This thesis explores the issue of lifelong incarceration in the Canadian context. Lifelong incarceration, defined as a criminal sentence which forecloses hope of prospective release from its outset, is a new sentencing option in Canada, only possible after legislative amendments enacted in 2011. Sentencing for murder in Canada is examined from a historical and comparative point of view to contextualize the issue of lifelong incarceration. An interdisciplinary approach is also used, drawing on the field of psychology to explore the meaning and importance of hope. I argue that all sentences in Canada should leave an offender with hope of prospective release. My argument situates hope within the principles of sentencing law codified in s. 718 of the Criminal Code as well as the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. / Graduate / 2017-10-31

This manuscript is collection of short stories about addiction and incarceration.

Thesis advisor: Stephen Pfohl / In the wake of decades of growth in the American prison system, unprecedented numbers of people flow out of penal institutions each year: 750,000 are released from state and federal prison, and 7 million more from local jails. Reentry on this scale creates a host of new policy challenges and important openings for social science research. I study the problems of reentry ethnographically. Based on nine months living in a halfway house for men leaving prison and jail, I examine how the prison experience follows people after they leave, the forces and processes that push people back toward prison, and the strategies of former prisoners confronting often extreme forms of social exclusion. My reentry research doubles as a ground-up account of the American prison boom: a window on the world of a small group of men and women rebuilding their lives under the long shadow of mass incarceration. I present the research in three articles: Reentry within the Carceral: Foucault, Race and Prisoner Reentry uses concepts from Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish to re-frame the way we think about reentry, while also taking account of the deep racial inequalities that stamp the American prison system. I argue that people leaving prison are branded delinquent in a society infused with technologies of surveillance and control. In this context, reentry is best conceptualized not as a move from confinement to freedom, but along a carceral continuum of graded intensity. Further, the racialized features of social control in the United States often leave black and brown bodies in themselves marked delinquent. An individual need not commit a crime or spend time inside to become enclosed in social spaces characterized by exclusion and close surveillance. In the case of many black prisoners, formal processing by police and prisons only intensifies a process already underway, and the experience of reentry is best understood as a particular moment in long-term process that begins before imprisonment. The Social Logic of Recidivism: Cultural Capital from Prison to the Street develops a conceptual framework for explaining the cycles of incarceration that so often enveloped the lives of participants. I argue that the growth of incarceration, concentrated geographically along race and class lines, establishes the structural context in which the choice to enter street culture makes sense for large numbers of former prisoners. In high incarceration neighborhoods where street culture is predominant, large-scale movements in and out of prison create networks of relationships that traverse and blur carceral boundaries. Prison and street cultures become partially fused – at different times they are populated by many of the same people - and because of this overlap, the skills and knowledges people learn while incarcerated are also valuable in the street. That is, incarceration involves an accumulation of cultural capital that increases the potential rewards of street crime. Rather than providing roads toward a new life, incarceration creates a structure of constraints and opportunities that pushes people back toward the street. Free But Still Walking the Yard: Prisonization and the Problems of Reentry examines the deep and lasting changes that people carry with them after leaving prison. I argue that prisonization transforms the habitus, as penal institutions are deposited within individuals as lasting dispositions, motor schemes and bodily automatisms. This prisonization of the habitus can be observed in the everyday practices of former prisoners: the experience of physical space, the rituals of cleaning and bodily care, and the practices of consuming food. While some of these habits and dispositions may seem innocuous, they express an underlying adaptation of the convict body to the rules and rhythms of prison life that can have powerfully disruptive effects during reentry: creating feelings of stress and anxiety, making it difficult to function in routine social situations, amplifying exclusion from the labor market and other institutions, and encouraging return to street cultures shared with other former prisoners. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Sociology.

While recent scholarship has documented the long history of African American disenfranchisement leading up to mass incarceration, it has evaded a comprehensive investigation of Latino encounters with the U.S. criminal justice system by relying on a false dichotomy between black and Latino carceral experiences. The historical roots of Latino criminalization and punishment in the United States, dating back to the 1845 annexation of Texas, merit a study that both particularizes Latino experiences and problematizes essentialized racial categories. Thus, this dissertation charts the trajectories of Latino racial constructions as shaped by incarceration, revealing how prisons have defined and destabilized the boundaries of Latinidad. Furthermore, this project finds that these racializations have served as decisive factors in determining the incarcerability of Latinos, with mass incarceration and deportation acting as intertwined, complementary systems of control. Utilizing a wide range of sources including prison records, personal memoirs, political discourses, local newspapers, survey data, and imagery from street and prison culture, this study also highlights the conflict between the concept of race as a social construct and efforts to quantify racial disparities in U.S. institutions. The first chapter identifies the ways in which Latinos were perceived and recorded as racial others in registers from the nation’s flagship prisons between 1850 and 1950. The personal histories of Latinos in this early era and later in the twentieth century also capture the normalization of interactions with law enforcement and the routine of jailtime. To address the systemic complexities that have dictated Latino racial developments, in the next chapters, I introduce an analytical framework based on three different racial paradigms. Chapter Two deconstructs understandings of Latinos as perpetual foreigners paired with the notion of immigrants as criminals. Chapter Three explores Latino experiences with criminalized blackness due to African ancestry and shared socioeconomic disadvantage. Chapter Four examines Latino disenfranchisement founded on Amerindian heritage and the reappropriation of Indianism as a tool of resistance in response. Finally, the last chapter analyzes longitudinal survey data, finding nuances within the racial disparities typically cited in criminal justice reports, while unpacking the role of incarceration in Latino racial formations over time. / 2021-02-05T00:00:00Z

archives@tulane.edu / The current Grounded Theory study sought to develop a theory of how low-income Black mothers in the greater New Orleans area choose to communicate with their young children about police, arrest and incarceration (PAI). Parental arrest affects the lives of a significant portion of young children in the United States, and disproportionately impacts the lives of Black families, families living in poverty, and families in the Southern part of the U.S. Despite this prevalence, little research has examined what and how parents choose to communicate with their young children about their experiences with the criminal justice system and how they arrive at these decisions within the context of their lived experiences. Working from an intersectional feminist and ecological systems frame, this study used multi-stage coding of interviews with seventeen mothers, all of whom had a child between 3-7 years old, identified as Black or African American, lived in the greater New Orleans area, and had incomes near or below the poverty line, to develop a theory of maternal communication choices about PAI. The theory elucidated a 7-theme model composed of a three-step decision-making process contained within four contextualizing and intersecting themes relating to maternal identity, environment, and experiences. This model expands the body of reserach on parenting in the context of arrest, provides a framework for more grounded and culturally appropriate clinical support to families who have been impacted by arrest, and informs potential policy changes aimed at diminishing the injustices and hurt inflicted on families by the current criminal justice system. / 1 / Elsia Obus

archives@tulane.edu / There is a veil that divides those willing to discuss the construct of race and those participating in racial ambivalence or color blindness. It is because of that veil or divide that discussing race, racism, and the traumatic effects of racism is a task that many are still learning how to do successfully. This study is among the first to question how social workers engage with the construct of racism-based trauma. Furthermore, this study beckons a consideration to racism based stressed experienced by the incarcerated person. By not considering racialized stress and harm, one not only has limitations in the intervention process but runs the risk of perpetuating more harm. The goals for the study were as follows: To identify how justice system social workers define racism-based trauma; to understand whether or not justice system social workers consider the carceral experience to be racially traumatic; to inform practice approaches to racism-based trauma among justice system social workers. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with twelve social workers to learn how they conceptualized racism-based trauma in their work with the incarcerated person. Inductive and abductive coding from the transcribed interviews revealed that racism-based stress was considered to be an experience often unbeknownst, long-lasting, and accentuated by locale. Reflections on the incarceration experience also suggest that the experience is racially stressful and that it occurs before, during, and after incarceration. Findings highlight the importance of increasing knowledge in the construct of racism-based trauma to be beneficial in practice while confronting whiteness and allyship were identified challenges. The findings for this study suggest that an engagement with one’s racial identity before and during a critique of racialized systems is beneficial in social work practice. Some examples of engagement include conceptualizing race and racism-based trauma experienced by the client, considering how to assess and relieve stress from racism, and how to maintain wellness while doing so. In these engagements, a shift from being culturally competent to being racially competent is possible and encouraged for the social worker. The aims of engaging with construct ultimately strengthens and diversifies social work pedagogy, training, and policies. / 1 / Curtis Davis

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) has a long history of identifying adolescents who are at risk of displaying delinquent behaviors. However, MMPI research regarding behaviors observed from adolescents while incarcerated is non-existent. This dissertation examines the usefulness of the adolescent version of the MMPI (MMPI-A; Butcher et al., 1992) in predicting specific unit infractions for female juvenile delinquents incarcerated in a state facility in Texas. Unit infractions were placed into groups based on behavioral relatedness. MMPI-A scales were selected for analyses based on behavioral descriptors related to unit infractions. Logistic regression was performed to test whether elevated MMPI-A scales, dichotomized at 55T, 60T, 65T and 70T could predict behaviorally related groupings. Analyses suggest that the MMPI-A is not very useful in statistically predicting unit infractions.

The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) has a long history of identifying adolescents who are at risk of displaying delinquent behaviors. However, MMPI research regarding behaviors observed from adolescents while incarcerated is non-existent. This dissertation examines the usefulness of the adolescent version of the MMPI (MMPI-A; Butcher et al., 1992) in predicting specific unit infractions for female juvenile delinquents incarcerated in a state facility in Texas. Unit infractions were placed into groups based on behavioral relatedness. MMPI-A scales were selected for analyses based on behavioral descriptors related to unit infractions. Logistic regression was performed to test whether elevated MMPI-A scales, dichotomized at 55T, 60T, 65T and 70T could predict behaviorally related groupings. Analyses suggest that the MMPI-A is not very useful in statistically predicting unit infractions.

The War on Drugs has lead to the incarceration of millions of people. Between 1965 and 2000 the prison population in the United States swelled by 600 percent. There are currently more than 2 million people incarcerated in the United States. As astonishing as these current prison population figures are, they are also deceptive in that they mask the systematic targeting of poor black communities. Critics claim that the boom in U.S. prison population has gone unnoticed because the war on drugs has been fought primarily in African Americans communities. From this view, mass incarceration in America is just another system of racial oppression, which has roots in slavery and Jim Crow legislation. Since the start of the war on drugs more than 31 million people have been arrested for drug-related crimes. With this report, I have documented the cycle of incarceration that U.S. Drug War policies have created in the communities that inmates leave behind. / text

archives@tulane.edu / 1 / John Bardes