“I Never Thought I Could Accomplish Something Like This”: The Success and Struggle of Teaching College Courses in Jail

In this article, we discuss the challenges and potential benefits of teaching in the “revolving-door” of the criminal justice system: county jails. Massachusetts jails hold pre-trial offenders as well as those serving sentences of up to 2.5 years. Over four semesters, we have learned that flexibility and creativity are necessary to navigate the challenges this heterogeneous population presents, not the least of which is a class in constant flux. In spite of many challenges of teaching in a jail, the classes we teach give students a recovered or newfound belief in their own self-worth and ability, opportunities for intellectual engagement, and encouragement to pursue a positive future. In addition, many of the incarcerated students are local and, when released, are likely to return to these same communities; the potential for successful partnership with nearby colleges to assist with reentry should not be overlooked

\u3ci\u3eControl and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States\u3c/i\u3e by Jennifer Musto

Review of Jennifer Musto\u27s Control and Protect: Collaboration, Carceral Protection, and Domestic Sex Trafficking in the United States. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2016

“We Incarcerate to Set Free:” Negotiating Punishment and Rehabilitation in Jail

Criminology has documented the decline of rehabilitation in the age of get-tough approaches to crime and punishment. Therapy and punishment, however, are not mutually exclusive. Rehabilitation and traditional punishment have long co-existed in penal facilities. In this article, I examine the role of rehabilitation at Northeast Jail, a county jail in the U.S. that adhered to an ideology of rehabilitation. But Northeast Jail was, first and foremost, a penal facility where offenders were confined and punished. While staff and administrators at Northeast Jail routinely invoked a rhetoric of rehabilitation, they adhered to rules and engaged in punitive practices that interfered with the rehabilitative process. Based on 18 months of participant observation, I found that managing the irresolvable tensions between confinement and rehabilitation was part of the job for staff at Northeast Jail. I identify three strategies that staff used to negotiate these tensions: rehabilitation as rhetoric, role-switching, and deferring to punishment

The effect of dog interaction through therapy trained animals or Harrisonburg-Rockingham SPCA volunteering on high achieving first year college student adjustment period

Transitioning to college is a big change. A change that can be life altering for some students, especially when they realize that transitioning to college also means leaving their beloved companion at home. This research study proposes an Animal Assisted Activity intervention for high achieving first year college students through the Honors College as a way to lower their anxiety and increase their happiness as they adjust to their new environment. The research compared an intervention using therapy dogs from the university counseling center to an intervention using SPCA dogs and a control group to see where the largest difference occurs. Even with results that didn’t favor the researcher’s hypotheses, the meaning came genuinely from the qualitative feedback received from participants. Throughout the course of the research, it became clear that meaning would come from developing a program for these first-year students to integrate into the General Education core of classes each student must take to receive their degree. This program will hopefully contribute to the health of future students at the university

Transverse angular momentum of photons

We develop the quantum theory of transverse angular momentum of light beams. The theory applies to paraxial and quasi-paraxial photon beams in vacuum, and reproduces the known results for classical beams when applied to coherent states of the field. Both the Poynting vector, alias the linear momentum, and the angular momentum quantum operators of a light beam are calculated including contributions from first-order transverse derivatives. This permits a correct description of the energy flow in the beam and the natural emergence of both the spin and the angular momentum of the photons. We show that for collimated beams of light, orbital angular momentum operators do not satisfy the standard commutation rules. Finally, we discuss the application of our theory to some concrete cases.Comment: 10 pages, 2 figure

Fiber Composite Sandwich Thermostructural Behavior: Computational Simulation

Several computational levels of progressive sophistication/simplification are described to computationally simulate composite sandwich hygral, thermal, and structural behavior. The computational levels of sophistication include: (1) three-dimensional detailed finite element modeling of the honeycomb, the adhesive and the composite faces; (2) three-dimensional finite element modeling of the honeycomb assumed to be an equivalent continuous, homogeneous medium, the adhesive and the composite faces; (3) laminate theory simulation where the honeycomb (metal or composite) is assumed to consist of plies with equivalent properties; and (4) derivations of approximate, simplified equations for thermal and mechanical properties by simulating the honeycomb as an equivalent homogeneous medium. The approximate equations are combined with composite hygrothermomechanical and laminate theories to provide a simple and effective computational procedure for simulating the thermomechanical/thermostructural behavior of fiber composite sandwich structures

Hoffmann-Infeld Black Hole Solutions in Lovelock Gravity

Five-dimensional black holes are studied in Lovelock gravity coupled to Hoffmann-Infeld non-linear electrodynamics. It is shown that some of these solutions present a double peak behavior of the temperature as a function of the horizon radius. This feature implies that the evaporation process, though drastic for a period, leads to an eternal black hole remnant. Moreover, the form of the caloric curve corresponds to the existence of a plateau in the evaporation rate, which implies that black holes of intermediate scales turn out to be unstable. The geometrical aspects, such as the absence of conical singularity, the structure of horizons, etc. are also discussed. In particular, solutions that are asymptotically AdS arise for special choices of the parameters, corresponding to charged solutions of five-dimensional Chern-Simons gravity.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, Revtex4. References added and comments clarified; version accepted for publicatio

“How Can You Live Without Your Kids?”: Distancing from and Embracing the Stigma of “Incarcerated Mother”

This article examines how incarcerated mothers constructed moral identities in the face of stigma. Analyzing data from participant observation and 83 in-depth interviews with incarcerated mothers, we show that mothers claimed moral identities by distancing from the stigma of incarceration and/or embracing the identity of incarcerated mothers. Utilizing these strategies, women challenged the stigma of convicted felon/ bad mother and reinforced the assumptions that motherhood is compulsory and should be reserved for women with enough money and standing to give their children advantages. The implications for understanding motherhood as a mechanism of moral identity and social control are discussed

Duality Between Spatial and Angular Shift in Optical Reflection

We report a unified representation of the spatial and angular Goos-Hanchen and Imbert-Fedorov shifts that occur when a light beam reflects from a plane interface. We thus reveal the dual nature of spatial and angular shifts in optical beam reflection. In the Goos-Hanchen case we show theoretically and experimentally that this unification naturally arises in the context of reflection from a lossy surface (e.g., a metal).Comment: 4 pages, 3 figure