Uneasy partnerships: prisoner re-entry, family problems and state coercion in the era of neoliberalism

Hundreds of thousands of Americans are released from prison every year. Drawing on interviews conducted in the mid-2010s in the context of the Multi-site Family Study on Parenting, Partnering and Incarceration, this article explores how the strains of prisoner re-entry interact with those of poverty and family life, and how these combined strains condition proactive engagement with the legal system among re-entering individuals and their intimate and co-parenting partners. We focus our analysis on problems, tensions and struggles for control in parenting and partnership, including inter-parental violence, as these often led to calls or actions that clearly allowed for coercive intervention by parole authorities, courts, child support enforcement, or child protective services. We identify the precise circumstances and motives that lay behind such requests or allowances, and explain how these related to the cynical regard in which former prisoners and their partners typically held the coercive apparatus of the state. Through bringing our empirical findings into an interplay with scholarship on the role of punishment in the governance of poverty under neoliberalism, we examine how the strains faced by former prisoners' households and the tactics they used to deal with them pertain to broader politico-economic arrangements

The Hispanic/Latino community in the Fox Ridge Manor Apartments, Wake County, North Carolina : an action-oriented community diagnosis : findings and next steps of action

During the 2002-2003 academic year, five students from the University of North Carolina’s School of Public Health conducted a community diagnosis for Hispanic/Latino residents of Fox Ridge Manor, an apartment complex in Southeast Raleigh. The AOCD process is used to help understand the many sides of a community, including its norms, values, culture, power structure, history, and patterns of communication (Eng and Blanchard, 1991). The goal is to develop an insider’s view and understanding of the community through extensive fieldwork (Steckler et al., 1993). Eng and Blanchard (1991) highlight the basic steps of the AOCD process the Fox Ridge team followed: 1. Specify target population. 2. Review secondary data sources. 3. Conduct windshield tours. 4. Interview local service providers. 5. Interview key community informants. 6. Tabulate the results for the secondary data and primary data. 7. Present the findings back to the community. With the guidance of a preceptor from Wake County Cooperative Extension, the team engaged in a resident-focused research process that combined publicly available secondary data with primary data from interviews and field notes. The community diagnosis process was aimed at describing life in Fox Ridge’s Hispanic/Latino community; with a focus on the strengths and challenges its members share. This document opens with a description of our experiences as outsiders in Fox Ridge. Our findings in this process have been shaped both actively and passively by our biases as observers, so this section traces the brief evolution of our perspectives as recorded in our field notes. A description of the Fox Ridge Hispanic/Latino community based on secondary data follows, along with an overview of recent research findings about the community. Secondary data include sections on health, housing, education, employment and income, language, recreation, and transportation. Next, methods for primary data collection, including interviews and focus groups, are discussed. A thematic summary of primary data follows, comparing the perspectives of service providers and residents. Themes that emerged from our primary data collection include: Language as a barrier to all aspects of the lives of Latino/Hispanic residents in Fox Ridge. Lack of communication between parents and school personnel. Lack of recreational opportunities for Fox Ridge residents, both children and adults. Lack of transportation. Discrimination of Latino/Hispanic residents by landlords, service providers, police, etc. Race relations between African American and Hispanic/Latino residents. Effect of immigration status on service eligibility. The demographic change of Fox Ridge. Lack of access to health services and other social services. Lack of employment opportunities. Housing/maintenance issues. Community functioning. Community problems, such as gang activity, substance and alcohol abuse, and domestic violence. The results of primary data collection presented to community members and service providers at the Fox Ridge community forum are reviewed including the planning process and outcomes. All of the themes determined by the primary data analysis were presented, although the focuses of the community forum were childcare/recreation, knowing your rights, and the presence of gangs. Participants in the forum decided to focus on developing a childcare center in Fox Ridge and agreed to meet to discuss possible ways of accomplishing this goal. The document concludes with the team’s recommendations for future outsider approaches.Master of Public Healt

When state violence comes home: partner violence in an era of mass incarceration

Research with returning prisoners and their partners finds astoundingly high rates of partner violence—as much as tenfold those observed in the general population. Yet very little is known about its nature or etiology in the context of the American experiment in hyper-incarceration. The current project responds to this gap by integrating qualitative narratives with couples-based, longitudinal survey data to understand the nature and etiology of partner violence among former prisoners and their partners. It draws on data from the Multi-site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting and Partnering to address four aims: 1. Examine patterns in the use of physical violence and controlling behavior by returning prisoners and their partners using latent class analysis and a stratified qualitative case study. 2. Investigate qualitative understandings and experiences of partner violence among returning prisoners and their partners and their perceived connection to experiences of state and structural violence through an inductive qualitative analysis. 3. Test quantitative relationships between individual criminal justice system exposure and later partner violence perpetration using structural equation modeling with couples-based survey data. 4. Examine whether and how local social and material conditions associated with mass incarceration predict partner violence perpetration by men returning from prison using structural equation modeling with couples-based survey data linked to representative data sources on local characteristics. This work reveals dense connections between government-sanctioned violence and acts of 4 violence in private homes and relationships. Applying Bronfenbrenner’s social ecological framework to synthesize results from four empirical inquiries, the study links partner violence to the state violence of criminalization and imprisonment and the structural violence of material deprivation and heightened mortality in hyper-incarcerated communities. The stories told by former prisoners and their partners reveal the coextension of violence and penal authority across carceral, domestic, and street spaces. They highlight how strategies of resistance to authority in one sphere become tools of domination in another and how heteropatriarchal social structures help to reallocate and obscure the harms of incarceration. Quantitative testing of hypotheses generated from qualitative data suggest how childhood criminal justice system exposure and cumulative criminal justice system exposure during adulthood each predict later partner violence perpetration via (distinct) behavioral health problems. Results also identify two different classes of partner violence among returning prisoners and their partners—coercive controlling violence and jealous-only situational violence—that are distinguished by accompanying patterns of controlling behavior (consistent with Johnson’s typology). While the types have different proximal precursors and different apparent consequences for victims, both are predicted by the local adversities associated with geographically concentrated incarceration. Built on the insights of partner violence survivors and survivors of mass incarceration, this work advances a new empirical and theoretical understanding of the relationship between penal authority and violence. It also reveals the workings of gender as an instrument of harm transfer in hyper-incarcerated poor communities of color. It argues that the most pervasive form of violence in America deserves focal attention in scholarly conversations about hyper-incarceration and as part of the urgent policy projects of decarceration and reparation

Racist policing is making Black and White Americans question police authority

In new research based on a nationwide survey of 1,500 Americans, Jonathan Jackson and co-authors find that years of racially targeted policing is leading people to question the fairness and legitimacy of the police, such that 40 percent believe that the police should be defunded. Regardless of respondents’ race, they find that concerns about the under-protection and over-regulation of Black communities may be threatening the public support that police fundamentally rely upon

Profile of Justice-Involved Marijuana and Other Substance Users: Demographics, Health and Health Care, Family, and Justice System Experiences

Substance users are more likely to have co-occurring health problems, and this pattern is intensified among those involved with the criminal justice system. Interview data for 1977 incarcerated men in 5 states from the Multi-site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering that was conducted between December 2008 and August 2011 were analyzed to compare pre-incarceration substance use patterns and health outcomes between men who primarily used marijuana, primarily used alcohol, primarily used other drugs, and did not use any illicit substances during that time. Using regression modeling, we examined the influence of substance use patterns on physical and mental health. Primary marijuana users comprised the largest portion of the sample (31.5%), closely followed by nonusers (30.0%), and those who primarily used other drugs (30.0%); primary alcohol users comprised the smallest group (19.6%). The substance user groups differed significantly from the nonuser group on many aspects of physical and mental health. Findings suggest that even among justice-involved men who are not using “hard” drugs, substance use merits serious attention. Expanding the availability of substance use treatment during and after incarceration might help to promote physical and mental health during incarceration and reentry

Centering race in procedural justice theory: structural racism and the under- and over-policing of black communities

Objectives: We assess the factors that legitimated the police in the United States at an important moment of history, just after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020. We present one way of incorporating perceptions of systemic racism into a procedural justice theory account of police legitimacy. Hypotheses: (1) Perceptions of police procedural justice, distributive justice and bounded authority are important to the legitimation of the police. (2) Perceptions of the under- and over-policing of Black communities also matter to the delegitimation of the institution, especially for people who identify with the Black Lives Matter movement. Method: A cross-sectional quota sample survey of 1,500 US residents was conducted in June 2020. Data were analysed using confirmatory factor analysis, structural equation modelling, and latent moderated structural equation modelling. Results: People who viewed the police as legitimate also tended to believe that police generally treat people with respect and dignity, make decisions in unbiased ways, fairly allocate their finite resources across groups in society, and respect the limits of their rightful authority. Moreover, people who believed that Black communities were under-policed and over-policed also tended to question the legitimacy of the police , especially if they identified with the Black Lives Matter movement. These results held among Black and White study participants alike. Conclusions: At least at that moment, systemic racism in policing may have delegitimated the institution in a way that transcends the factors that procedural justice theory focuses on, such as procedural justice. This was especially so for those who identified with a social movement that was extremely high-profile in 2020