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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (18 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2023)
This study explores COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among prison security staff and the extent to which they trust varied sources of information about the vaccines. Cross-sectional survey data were obtained from a state-wide sample of corrections officers (COs, hereafter; n = 1208) in February 2021. Group differences, disaggregated by demographic characteristics, were examined using F-tests and t-tests. Despite the comparatively limited risk of contracting the virus, non-security staff reported they would accept a COVID-19 vaccine at no cost (74%), compared to their more vulnerable CO counterparts (49%). We observed vaccine refusal correlations between COs reported gender, age, and length of time working as a CO, but none with their self-reported race. Vaccine refusal was more prevalent among womxn officers, younger officers, and those who had spent less time working as prison security staff. Our findings also suggest that the only trusted source of information about vaccines were family members and only for officers who would refuse the vaccine; the quality of trust placed in those sources, however, was not substantially positive and did not vary greatly across CO racial groups. By highlighting characteristics of the observed gaps in COVID-19 vaccine acceptance between COs and their non-security staff coworkers, as well as between corrections officers of varied demographic backgrounds, these findings can inform the development of responsive and accepted occupational health policies for communities both inside and intrinsically linked to prisons.
    Cover page: COVID-19 Vaccine Refusal and Medical Distrust Held by Correctional Officers.
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
    This article uses ethnographic and interview data to explore how halfway house and community corrections staff in a women’s halfway house in the northeastern region of the U.S. police women’s sexuality and the ensuing complications of being queer and under supervision. In this setting, women are required to create a Reentry Home Plan that is approved by Community Corrections Officers, putting into tension some women’s newly emerging queer identity and/or nonnormative relationship schema that they see as “healthier” and more stable than heterosexual relationships, with Probation or Parole Officers’ heteronormative ideals that disapprove nontraditional home plans. This study shows how these women negotiate a marginalized sexual identity and resist biased forms of heteronormative surveillance that extend beyond the legislative parameters of community corrections supervision. It also illustrates the tensions between correctional staff, who view residents’ nonnormative relationships as potential sources of risk, and the supervised women, as they develop community release plans.
      Cover page: Risky business, risk assessment, and other heteronormative misnomers in women’s community corrections and reentry planning
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
      Prison-based therapeutic community (TC) programming is derived from the perspective that drug addiction is primarily symptomatic of cognitive dysfunction, poor emotional management, and underdeveloped self-reliance skills, and can be addressed in a collaborative space where a strong ideological commitment to moral reform and personal responsibility is required of its members. In this space, evidence of rehabilitation is largely centered on the client's relationship to language and the public adoption of a "broken self" narrative. Failure to master these linguistic performances can result in the denial of material and symbolic resources, thus participants learn how to use TC language to present themselves in ways that support existing institutionalized hierarchies, even if that surrender spells their self-denigration. This research examines the interview narratives of 300 former prisoners who participated in a minimum of 12 months of prison-based TC programming, and described how programming rhetoric impacted their substance abuse treatment experiences. While many of the respondents described distressing experiences as TC participants, White respondents were more likely to eventually embrace the "addict" label and speak of privileges and reintegrative support subsequently received. Black respondents were more likely to defy the treatment rhetoric, and either fail to complete the program or simulate a deficit-based self-narrative without investing in the content of those stories. The following explores the significance of language and identity construction in these carceral spaces, and how treatment providers as well as agency agendas are implicated in the reproduction of racial disparities in substance abuse recovery.
        Cover page: Exploring how prison-based drug rehabilitation programming shapes racial disparities in substance use disorder recovery
        • Article
        • Peer Reviewed
        UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2015)
          Cover page: Talitha L LeFlouria, Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South
          • Article
          • Peer Reviewed
          UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2017)
          This study leverages critical race and legal epidemiological frameworks to illustrate the race-based historical evolution of U.S. rehabilitation paradigms directed at imprisoned heroin and opioid users. What began as a racist early-20th-century federal antinarcotic trafficking effort has since assumed a state-based treatment agenda whose programmatic operations are largely based in correctional settings disproportionately reserved for poor substance abusers of color. Even in contemporary carceral facilities, where incarcerated populations are teeming with White addicts, in the aggregate, White drug abusers have been protected from the depraved, incorrigible, and inherently pathological drug-using caricature assigned to their non-White counterparts. This historical examination demonstrates how links between broader drug policy and prison-based drug treatment support a legally codified White supremacist narrative that erodes health and wellbeing for program participants of color, and the communities to which they inevitably return.
            Cover page: An historical review of racial bias in prison-based substance abuse treatment design
            • Article
            • Peer Reviewed
            UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2020)

            Objective

            This paper demonstrates that localized and chronic stop-question-and-frisk (SQF) practices are associated with community members' utilization of emergency department (ED) resources. To explain this relationship, we explore the empirical applicability of a legal epidemiological framework, or the study of legal institutional influences on the distribution of disease and injury.

            Data and study design

            Analyses are derived from merging data from the Philadelphia Vehicle and Pedestrians Investigation, the National Historical Geographic Information System, and the Southeastern Philadelphia Community Health database to zip code identifiers common to all datasets. Weighted multilevel negative binomial regressions measure the influence that local SQF practices have on ED use for this population. Analytic methods incorporate patient demographic covariates including household size, health insurance status, and having a doctor as a usual source of care.

            Principal findings

            Findings reveal that both tract-level frisking and poor health are linked to more frequent use of hospital EDs, per respondent report. Despite their health care needs, however, reporting poor/fair health status is associated with a substantial decrease in the rate of emergency department visits as neighborhood frisk concentration increases (IRR = 0.923; 95% CI: 0.891, 0.957). Moreover, more sickly people in high-frisk neighborhoods live in tracts that have greater racial disparities in frisking-a pattern that accounts for the moderating role of neighborhood frisking in sick people's usage of the emergency room.

            Conclusions

            Findings indicating the robust association reported above interrogate the chronic incompatibility of local health and human service system aims. The study also provides an interdisciplinary theoretical lens through which stakeholders can make sense of these challenges and their implications.
              Cover page: Negative illness feedbacks: High‐frisk policing reduces civilian reliance on ED services
              • Thesis
              • Peer Reviewed
              UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations (2022)

              Extensive empirical literature demonstrates that exclusionary school discipline (e.g., suspension, expulsion) is a source of persistent educational inequity in the United States. Since the early 2000’s, the prevalence and disproportionate impacts of exclusionary discipline have been observed in early care and education settings (e.g., preschools). Policy and practice interventions targeting exclusionary discipline in early childhood contexts are gaining traction at local, state, and federal levels. Yet, absent descriptions of the scope of exclusionary practices and how structural factors relate to practitioner use of exclusionary discipline in preschools, current measures, policy frameworks, and school-based interventions may dismiss a complex architecture of exits from early learning and care. Furthermore, in the context of increasing regulation, it is possible that forms of extra-exclusionary discipline proliferate. Guided by a desire-based epistemological stance grounded in womanist anti-carceral praxis and critical theoretical perspectives, I conceptualize extra-exclusionary discipline as the array of methods of exclusion that operate in covert, unconventional, and undocumented ways to achieve the same exclusionary ends as regulated discipline measures.

              This mixed methods convergent dissertation, therefore, aims to (a) elucidate a typology of “trapdoor” exits via extra-exclusionary discipline, and (b) explore underlying structural factors that influence these extra-exclusionary outcomes. To meet these aims, this dissertation addresses three research questions using data from a study conducted by an interdisciplinary research team as part of a multi-team, multi-study research-practice partnership between the University of California, Berkeley’s Graduate School of Education and a large school district in a large city on the West Coast. Specifically, I investigated (a) whether unmeasured common factors account for variance in measured extra-exclusionary discipline variables; (b) what themes and associated underlying dimensions emerge from interview narratives; and (c) the extent to which themes and associated underlying dimensions cohere between the quantitative and qualitative strands of this study. The target population was 190 individuals who were employed to work professionally with children and families at preschool sites in the school district (e.g., teachers, administrators, staff). The quantitative strand of this dissertation involved conducting exploratory factor analysis on data from a survey experiment (n = 60) with vignettes about “Terrell,” a Black boy. The survey sample was majority racially/ethnically minoritized and/or multiracial (83%), female (89%), and teachers (77%), with diverse educational attainment and years of experience in their professional roles in the school district, specifically, and working with children, in general. The qualitative strand of this dissertation involved an integrated analysis of narrative data derived from interviews (n = 24) focused on participants’ perspectives and experiences negotiating challenges in their in-person and virtual classrooms. Similar to the survey sample, the interview sample was majority racially/ethnically minoritized and/or multiracial (88%), female (88%), and teachers (71%), with diverse educational attainment and years of experience in their professional roles in the school district, specifically, and working with children, in general. Merging the quantitative and qualitative results as an integrated framework of “inside-out” perspectives yields a rich description of salient themes of extra-exclusionary discipline and key underlying dimensions.

              The results indicate that the quantitative and qualitative strands of this dissertation tell complementary stories that elucidate extra-exclusionary trapdoors and underlying structural factors. First, in the quantitative strand, models with two- and three-factor solutions were sequentially evaluated according to several pre-specified guidelines. The two-factor model, which used principal axis factor extraction and oblique (oblimin) rotation, was the most parsimonious solution and demonstrated acceptable model fit. The results suggest that underlying dimensions of extra-exclusion are distinguished by correction and treatment. Second, the qualitative results expand an understanding of trapdoor themes and underlying factors, illustrating characteristic dynamism and complexity of extra-exclusionary discipline. Narrative data illuminate five distinct themes, which constitute a typology of extra-exclusionary trapdoors in preschool contexts: disenrollment, early release, in-school, referral, and virtual measures. Within these themes of trapdoors, underlying dimensions at the child, family, and school levels reveal the complete picture of the implications of a fragmented early education system on fundamental issues of access and inclusion in preschool. Participants’ narratives demonstrate that measures of extra-exclusion mitigate “disruptive,” “unsafe,” and altogether deviant children; are sharpened by friction and distrust in the family-school relationship; and are cemented by an under-resourced and disconnected system. Taken together, participants’ narratives illustrate how extra-exclusionary trapdoors and associated underlying dimensions shine a light on precarity spanning every level of the preschool ecological system. Finally, the merged results expand knowledge about the conceptualization and measurement of extra-exclusionary discipline, drafting a sophisticated blueprint of structural and ecological factors concealing trapdoors within a racialized carceral continuum.

              This dissertation makes several novel contributions to the knowledge base. Most importantly, it is the first known conceptual and empirical investigation of a typology of covert, undocumented, and unregulated forms of extra-exclusionary discipline and associated underlying dimensions. The primary data collected at multiple timepoints as part of a research-practice partnership implemented during the COVID-19 pandemic is a particular strength of this research. Little is known about the dimensionality of exclusionary discipline amid in-person and distance learning contexts; this dissertation addresses both. Descriptions of extra-exclusionary discipline and associated underlying dimensions add precision to research, policy frameworks, and practice interventions to address a robust architecture of trapdoor exits from early care and education settings. The findings from this dissertation should motivate systems-change partnerships that target hidden, systemic sources of exclusion rather than downstream symptoms of exclusion such as disparities or disproportionalities in discipline outcomes.

                Cover page: Tricycles and Trapdoors: A Mixed Methods Study of Exclusionary Discipline in Preschools
                • Article
                • Peer Reviewed
                UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
                The politics of “Black Respectability” foreground Black citizens’ individual and collective responsibility to prioritize self-policing, polish, and propriety. Proponents believe that the steady performance of restraint and decorum is critical and that any departure from that repertoire can result in punishment. The belief that racially minoritized youth must earn respect and autonomy, rather than see those rights protected as a standard afforded to all community members, may not be widely held by younger Black people. The following study makes use of interview data collected from 23 Black Baltimore City millennials who shared their perspectives on the social and political contexts that led to Freddie Gray’s death while in Baltimore Police custody. When discussing police officers’ pursuit of citizens who match Freddie Gray’s outward appearance, younger respondents resisted the demands of Black Respectability Politics and, instead, asserted their right to pass through their neighborhoods absent state-sanctioned harassment. This study features an exploration of how generational membership moderates legal socialization, attitudes about personal responsibility for police profiling, and beliefs about the right to the same full spectrum of freedoms and protections enjoyed by majority citizens. Implications for critical race theory, legal cynicism, and intergenerational coalition building are also discussed.
                  Cover page: “Your Pants Won’t Save You”
                  • Article
                  • Peer Reviewed
                  UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2018)
                  Body-worn cameras (BWCs) are touted as a much-needed remedy to address police misconduct. Proponents argue that BWCs can serve not only as an accountability instrument, but that their use will lower costs attributed to investigation and evidence collection in the event of a civilian or internal complaint. However, the push for furnishing patrol officers with BWCs in order to bolster accountability, professionalism, and faith in institutional legitimacy might be a misguided effort. The argument that public perception of police officers’ use of force will be improved once officers are outfitted with a surveillance mechanism is unfounded for at least two reasons. First, evidence suggests that because they are aware of their being recorded, wrongdoing police officers may plant weapons and invoke language at a crime scene that corroborates a justified response to suspects who pose a threat. Second, civilians and officers alike have always known images of unjust state violence and that the presentation of even the most damning evidence does not necessarily deter officers from violating constitutional protections, or reduce the likelihood of being acquitted when they do. Drawing from the narratives offered by 68 Black Baltimore City residents who were interviewed on the heels of Freddie Gray’s death in 2015, this study explores what surveilled community members think of BWCs and their disutility, as well as center their suggestions for true and lasting improvements in police-civilian interaction. Theoretical implications for critical race theory, legal legitimacy, and legal cynicism are also discussed.
                    Cover page: Stop-gaps, lip service, and the perceived futility of body-worn police officer cameras in Baltimore City
                    • Article
                    • Peer Reviewed
                    UC Berkeley Previously Published Works (2016)
                    Purpose: The purpose of this study is to measure the effect that age has on women’s gendered prisoner reentry experiences and the likelihood of desisting from crime and substance abuse. This study also seeks to evaluate the applicability of Paternoster and Bushway’s (2009) Identity Theory of Desistance (ITD) for a contemporary, all-female sample. Methods: This mixed-method study makes use of official arrest data for 218 women leaving Delaware prisons in the mid 1990s, to create group-based offending trajectory models. A representative subsample of 118 women was interviewed between 2009 and 2011 and asked to conceptualize the mechanisms that led to their desistance or persistence in offending. Results: Multinomial logistic regression analyses reveal that for some of the sample, age at the time of release from prison has a positive effect on the likelihood that women will belong to a desisting trajectory group rather than the most deviant reference group. Interview narratives demonstrate that in navigating the post-incarceration gendered experiences of securing employment, family reunification, and substance abuse recovery, maturity, clarity about one’s personal responsibility for linked failures, and a desire to transform one’s identity were significant factors that preceded the capacity to excel in those reentry domains. Conclusions: These findings lend support for the applicability of ITD for women’s desistance experiences. As older women appear to express a reentry goal orientation that diverges from that of their younger counterparts, gender-responsive rehabilitation agendas must also include programming that increases the likelihood that participants will connect failures sooner so that the prosocial benefits of a healthy identity change can be enjoyed for longer.
                      Cover page: The Effects of Age at Prison Release on Women’s Desistance Trajectories: a Mixed-Method Analysis
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