable from federal geopolitical maneuverings that enabled U.S. conquest of the region--in the name of "peace." Whether Native men were held in municipal jails for civil trials, or in military guardhouses as hostages, their incarceration was directly, or indirectly, tied to the social control of larger Native collectivities and worked to bolster U.S. military, political, legal and economic hegemony in the region. As such, these carceral practices constituted a glaring contradiction of U.S. officials' often repeated dictum that as "fair" and "benevolent" arbiters of "Indian affairs," they would never punish the "innocent" for the behaviors of the "guilty." Moreover, the legal and geopolitical status of imprisoned Indian men during this period was marked nebulous, fluid, and expedient, for it was contingent upon the nonspecific legalese of various treaties and federal laws as well as upon U.S. officials' ever-changing, on-the-ground geopolitical calculations. This dissertation intervenes in histories of nineteenth-century U.S. penology and of Anglo-American conquest in the upper Mississippi Valley which essentially ignore the significance of Indian incarceration and the experiences of Native prisoners. It also intercedes in the sizeable body of work concerning the Sauk leader Black Hawk and his "war" against the United States in the summer of 1832. Arguably, Black Hawk became--and has remained--the most prominent of Indian prisoners in the region. However, accounts of Black Hawk have failed to consider his incarceration within the larger carceral landscape to which Indian men were routinely subjected; moreover, those accounts have neglected the significance of Indian incarceration (beyond Black Hawk's) to military officials' prosecution of the Black Hawk war.

Throughout history the penal system has been viewed as the paramount means of dealing with criminals, though its function has transformed throughout time. It has served as a pit for detaining suspected criminals, a home for the vagrant, an institution for the insane, a dreaded place of repute, quarters for cleansing and renewal, and an establishment of cataloged charges. The trials and transformations of history have developed and shaped the institution that we recognize today. Presently, the United States prison population far exceeds that of any other country in the world. The political climate, tough on crime policies, determinate sentencing, and increasing cost of prisons have significantly increased numbers of various offenders in prisons and generated lengthy prison sentences; creating a proliferating annual prison population and a depletion of resources. As a result, this practice of essentially cataloging mass amounts of inmates appears to have resulted in a system whose practices, financial situation, depleting amount of resources and ultimately the inability achieve rehabilitation has resulted in a system accomplishing only incapacitation. However, other nations have created prison models that appear more successful, managing to lower prison populations while simultaneously lower crime rates. Comparing the United States to the Netherlands and Germany, countries that have been successful in these to lower prison populations while simultaneously lower crime rates, provides an opportunity for uncovering potential advantageous practices.

Oscar Wilde redefined the relationship between Life and Art, and attempted to live in the style of the characters in his works: pursuing Beauty. His view of Life as imitating Art played a crucial role in his definition of Individualism. In his works, he explored how one develops one's personality and Individuality, and society's role in suppressing the Individual. He firmly believed that Life and ugliness were inextricably intertwined, and that society's moral structure was to blame. Popular in his time as an artist, he made it a point in his writing and in his work to stand apart from society. Ultimately, society cast him out; while in prison, he experienced an aspect of Life that he had been avoiding his entire life as an aesthete, and thus altered and expanded his ideal of the Individual. In falling from grace and in being forced to live in the ugliest of realities, he developed a fuller idea of what it means to live beautifully.