Welcome to the University of Oklahoma Carceral Studies Consortium Newsletter. The Carceral Studies Consortium strives to build a community for intellectual exploration that includes faculty, staff, graduate students, community members, practitioners, and organizers.
Carceral Studies is concerned with the independent function and nexus of the political and social systems that organize, shape, sustain, and entrench practices of punishment, surveillance, incarceration, and harm.
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The University of Oklahoma Carceral Studies Consortium is pleased to announce that Dr. Constance Chapple has been selected to serve in the role of faculty director of the Carceral Studies Consortium following an internal search. Dr. Chapple will serve as incoming director during the Spring 2022 semester and officially assume the position on July 1, 2022. Dr. Chapple is an associate professor of sociology with research specialties in the causes and consequences of crime and criminal justice involvement.
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Alex Hinton / iStock / FuatKose / ShinjiPhotographer / Akiromaru / DebbiSmirnoff |
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Heile Gantan, a formerly incarcerated person, explains that the experience of incarceration is one of hunger pangs, food hoarding, and binge eating. Food in prison is often exceedingly cheap and low-quality foods that are high in sodium, carbohydrates, and sugar. Lela Nargi notes that "food in jails and prisons can instigate or exacerbate diet-related health issues, coping behaviors, and food insecurity that are already prevalent among communities of color that bear the brunt of mass incarceration." This food insecurity causes Gantan and others to focus only on " filling" their stomach rather than obtaining proper nutrition while incarcerated. According to Nargi, traumatic food experiences combine with the poor quality of prison foods to create health problems such as diabetes, heart disease, mental health issues, behavior issues, and illnesses due to foodborne pathogens. However, these behaviors were not only isolated to their time being confined, as many formerly incarcerated individuals express food-related trauma once they've returned home. Kanav Kathuria of the Maryland Food and Prison Abolition Project summarizes that "a person going into prison, even if they're healthy, is likely to leave with chronic health conditions, whether physical or mental."
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Jason Peters / Prison Arts Program |
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Jeffrey Greene manages the Community Partners in Action's Prison Arts Program in Connecticut that seeks to change the perceptions of incarcerated individuals and their communities. The arts program will present pieces crafted by incarcerated individuals for the month of February at the Holy Family Retreat Center's Monastery Gallery of Art. Greene believes that "prison is this sterile and seemingly pointless, stagnant adversarial environment. It's so separate from the outside world. It's really important to connect the two worlds." Even though people may be separated through the prison system, Greene's program changes how "the person on the outside thinks of the person in prison as the person who went to prison, rather than the person who is growing and changing. When you're locked in prison, your loved ones don't observe those changes — positive or negative. They can't keep track of you. But all of a sudden, they're seeing this artwork and they respect your growth and your need to be connected with them."
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Mary Inhea Kang / The New York Times |
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In 2021, New York saw sixteen incarcerated individuals die while in jail. Although the number of deaths in recent years has decreased compared to approximately thirty deaths per year in the 1990s, the deaths of incarcerated individuals in 2021 were a stark contrast to the previous two years of zero suicides. Michael Wilson and Chelsia Rose Marcius note that the "deaths have received outsize scrutiny compared with years past, with many seemingly preventable, especially after recent reforms put in place at the jails and the emptying of thousands of inmates during the pandemic." By September, the Correction Board responded to five recent suicides by declaring "a crisis for persons in custody." Wilson and Marcius conclude that "awaiting the outcomes of their cases, these men died unseen, away from family, and in most cases, from doctors or correction officers charged with watching over them."
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The Communities not Cages campaign, a New York-based grassroots organization, recently proposed three measures to address a system that they believe to be a "skewed criminal justice system in relation to jail bonds disparities, coerced plea deals, and the indiscriminate and excessive punishment of an overwhelming number of minority groups facing the brunt of incarceration. The first measure proposes the elimination of mandatory minimums that "force judges to dish out harsh and unreasonable time.” Instead, they propose "the elimination of mandatory minimums [to] empower judges and juries to evaluate the individual factors of each case." The second proposition would "allow those imprisoned to petition for resentencing review, permitting judges to revisit cases where excessive sentences have been implemented, allowing the court to reconsider the time allocated." The final initiative suggests an expansion of "eligibility for the existing Good Time and Merit Time laws," which reduces sentencing time off of an incarcerated individual's maximum term of imprisonment due to good behavior. According to assembly member Anna Kelles, the proposed reforms would progress New York toward shifting from a "system of punishment to a system of redemption, transformation, and rehabilitation."
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Please share recent research you would like to see featured, including your own!
Send it to carceralstudies@ou.edu
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ABSTRACT: Worldwide, incarcerated women are known to suffer adverse experiences that might increase the risk of suicide attempts during incarceration. The present investigation examines the prevalence of suicide attempts amongst incarcerated women in Spain and the factors associated with this. Between January and March of 2017 a total of 174 women, enrolled from two prisons in the southeast of Spain, completed anonymous self-report measures of demographic variables, penitentiary and sentence-related variables, mental distress (including depression, anxiety and stress), perceived social support, substance use (including alcohol, cannabis, cocaine, amphetamine, heroin and hallucinogens), prison victimization (property, verbal, physical and sexual victimization) and suicide attempts. Overall, 15.5 percent of women reported they had attempted suicide during their current incarceration. Compared with women who did not report suicide attempts, multivariate analysis showed that women reporting suicide attempts were more likely to report lower education levels, in-prison substance use, victimization and higher levels of mental distress. In order to prevent suicide amongst incarcerated women, victimization in all its forms, emotional distress and drug abuse in women with lower education levels, should be considered highly targetable variables.
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ABSTRACT: The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted children and parents involved in the child welfare system and the professionals working with these families. Using survey data collected August–September of 2020, this mixed-methods study examined the perspectives of 196 child welfare-involved professionals (77 attorneys, 99 caseworkers, and 20 therapists) in the United States about the impact of COVID-19 on parents of origin, children, foster parents, and child welfare professionals. Particular attention was paid to the implications of COVID-19 and associated challenges for parent-child contact and reunification. With respect to professional stresses, more than half of participants worried about their own personal safety and health amidst COVID-19, and more than three-quarters expressed concerns about the safety and well-being of child welfare-involved families. Participants, especially attorneys, expressed concerns about parent-child contact and disruptions to reunification. In-person parent-child visits had all but ceased during the early part of the pandemic, and participants identified barriers to effective virtual visits, including lack of foster parent oversight, technology issues, and children's developmental stage and/or lack of engagement. Attorneys were especially critical of the cessation of in-person visits and viewed this as a serious threat to child-parent bonds and reunification. Participants, especially child welfare workers, voiced concerns about children's mental health and educational outcomes amidst the pandemic. Findings have implications for attorneys, child welfare workers, and other practitioners who directly and indirectly interface with child welfare-involved families.
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OBJECTIVES: To examine the dual disproportionality that individuals with serious mental illness and people of color (PoC) occupy in the criminal–legal system. METHODS: This study follows a cohort of 623 individuals who screened positive for mental health issues at booking in 8 Midwestern jails in 2017. We followed individuals through the jails' practices of jail-based mental health treatment, and we used Medicaid billing data to assess community-based behavioral health treatment engagement in the post-year period after jail release. The aim was to examine if an individual's race/ethnicity was associated with their access to jail- and community-based mental health treatment. RESULTS: We did not find any racial disparities in jail-based treatment, although 3 community-based outcomes significantly differed. Compared with PoC, White people had 1.9 times greater odds of receiving community-based mental health and substance use treatment and 4.5 times greater odds of receiving co-occurring disorder treatment. CONCLUSIONS: Barriers that individuals released from jail face adversely affect PoC, resulting in reduced access to treatment. Critical race theory can expose the assumptions and functions of systems of care and the possible reproduction of implicit bias in potential solutions.
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ABSTRACT: The development of police legitimacy evaluations is a core component of the legal socialization process. Research has identified many factors that impact peoples' perceptions of legitimacy such as social and ethnic identity, but the role of American identity has yet to be examined. This study attempted to gain a deeper understanding of the factors that impact legal socialization by examining the relationship between American identity and police legitimacy evaluations. Using a sample of 2086 adults from the United States, we found that people with a stronger American identity were more likely to believe the police are a legitimate authority after accounting for other known predictors of legitimacy. The results demonstrate that national identity maybe play a key role in the legal socialization process and partially shape peoples' evaluations of police legitimacy regardless of the content and quality of interactions they have with the police.
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Updates, Events & Opportunities |
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Reimagining the American Carceral State Seminar
The Oklahoma Scholar-Leadership Enrichment Program is hosting a week-long (in person) seminar that focuses on "how the modern police state developed, how everyday Americans respond politically to the carceral state, and explore the possibility of reimaging criminal justice." The seminar is primarily for upper-division undergraduate students, but graduate students can take the seminars with permission from their departments.
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OU Libraries and Carceral Studies Consortium Assemble “Racial Capitalism” Library Guide
In a collaborative effort between OU Libraries and the Carceral Studies Consortium, a library guide on “Racial Capitalism” is now available for all students, staff, and faculty. Racial capitalism contends that racist oppression is central to how capitalism operates. Racial subjugation is not one specific manifestation of a larger capitalist system, but rather, capitalism itself is a racial system. The guide includes resources (written, audiovisual, and contacts) for information about the carceral state, crimmigration, and race and labor.
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2021-2022 Carceral Studies Consortium Student Work Prize
The Carceral Studies Consortium is inviting original student essays or creative works developed as part of any course in any discipline during the 2021-2022 academic year that engages the topic of Carceral Studies, broadly conceived. Submissions are not limited to essays, but may be in any creative or scholarly format, including but not limited to art in any medium, story maps, and more.
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ABOUT
The Consortium Newsletter will offer a roundup of a few selected articles that reflect today’s news, organizing, and thinking related to the carceral state. We understand that freedom work is built on education and engagement. Education requires an understanding of contemporary issues informed by their historical context. We hope that these curated articles will help you analyze the issues that we face and understand the community that we strive to construct.
Join the conversation!
We encourage feedback, suggestions, and article suggestions. Please reach out to carceralstudies@ou.edu with any ideas, thoughts, or recommendations.
If anyone you know is interested in receiving this newsletter and other information from the Carceral Studies Consortium, please forward them this email and they may click this link to subscribe.
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Land Acknowledgment
The University of Oklahoma is on the traditional lands of the Caddo Nation and the Wichita & Affiliated Tribes. This land was also once part of the Muscogee Creek and Seminole nations. It also served as a hunting ground, trade exchange point, and migration route for the Apache, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kiowa, and Osage nations. Today, 39 federally-recognized Tribal nations dwell in what is now the State of Oklahoma as a result of settler colonial policies designed to confine and forcefully assimilate Indigenous peoples.
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The University of Oklahoma is an equal opportunity institution. ou.edu/eoo |
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