Kristin Carbone-Lopez

Demographic Change and Ethnically Motivated Crime: The Impact of Immigration on Anti-Hispanic Hate Crime in the United States

In recent years, Hispanic immigration to the United States has become a politically charged public issue, with significant consequences for immigration policies, communities, individual immigrants, and the U.S. residents who resemble them in language, customs, and appearance. We examine one possible collateral consequence of the fear and tension surrounding recent immigration trends, anti-Hispanic hate crime. Drawing on traditional theories of intergroup conflict—and particularly minority threat theory—we hypothesize that recent changes in Hispanic immigration are positively related to hate crimes targeting Hispanics. We find support for this hypothesis in a multivariate state-level panel analysis of anti-Hispanic hate crime from 2000 to 2004. Other predictions, however, are not supported. We conclude that the impact of immigration patterns on hate crime is an important area for continued criminological inquiry and that the notion of cultural threat should receive greater attention as studies of intergroup conflict move beyond the Black—White dichotomy.

Risky Relationships? Assortative Mating and Women’s Experiences of Intimate Partner Violence

Research indicates that female offenders are far more likely to have experienced intimate partner violence than women in the general population. Despite extensive research on women’s pathways into offending, very little is known about why these women are at increased risk for partner violence. The authors use data from a sample of incarcerated women to explore various explanations for this association, paying particular attention to assortative mating patterns and the role of lifestyle. Findings indicate that, net of other risk factors, relationships with criminally involved partners increase women’s risks of victimization. Such findings have implications for assortative mating theory, the study of female offenders, and studies of the community-level impact of incarceration.

Women's "storylines" of methamphetamine initiation in the Midwest

Scholars have learned a great deal about the age at which individuals typically initiate particular drugs, the contexts in which they initiate use, and some of the motivations for initiation. Despite this attention, there remain few scholarly examinations of the accounts or “storylines” that users themselves give as explanation for their initiation. The authors present research from 40 interviews with female methamphetamine (meth) users incarcerated in Missouri, a state that has gained national attention for having high numbers of meth lab seizures. This study focuses specifically on the ways in which women articulate their storylines of initiation into meth use. These reveal a number of important findings, including the most common contexts in which women describe first using meth and their motivations for doing so. In particular, the findings highlight the role of family drug use, prior victimization experiences, and meth’s known pharmacological effects in women’s motivations for initiation.

Across Racial/Ethnic Boundaries: Investigating Intimate Violence Within a National Sample

The number of interracial relationships in the United States continues to increase. The fact is, though, that race remains a significant influence in the lives of individuals and in their relationships. Although there is evidence that relationships that cross racial/ethnic boundaries may be at greater risk for conflict and dissolution, there have been few investigations as to whether such relationships are at greater risk for violence. Using data from the National Violence Against Women Survey, I find that there are differences in risk of intimate violence depending on the racial/ethnic dyad of the couple. Ethnic monoracial relationships demonstrate the greatest risk for physical and nonphysical forms of violence, controlling for structural factors, whereas women in interracial relationships report higher rates of nonphysical violence, as compared with women in White monoracial relationships. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.

“Police Wouldn’t Give You No Help” Female Offenders on Reporting Sexual Assault to Police

Sexual assault remains one of the most underreported violent crimes. When victims report, they often are dissatisfied with the police response. The factors influencing one’s decision to invoke the law have been widely examined. However, less research examines (a) how the victim’s criminality affects this decision and (b) women offenders’ characterization of their reporting decisions. We use mixed methods to explore the factors related to an offender’s decision to report sexual victimization to police and consider their descriptions of police response when they do report the crime. Our findings provide insight into the gendered relations between offenders and police.

Beyond 'Doing Gender': Incorporating Race, Class, Place, and Life Transitions into Feminist Drug Research

This essay draws from our research with US rural women methamphetamine users in 2009 to offer strategies for “revisioning” the drug use(r) field to better understand the impact of gender on drug use and drug market participation. We highlight the insights and limitations of a popular strategy in feminist research that conceptualizes gender as performance— commonly referred to as “doing gender”—using illustrations from our research. We encourage scholars to move beyond a primarily normative orientation in studying gender, and investigate gendered organizational features of social life including their intersections with other aspects of social inequality such as those of race, class, and place. In addition, we suggest that feminist scholars can integrate gender in a rigorous way into theoretical perspectives that are typically inattentive to its import, as a means of challenging, enriching, and refining research on drug use, drug users, and drug market participation.

Specifying the Strain-Violence Link: The Role of Emotions in Women's Descriptions of Violent Incidents

Abstract Research on General Strain Theory has not considered fully the range of emotions that might be linked to violent behavior. Moreover, quantitative analyses of strain and emotions have assessed emotional traits rather than emotional states that directly precede violence. We use narrative data from incarcerated women to examine how they describe the strains and resulting emotions that emerged during incidents in which they used violence. Our findings confirm the importance of anger, but also suggest the presence of other related emotions during violent interactions. We argue that the study of General Strain Theory can be advanced by considering situational factors.

Gendered Carceral Regimes in Sri Lanka: Colonial Laws, Postcolonial Practices, and the Social Control of Sex Workers

Across time and place, semicarceral institutions extend the arms of the state to control women’s perceived moral and sexual transgressions. In this article, we examine the case of Sri Lanka, where the criminalization of women who participate in transactional sex is a prominent feature of gendered social control. We trace how vestiges of British colonial law intersect with Sinhala Buddhist nationalism, militarization, and the gendered liberalization of Sri Lanka’s economy to heighten national anxieties about women’s sexuality and sexual practices, culminating in penal excesses directed at those engaged in commercial sex. Yet processes of carceral control are never seamless: we also trace their unevenness in practice, investigating what they reveal about tensions between Sinhala Buddhist ideals of respectable womanhood, reformation, and the realities of marginalized women’s lives in contemporary Sri Lanka.