CARCERAL EXTRACTIVISM, LIVELIHOOD STRATEGIES, AND “ACTING RIGHT” IN THE U.S. SOUTH

Mass incarceration and its effects are well documented and carceral privatization is hotly contested on moral and economic grounds. This dissertation examines the local effects of carceral privatization in the U.S. south in historical context. Tallulah is a small, rural predominately African American town in northeastern Louisiana that endures high rates of poverty, unemployment, and low educational attainment. It also hosts four private prisons operated by LaSalle Corrections, LLC. Two primary and overlapping questions guide the research. 1) How has an history of carceral entrepreneurship and mass incarceration impacted the way persons and communities create livelihoods and imagine futures, and how have these strategies changed over time? 2) In what ways does for-profit incarceration in Tallulah sustain historically racialized social and economic patterns of low educational attainment, unemployment, crime, and poverty? Findings presented here draw on 13 months of ethnographic data collected from 2015–2019 where I conducted informal interviews with multi-generational participants and partial life histories with persons aged 19-92, participant observation in community spaces and public meetings, as well as guided tours in the community and surrounding area and local archival research. The dissertation provides an overview of Louisiana’s carceral economy spanning chattel slavery, convict leasing, and sharecropping up to the more recent history of carceral entrepreneurship in Tallulah recounted from local newspaper archives, publicly available documents, and resident’s experiences. I argue that incarceration and prisons be understood as an extractive industrial enterprise (carceral extractivism) within a longer trajectory of expropriative racial capitalism. Examining the local history and effects of carceral entrepreneurship as it materialized locally in Tallulah during the 1990’s in the building of a men’s detention facility and a youth prison, since converted to a women’s transitional facility, illustrates how these processes involve private individual investors, the community, and state actors that national debates often leave unexamined. I argue that carceral entrepreneurship in Tallulah influences community livelihood strategies and well-being overtime through changing employment possibilities and wage migration but must be understood alongside and with other processes including periods of school integration, state policy towards social services, and the legacies of deep poverty, disenfranchisement, and criminalization in the south. Similarly, carceral entrepreneurship in Tallulah exacerbates socioeconomic challenges in the community, materially in the form of financial resources diverted from the city to private companies and the Sheriff’s office, but also in terms of imagined life outcomes and of living day to day in a “prison town” where the facilities predominate on the landscape. In response to the challenges presented by mass incarceration in the community I examine the ways in which people make lives worth living alongside extractive carceral institutions through various forms of work, including scrapping metal, cottage food industries, and involvements with local churches. Through these livelihood creating activities, centered around an ethic of “acting right,” non-carceral spaces of social reproduction are created, resisting, even as they are constrained by, carceral entrepreneurship in the community and broader region

Considering the Human and Nonhuman in Literary Studies: Notes for a Biographic Network Approach for the Study of Literary Objects

In recent years critical projects spanning philosophy, the social sciences, science studies, and nearly everywhere that has employed the term ecology have engaged in thinking humans and non-humans together as collectively producing outcomes, where objects do work beyond how humans perceive or make use of them. Taking Zelda Fitzgerald’s Save Me the Waltz as its focus, this thesis explores how this reorientation might contribute to literary studies and to literary criticism more specifically. The thesis considers a notion that novels constitute objects with biographies running “against” the biographic material of their authors, mobilizes actor network theory as a manner of mapping that biographic assemblage, and tentatively develops a biographic network approach as one alternative to traditional literary interpretative practices. Attending to the novel as an actor shifts critical focus away from its interior – the “text” or content – and expands traditional literary criticism’s default practice – interpretation – and logic – mimetic representation – in hopes of facilitating a discussion of Zelda’s novel in a manner which destabilizes the overdetermined themes that continue to scaffold her imaginary. Ultimately, this work argues that a biographic network approach can prove instructive as a “method” for dealing with other texts which remain relatively obscured at the margins of literary consciousness

Identifying Effects and Applications of Fixed and Variable Speed Limits

In Indiana, distracted driving and unexpected queues have led to an increase in the amount of back-of-queue crashes, particularly on approach to work zones. This report presents new strategies for the assessment of both transportation safety and traffic operations using crowd-sourced probe vehicle data and a speed laser vehicle re-identification scheme. This report concludes by recommending strategies for the placement of variable speed limits (VSL) adjacent to work zones and suggestions for future research

The Equity Impact Vaccines May Have On Averting Deaths And Medical Impoverishment In Developing Countries.

With social policies increasingly directed toward enhancing equity through health programs, it is important that methods for estimating the health and economic benefits of these programs by subpopulation be developed, to assess both equity concerns and the programs' total impact. We estimated the differential health impact (measured as the number of deaths averted) and household economic impact (measured as the number of cases of medical impoverishment averted) of ten antigens and their corresponding vaccines across income quintiles for forty-one low- and middle-income countries. Our analysis indicated that benefits across these vaccines would accrue predominantly in the lowest income quintiles. Policy makers should be informed about the large health and economic distributional impact that vaccines could have, and they should view vaccination policies as potentially important channels for improving health equity. Our results provide insight into the distribution of vaccine-preventable diseases and the health benefits associated with their prevention

Promising insights into the health related quality of life for children with severe obesity

Background Childhood obesity is a growing health concern known to adversely affect quality of life in children and adolescents. The Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) pediatric measures were developed to capture child self-reports across a variety of health conditions experienced by children and adolescents. The purpose of this study is to begin the process of validation of the PROMIS pediatric measures in children and adolescents affected by obesity. Methods The pediatric PROMIS instruments were administered to 138 children and adolescents in a cross-sectional study of patient reported outcomes in children aged 8–17 years with age-adjusted body mass index (BMI) greater than the 85th percentile in a design to establish known-group validity. The children completed the depressive symptoms, anxiety, anger, peer relationships, pain interference, fatigue, upper extremity, and mobility PROMIS domains utilizing a computer interface. PROMIS domains and individual items were administered in random order and included a total of 95 items. Patient responses were compared between patients with BMI 85 to < 99th percentile versus ≥ 99th percentile. Results 136 participants were recruited and had all necessary clinical data for analysis. Of the 136 participants, 5% ended the survey early resulting in missing domain scores at the end of survey administration. In multivariate analysis, patients with BMI ≥ 99th percentile had worse scores for depressive symptoms, anger, fatigue, and mobility (p < 0.05). Parent-reported exercise was associated with better scores for depressive symptoms, anxiety, and fatigue (p < 0.05). Conclusions Children and adolescents ranging from overweight to severely obese can complete multiple PROMIS pediatric measures using a computer interface in the outpatient setting. In the 5% with missing domain scores, the missing scores were consistently found in the domains administered last, suggesting the length of the assessment is important. The differences in domain scores found in this study are consistent with previous reports investigating the quality of life in children and adolescents with obesity. We show that the PROMIS instrument represents a feasible and potentially valuable instrument for the future study of the effect of pediatric obesity on quality of life

BLAST: Correlations in the Cosmic Far-Infrared Background at 250, 350, and 500 microns Reveal Clustering of Star-Forming Galaxies

We detect correlations in the cosmic far-infrared background due to the clustering of star-forming galaxies in observations made with the Balloon-borne Large Aperture Submillimeter Telescope, BLAST, at 250, 350, and 500 microns. We perform jackknife and other tests to confirm the reality of the signal. The measured correlations are well fit by a power law over scales of 5-25 arcminutes, with Delta I/I = 15.1 +/- 1.7%. We adopt a specific model for submillimeter sources in which the contribution to clustering comes from sources in the redshift ranges 1.3 <= z <= 2.2, 1.5 <= z <= 2.7, and 1.7 <= z <= 3.2, at 250, 350, and 500 microns, respectively. With these distributions, our measurement of the power spectrum, P(k_theta), corresponds to linear bias parameters, b = 3.8 +/- 0.6, 3.9 +/- 0.6 and 4.4 +/- 0.7, respectively. We further interpret the results in terms of the halo model, and find that at the smaller scales, the simplest halo model fails to fit our results. One way to improve the fit is to increase the radius at which dark matter halos are artificially truncated in the model, which is equivalent to having some star-forming galaxies at z >= 1 located in the outskirts of groups and clusters. In the context of this model we find a minimum halo mass required to host a galaxy is log (M_min / M_sun) = 11.5 (+0.4/-0.1), and we derive effective biases $b_eff = 2.2 +/- 0.2, 2.4 +/- 0.2, and 2.6 +/- 0.2, and effective masses log (M_eff / M_sun) = 12.9 +/- 0.3, 12.8 +/- 0.2, and 12.7 +/- 0.2, at 250, 350, and 500 microns, corresponding to spatial correlation lengths of r_0 = 4.9, 5.0, and 5.2 +/- 0.7 h^-1 Mpc, respectively. Finally, we discuss implications for clustering measurement strategies with Herschel and Planck.Comment: Accepted for publication in the Astrophysical Journal. Maps and other results available at http://blastexperiment.info

LSST: from Science Drivers to Reference Design and Anticipated Data Products

(Abridged) We describe here the most ambitious survey currently planned in the optical, the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST). A vast array of science will be enabled by a single wide-deep-fast sky survey, and LSST will have unique survey capability in the faint time domain. The LSST design is driven by four main science themes: probing dark energy and dark matter, taking an inventory of the Solar System, exploring the transient optical sky, and mapping the Milky Way. LSST will be a wide-field ground-based system sited at Cerro Pach\'{o}n in northern Chile. The telescope will have an 8.4 m (6.5 m effective) primary mirror, a 9.6 deg$^2$ field of view, and a 3.2 Gigapixel camera. The standard observing sequence will consist of pairs of 15-second exposures in a given field, with two such visits in each pointing in a given night. With these repeats, the LSST system is capable of imaging about 10,000 square degrees of sky in a single filter in three nights. The typical 5$\sigma$ point-source depth in a single visit in $r$ will be $\sim 24.5$ (AB). The project is in the construction phase and will begin regular survey operations by 2022. The survey area will be contained within 30,000 deg$^2$ with $\delta<+34.5^\circ$, and will be imaged multiple times in six bands, $ugrizy$, covering the wavelength range 320--1050 nm. About 90\% of the observing time will be devoted to a deep-wide-fast survey mode which will uniformly observe a 18,000 deg$^2$ region about 800 times (summed over all six bands) during the anticipated 10 years of operations, and yield a coadded map to $r\sim27.5$. The remaining 10\% of the observing time will be allocated to projects such as a Very Deep and Fast time domain survey. The goal is to make LSST data products, including a relational database of about 32 trillion observations of 40 billion objects, available to the public and scientists around the world.Comment: 57 pages, 32 color figures, version with high-resolution figures available from https://www.lsst.org/overvie

LSST Science Book, Version 2.0

A survey that can cover the sky in optical bands over wide fields to faint magnitudes with a fast cadence will enable many of the exciting science opportunities of the next decade. The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope (LSST) will have an effective aperture of 6.7 meters and an imaging camera with field of view of 9.6 deg^2, and will be devoted to a ten-year imaging survey over 20,000 deg^2 south of +15 deg. Each pointing will be imaged 2000 times with fifteen second exposures in six broad bands from 0.35 to 1.1 microns, to a total point-source depth of r~27.5. The LSST Science Book describes the basic parameters of the LSST hardware, software, and observing plans. The book discusses educational and outreach opportunities, then goes on to describe a broad range of science that LSST will revolutionize: mapping the inner and outer Solar System, stellar populations in the Milky Way and nearby galaxies, the structure of the Milky Way disk and halo and other objects in the Local Volume, transient and variable objects both at low and high redshift, and the properties of normal and active galaxies at low and high redshift. It then turns to far-field cosmological topics, exploring properties of supernovae to z~1, strong and weak lensing, the large-scale distribution of galaxies and baryon oscillations, and how these different probes may be combined to constrain cosmological models and the physics of dark energy.Comment: 596 pages. Also available at full resolution at http://www.lsst.org/lsst/sciboo

Promising insights into the health related quality of life for children with severe obesity

Abstract Background Childhood obesity is a growing health concern known to adversely affect quality of life in children and adolescents. The Patient Reported Outcomes Measurement Information System (PROMIS) pediatric measures were developed to capture child self-reports across a variety of health conditions experienced by children and adolescents. The purpose of this study is to begin the process of validation of the PROMIS pediatric measures in children and adolescents affected by obesity. Methods The pediatric PROMIS instruments were administered to 138 children and adolescents in a cross-sectional study of patient reported outcomes in children aged 8–17 years with age-adjusted body mass index (BMI) greater than the 85th percentile in a design to establish known-group validity. The children completed the depressive symptoms, anxiety, anger, peer relationships, pain interference, fatigue, upper extremity, and mobility PROMIS domains utilizing a computer interface. PROMIS domains and individual items were administered in random order and included a total of 95 items. Patient responses were compared between patients with BMI 85 to < 99th percentile versus ≥ 99th percentile. Results 136 participants were recruited and had all necessary clinical data for analysis. Of the 136 participants, 5% ended the survey early resulting in missing domain scores at the end of survey administration. In multivariate analysis, patients with BMI ≥ 99th percentile had worse scores for depressive symptoms, anger, fatigue, and mobility (p < 0.05). Parent-reported exercise was associated with better scores for depressive symptoms, anxiety, and fatigue (p < 0.05). Conclusions Children and adolescents ranging from overweight to severely obese can complete multiple PROMIS pediatric measures using a computer interface in the outpatient setting. In the 5% with missing domain scores, the missing scores were consistently found in the domains administered last, suggesting the length of the assessment is important. The differences in domain scores found in this study are consistent with previous reports investigating the quality of life in children and adolescents with obesity. We show that the PROMIS instrument represents a feasible and potentially valuable instrument for the future study of the effect of pediatric obesity on quality of life