Sarah Shannon

Juvenile Offenders as Fathers: Perceptions of Fatherhood, Crime and Becoming an Adult

Current research offers conflicting findings regarding how, or if, fatherhood influences youth offenders’ criminal trajectories. Through repeated qualitative interviews with seven incarcerated teen fathers, this study provides insight into these young fathers’ understandings of their responsibilities toward their children and prospects for future criminal activity. Analysis reveals that these young fathers take their parental roles very seriously and identify their children as the principal motivator for desistance from crime. They also articulate substantial obstacles to achieving their paternal ideals, including financial pressure, strained relationships with their childrens mothers, and lack of male role models. Implications for social work practice are provided.

The Institutional Effects of Incarceration: Spillovers From Criminal Justice to Health Care

POLICY POINTS The steady increase in incarceration is related to the quality and functioning of the health care system. US states that incarcerate a larger number of people show declines in overall access to and quality of care, rooted in high levels of uninsurance and relatively poor health of former inmates. Providing health care to former inmates would ease the difficulties of inmates and their families. It might also prevent broader adverse spillovers to the health care system. The health care system and the criminal justice system are related in real but underappreciated ways. CONTEXT This study examines the spillover effects of growth in state-level incarceration rates on the functioning and quality of the US health care system. METHODS Our multilevel approach first explored cross-sectional individual-level data on health care behavior merged to aggregate state-level data regarding incarceration. We then conducted an entirely aggregate-level analysis to address between-state heterogeneity and trends over time in health care access and utilization. FINDINGS We found that individuals residing in states with a larger number of former prison inmates have diminished access to care, less access to specialists, less trust in physicians, and less satisfaction with the care they receive. These spillover effects are deep in that they affect even those least likely to be personally affected by incarceration, including the insured, those over 50, women, non-Hispanic whites, and those with incomes far exceeding the federal poverty threshold. These patterns likely reflect the burden of uncompensated care among former inmates, who have both a greater than average need for care and higher than average levels of uninsurance. State-level analyses solidify these claims. Increases in the number of former inmates are associated simultaneously with increases in the percentage of uninsured within a state and increases in emergency room use per capita, both net of controls for between-state heterogeneity. CONCLUSIONS Our analyses establish an intersection between systems of care and corrections, linked by inadequate financial and administrative mechanisms for delivering services to former inmates.

A Life Table Approach to Estimating Disproportionate Minority Contact in the Juvenile Justice System

Disproportionate minority contact (DMC) in the U.S. juvenile justice system persists despite substantial efforts to reduce it. The juvenile justice system is comprised of a series of interconnected stages, yet few studies to-date use methods to measure DMC that take the cascading nature of the decision-making process into account. Our study addresses this gap by applying life table analysis to identify the cumulative nature of DMC across multiple stages of the juvenile justice system using data from 2008 to 2010 in Georgia that include white, black, and Hispanic/Latino youth. We then compare these state-level results to life tables from a national sample of black youth and a subnational sample of Hispanic/Latino youth. Our findings show that arrest/referral accounts for the greatest proportion of total system-wide DMC for black youth, but most of the total DMC for Hispanic/Latino youth results from later stages.

The Suburbanization of Food Insecurity: An Analysis of Projected Trends in the Atlanta Metropolitan Area

Although general patterns of food insecurity in the United States are known, few studies have attempted to estimate small area food security or account for ongoing socioeconomic changes. Here we address these issues by producing small area estimates of food insecurity in the Atlanta metropolitan area using two methodologies: fixed effects modeling and demographic metabolism. In both cases, we use county-level data from the Current Population Survey to determine the association between food insecurity and demographic predictors. These associations are then applied to tract-level data from the 2009 to 2013 American Community Survey and projected data for 2020 to create small area estimates of food insecurity. We find broad consensus between our two methods. For both time periods, food insecurity is highest in southern sections of the city of Atlanta and its neighboring suburbs. Projections to 2020, however, show that food insecurity rates are projected to increase in outer-ring suburbs east and west of the city while decreasing in the urban core. These results highlight the need to further adapt antihunger efforts for often sprawling suburban communities, where poverty rates are increasing but spatial mismatch combined with poor transit access might hinder access to food assistance.

The mobility of food retailers: How proximity to SNAP authorized food retailers changed in Atlanta during the Great Recession

Retailer mobility, defined as the shifting geographic patterns of retail locations over time, is a significant but understudied factor shaping neighborhood food environments. Our research addresses this gap by analyzing changes in proximity to SNAP authorized chain retailers in the Atlanta urban area using yearly data from 2008 to 2013. We identify six demographically similar geographic clusters of census tracts in our study area based on race and economic variables. We use these clusters in exploratory data analysis to identify how proximity to the twenty largest retail food chains changed during this period. We then use fixed effects models to assess how changing store proximity is associated with race, income, participation in SNAP, and population density. Our results show clear differences in geographic distribution between store categories, but also notable variation within each category. Increasing SNAP enrollment predicted decreased distances to almost all small retailers but increased distances to many large retailers. Our chain-focused analysis underscores the responsiveness of small retailers to changes in neighborhood SNAP participation and the value of tracking chain expansion and contraction in markets across time. Better understanding of retailer mobility and the forces that drive it can be a productive avenue for future research.

SNAP benefit levels and enrollment rates by race and place: evidence from Georgia, 2007–2013

ABSTRACT The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) decreases poverty and food insecurity for millions of Americans. Yet not all eligible households participate, and disparities in participation exist by household size, race, ethnicity, and place. We examine the county-level associations between maximum benefit levels and SNAP enrollment by household size, race, ethnicity, and metropolitan status from 2007 to 2013 in the state of Georgia. National county-level data on participation in SNAP by racial or ethnic group are not available, but Georgia features substantial variation by race and ethnicity as well as metropolitan status at the county level that make it well suited for our analysis. Maximum SNAP benefit levels were associated with increases in county-level SNAP enrollment across the board but especially for single-person households, Hispanics, and rural Whites. These findings have implications for future changes to SNAP benefits.

Punishment, Religion, and the Shrinking Welfare State for the Very Poor in the United States, 1970–2010

The U.S. social safety net for the very poor has been shrinking for several decades. Two factors stand out as potential drivers of this transformation: a neoliberal turn in poverty governance that favors incarceration and other punitive policies and “religious neoliberalism,” which melds neoliberal, anti-statist political ideology with conservative Christian ideals of compassionate assistance administered not by government but through local congregations. Yet these two streams have not been studied simultaneously in relation to welfare retrenchment. Analysis of the demise of state General Assistance (GA) programs using Cox regression models and a unique longitudinal data set shows that higher incarceration rates and higher church density both contribute to the decline of public assistance over time. Findings support the theoretical perspective of religious neoliberalism.

Reconstructing Rage: Transformative Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration:

As sociologists like Bruce Western and Michelle Alexander have demonstrated, the stunning growth of U.S. incarceration rates over the past several decades has disproportionately affected African American men, especially those with low educational attainment. Numerous social scientists have further documented the detrimental and concentrated effects of mass incarceration on low-income, high-minority communities, including the depletion of human and social capital, as well as the prevalence of legal cynicism—a deep distrust of law enforcement. Reconstructing Rage: Transformative Reentry in the Era of Mass Incarceration begins against the backdrop of a violent confrontation between Philadelphia police and a black liberation group in 1985, during which the city’s mayor ordered the bombing of the group’s residence. Townsand Price-Spratlen and William Goldsby present an analysis of Reconstruction, Inc., a grassroots, ethnicspecific organization that began in response to this confrontation and has as its mission to ‘‘productively’’ respond to ‘‘the rage of black men,’’ especially within the context of prisoner reentry (p. xx). According to Price-Spratlen and Goldsby, rage on the part of African American men is warranted in light of these present and historic sources of oppression, and can be both a liability and a resource. The authors situate the book within previous research on prisoner reentry by identifying three little-addressed areas that their historical analysis of Reconstruction, Inc. will attend to: (1) a longitudinal study of an organization in the reentry and reintegration process, (2) how sustained involvement with a reentry organization affects desistance for individuals, families, and communities, and (3) a focus on a grassroots organization that does not receive state funding and is not faith-based. The book’s primary strength lies in its thorough description of Reconstruction, Inc.’s organizational history. The book narrates the growth and development of Reconstruction, Inc. using a variety of archival data, including excerpts from the founder’s journals, meeting minutes, interviews, and agency curriculum. This is a valuable contribution of the book, given that studies of grassroots, ethnic-specific organizations addressing the negative effects of mass incarceration are indeed scarce. The book is divided into three sections along Reconstruction, Inc.’s principal themes of culture, community, and capacity-building. Each section contains three chapters, one of which covers some portion of the organization’s timeline from 1988 to 2007 with the remaining chapters devoted to such special topics as the role of women in Reconstruction, Inc.’s development, the agency’s curriculum, and ‘‘best practices.’’ Perhaps one of the most intriguing episodes in the agency’s history, described in Chapter Five, is the period of dormancy during the late 1990s, largely due to an overtaxed staff and budget. While this is a predictable stage in grassroots organizational development, the authors describe well the events precipitating it and the perceived positive outcomes that followed. Chapter Four’s focus on women’s involvement in Reconstruction, Inc. is also noteworthy. Of all the book’s chapters, this one contains the most direct quotes from participant interviews, which bolster the credibility of the authors’ characterization of the unique contributions of women in the founding and development of an organization focused primarily on meeting the reentry challenges faced by men. On the whole, the book succeeds in providing a descriptive case study of an ethnicspecific grassroots organization that supports prisoner reentry outside the typical channels of state or faith-based structures and funding. Instructors may find some portions of the book useful on topics such as Reviews 109

Bureaucrats on the Cell Block: Prison Officers’ Perceptions of Work Environment and Attitudes toward Prisoners

US prisons represent an important site for the delivery of social services—even in light of the punitive policy shifts of recent decades—because a significant segment of the nation’s low-income, minority population is incarcerated every year. Prison officers interact daily with prisoners and are responsible for maintaining prisoners’ security and welfare. As a result, this group of workers can be understood as street-level, front-line bureaucrats who implement penal policy and play a role in distributing needed resources to millions of society’s most vulnerable citizens. We examine prison officers through this lens to assess how officers’ perceptions of prison resources, work stress, and work support are associated with their attitudes toward the prisoners in their care. We find that work stress and work support operate as mediating pathways between prisoner officers’ assessments of available resources and their attitudes toward prisoners.