INCARCERATION AS A THREAT TO REPRODUCTIVE JUSTICE IN MASSACHUSETTS AND THE UNITED STATES

This Article is an edited and expanded version of Rachel Roth’s presentation at the 2016 Western New England Law Review Symposium on Gender and Incarceration. It provides an overview of reproductive justice and describes (1) how prisons and jails undermine reproductive health, rights, and justice for the people they confine, and (2) how mass incarceration undermines the prospect for reproductive justice in the United States overall. It focuses on examples from women’s prisons and includes issues and advocacy work from Massachusetts and across the country

The Strange Case of Privacy in Equilibrium Models

We study how privacy technologies affect user and advertiser behavior in a simple economic model of targeted advertising. In our model, a consumer first decides whether or not to buy a good, and then an advertiser chooses an advertisement to show the consumer. The consumer's value for the good is correlated with her type, which determines which ad the advertiser would prefer to show to her---and hence, the advertiser would like to use information about the consumer's purchase decision to target the ad that he shows. In our model, the advertiser is given only a differentially private signal about the consumer's behavior---which can range from no signal at all to a perfect signal, as we vary the differential privacy parameter. This allows us to study equilibrium behavior as a function of the level of privacy provided to the consumer. We show that this behavior can be highly counter-intuitive, and that the effect of adding privacy in equilibrium can be completely different from what we would expect if we ignored equilibrium incentives. Specifically, we show that increasing the level of privacy can actually increase the amount of information about the consumer's type contained in the signal the advertiser receives, lead to decreased utility for the consumer, and increased profit for the advertiser, and that generally these quantities can be non-monotonic and even discontinuous in the privacy level of the signal

“Here we come:” The experiences of women enrolled in male-dominated STEM career technical pathway programs at a Midwestern community college

This research is an exploratory study that focused on describing the experiences of adult students who identify themselves as women enrolled in male-dominated Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) career pathway programs at a large Midwestern multi-campus community college. The study was undertaken to build on the research of women in community college STEM transfer programs and describe self-efficacy as women in male-dominated STEM career programs at a large Midwestern community college. An examination of the history of women in STEM helps one to gain an understanding of women in male-dominated STEM career pathway programs in community college programs as women are currently enrolling in college at higher rates than men and have earned more than 50% of associates degrees awarded in 2013-14 (NCES). Community colleges provide an accessible educational option and are well positioned to accommodate economic needs (Garza & Eller, 1998; American Association of Community Colleges, 2015). Historically, men have dominated the market for jobs in high paying STEM and CTE fields. Adding to the research about women who persist in these programs and field is important to increase equity in representation. This research explored the experiences of women in career and technical STEM programs within community colleges. Using qualitative methodology and phenomenological techniques, the researcher sought a social constructivist post-modern worldview that attends to student self-efficacy as grounded in social cognitive theory and social cognitive career theory with a focus on human agency and self-efficacy. Semi-structured interviews were employed for data collection and inductive analysis procedures. In Lester’s (2010) research, women in these areas indicated family influence, mentorship and self-efficacy impacted their decision to pursue education in male-dominated career and technical programs. The findings of this study also included family as a strong influence, strong belief in one’s ability and a desire to contribute the field of study and the world. This study further contributed to the literature about women in STEM career pathway programs within the community colleges to enhance completion initiatives for this growing student population

Online Learning and Profit Maximization from Revealed Preferences

We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices, subject to a budget constraint. The merchant observes only the purchased goods, and seeks to adapt prices to optimize his profits. We give an efficient algorithm for the merchant's problem that consists of a learning phase in which the consumer's utility function is (perhaps partially) inferred, followed by a price optimization step. We also consider an alternative online learning algorithm for the setting where prices are set exogenously, but the merchant would still like to predict the bundle that will be bought by the consumer for purposes of inventory or supply chain management. In contrast with most prior work on the revealed preferences problem, we demonstrate that by making stronger assumptions on the form of utility functions, efficient algorithms for both learning and profit maximization are possible, even in adaptive, online settings

“If They Hand You a Paper, You Sign It”: A Call to End the Sterilization of Women in Prison

The context in which the sterilization of incarcerated women takes place is a deeply coercive one. The practice of sterilizing incarcerated women, whether intentionally coerced or not, takes place against a backdrop of mass incarceration and the long and ignominious history of forced and coerced sterilizations directed at poor people and women of color in the United States. Professor Sara Ainsworth and Dr. Rachel Roth explore this backdrop, and the federal sterilization regulations that arose from this history and from women\u27s activism to change it, in Part I. In Part II, they explain how the appallingly bad and often unconstitutional state of medical care in prison forms the context for both indirect and direct forms of sterilization abuse in prison. They describe careless or aggressive medical treatment that results in infertility, present a case study of sterilizations in California, and analyze state prison policies that permit sterilization. Part III explores medical ethics and the lack of guidance from professional medical organizations on this issue. They conclude by addressing claims that access to sterilization is necessary for incarcerated women\u27s reproductive autonomy, and making specific recommendations against the practice of sterilizing women in prison