Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: As welfare provisions and welfare rolls have been cut, imprisonment in the United States has climbed at an unprecedented rate. The co-occurrence of these patterns is likely not coincidence, especially if they are both viewed as mechanisms of social control in society. Indeed, previous studies of imprisonment have found that shifts in welfare provisions are associated with changes in prison admissions and custody rates. Research on welfare has examined whether partisan politics and economic factors predict changes in public assistance benefits and numbers of recipients. Yet, published research has not yet examined whether welfare and imprisonment policies are both accounted for by the same shifts in economic and political climates, and whether some aspects of economics and politics may have differential effects on the welfare safety net than on imprisonment. This is the goal of the present study. Using data from the fifty states for the late 1970s through 2004, we assess similarities and differences in the effects of economic, political and demographic factors on state welfare provisions versus state imprisonment rates. To assess these patterns, we develop an extension of the seemingly unrelated regression approach, recast in a multilevel modeling framework. The paper explores both the empirical and theoretical connections between the welfare safety net and concerns with public safety, in the form of imprisonment.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: What happens to societies when large numbers of prisoners are released? With incarceration levels similar to the United States, Russia is a case that might provide insight into the social consequences of mass imprisonment. I examine the case of the mass releases of prisoners in the Soviet Union from the 1920s to 1957. Moving beyond seeing inmates as individual victims and as criminal actors, I seek to examine consequences arising from the social worlds, networks, skills, and knowledge that they bring out of the camps. The supposed ur-institutions of totalitarianism created non-totalitarian conditions, concentrating diverse groups of people who often were non-conformist and anti-Communist, maintaining elements of the past and present, demanding weak and strong network connections for survival, producing knowledge and skills to get by in the Gulag, and providing direct contact with rebellion, resistance, widespread suffering, and violence. Returnees directly participated in changes in the Communist Party, new cultural trends in literature and music, a crime wave, and a range of social movements. They also changed the nature of the places they lived. They indirectly had a social impact through the spread of camp slang, literature, worldviews, and music, as well as through the symbol of the prisoner.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: My aim in this paper is to explore the meaning(s) of incarceration as narrated by young men (aged 15 to 21) detained within the South Australian secure care and prison systems. Based on data obtained from 80 in-depth initial and follow-up interviews at seven custodial sites, I look specifically at how the event of incarceration works its way into the vocabulary and day to day dispositions of custodial subjects in order to better grasp the types of orientations toward self and other likely to be carried into the community upon release. In particular I focus on the political and social implications of the following themes: incarceration as familiar/secure; incarceration as respite; incarceration as criminogenic; incarceration as senseless; incarceration and respect; and incarceration and visitation. Overall, my objective is to initiate a dialogue which takes as its starting point two critical questions: firstly, how do young men narrate or construct the experience of lock-up?, and secondly, what kind of subject does confinement unwittingly assemble in its efforts to extract conventional lives via patently unconventional means?

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Scholars have compared the current practice of detaining enemy combatants in U.S. military custody with that of confining enemy prisoners within the United States during World War II. Another comparison could be drawn from the experience of the American Civil War. Northern public opinion of rebel prisoners druing the Civil War provides abundant parallels with contemporary perceptions of detainees kept at Guantanamo Bay Navy Base prison. The purpose of this paper is to explore how war psychology and war-time propaganda combined to provide a distorted view of Confederate prisoners held in northern U.S. military prisons. After first describing the prevailing historical image of Civil War era prisoners, the paper assesses exigent sources of relevant evidence and finds that much historical data contradicts the picture that conventional research has drawn. The paper concludes with an illustrative case-study of Confederate prisoners confined in one northern state.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper extends the opportunity structures framework by analyzing the effects of individual race-ethnicity and aggregate racial inequality on imprisonment among urban California counties during the 1990s. Of special interest is the role of life-course institutions--including the labor market, education, welfare, and the criminal justice system itself--in shaping opportunities for ascriptive groups. Hierarchical models are used to estimate the interactive effects of individual and community-level factors.