Fear of people with mental illnesses: the role of personal and impersonal contact and exposure to threat or harm

Vignette and laboratory experiments suggest that negative reactions to people with mental illness are a direct consequence of their symptomatic behavior, but because of their poor external validity, these studies cannot tell us whether widespread negative public reactions to people with mental illness actually result from observation of symptomatic behavior. Focusing on perceived danger, we use a large national survey to test the "behavior hypothesis" in the general population. We reason that, if this hypothesis is correct, contact with people with mental illnesses should be associated with more perceived danger, and exposure to threat or harm should mediate this association. On the contrary, respondents with more personal and impersonal contact perceive people with mental illness to be less dangerous. Exposure to threat is more common among people with more contact, but this exposure explains very little of the variance in perceived danger. These findings do not support the conclusion that public fear of people with mental illness is due to the observation of violent behavior.     

Understanding Unique Effects of Parental Incarceration on Children: Challenges,Progress, and Recommendations

Growth in U.S. incarceration rates during the 1980s and 1990s prompted a body of research focused on understanding the diverse effects of incarceration on individuals, families, and communities. An area of particular interest has been how the incarceration of a parent may affect child well‐being. Despite what appears to be converging evidence that parental incarceration poses a significant threat to child development, this area of inquiry has yet to overcome important methodological and conceptual challenges related to selection bias. It is therefore unclear whether the difficulties that have been observed among children whose parents are incarcerated are due to the incarceration itself or to other adversities that children have experienced. The purpose of this article is to draw attention to these issues, to summarize empirical and conceptual progress in overcoming these challenges, and to suggest directions for future research.     

Families and the Moral Economy of Incarceration

SUMMARY

The experiences of families of prisoners barely register in contemporary debates over criminal sanctions. But the accounts of families of prisoners demonstrate that mass incarceration does far more than punish and deter. By pitting the moral and economic interests of families against one another, it erodes the fundamental norms of social life itself. As family members are pressed hard to withdraw their care and concern from one another, the effect is more than the impoverishment of individuals: As over-incarceration increases the costs of caring relationships, the loss becomes a moral one and, in time, we impoverish our culture as well.     

Parental Incarceration and the Transition to Adulthood

The growing literature on the intergenerational consequences of incarceration generally neglects to consider how paternal and maternal incarceration structures offspring's transition to adulthood, a fundamental life course stage that has become increasingly unequal. In this article, the authors use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health to explore the relationship between parental incarceration and both subjective (e.g., respondent feels older compared to others his or her age) and behavioral (e.g., respondent is a parent) indicators of adulthood transitions among respondents younger than age 24 (N = 10,937). The results suggest that both paternal and maternal incarceration is positively associated with the number of subjective and behavioral adulthood transitions. The results also suggest that parental incarceration is associated with some individual indicators, especially subjective indicators, of adulthood. Taken together, these findings highlight that the high incarceration rate in the United States has transformative intergenerational consequences.     

The Impact of Mothers' Incarceration on the Family System:

No abstract available for this article.     

Incarceration and the Formation and Stability of Marital Unions

Rising imprisonment rates and declining marriage rates among low‐education African Americans motivate an analysis of the effects of incarceration on marriage. An event history analysis of 2,041 unmarried men from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth suggests that men are unlikely to marry in the years they serve in prison. A separate analysis of 2,762 married men shows that incarceration during marriage significantly increases the risk of divorce or separation. We simulate aggregate marriage rates using estimates from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and find that the prevalence of marriage would change little if incarceration rates were reduced.     

Rational Choice theory and prison chaplaincy: the chaplain's dilemma

Critical responses to the application of Rational Choice theories to the study of religious phenomena tend to be polarized between outright denial that the theories have any relevance to religion and equally outspoken claims that the theories are the only hope for progress in the sociology of religion. This article aims to avoid both of these extreme positions by raising a question, instead, about one of Rational Choice's central propositions about religion. This proposition holds that levels of religious vitality vary positively with the degree to which agencies of the state are prevented from regulating religious activity. The findings of recent research into prison chaplaincy in the UK and the USA will be used to test this claim. The main argument will be that the existence of an established church has facilitated a higher level of religious activity, especially for minority faiths, in prisons in England and Wales than is possible in American prisons. This difference in religious vitality is explained in terms of the Church of England's privileged position as a 'broker' between the state and minority faith communities. There is greater equality of opportunity for religious activity in American prisons, but the level of the activity is necessarily lower. In neither country is there anything truly resembling a 'free' market for religion in prisons, but the established Church of England is able to use its quasi-monopoly powers to broker advantageous conditions for minority faith communities. This brokerage function may be advantageous to all religious organizations in the highly regulated 'economy' of prisons.     

Norbert Elias and the civilized prison

This paper employs an Eliasian perspective to provide an historical overview to the contemporary crisis in British prisons. It argues that some of the roots of this crisis lie within the very attempts to bring prison development in line with the cultural values of modern society.     

Paternal Incarceration and the Housing Security of Urban Mothers

High rates of imprisonment among American fathers have motivated an ongoing examination of incarceration's role in family life. A growing literature suggests that incarceration creates material and socioemotional challenges not only for prisoners and former prisoners but also for their families and communities. The authors examined the relationship between fathers' incarceration and one such challenge: the housing insecurity of the mothers of their children. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,125) and a series of longitudinal regression models, they found that mothers' housing security was compromised following their partners' incarceration, an association likely driven in part, but not entirely, by financial challenges following his time in prison or jail. Given the importance of stable housing for the continuity of adult employment, children's schooling, and other inputs to healthy child development, the findings suggest a grave threat to the well‐being of children with incarcerated fathers.     

More Than a Job Club,Sister: Career Intervention for Women Following Incarceration

Following incarceration, women face unique challenges in returning to their communities and seeking employment. This qualitative study used interpretative phenomenological analysis to explore the lived experiences of previously incarcerated women as they participated in It's More Than a Job Club, Sister, a spiritually integrated career intervention, and subsequently sought employment. The following 4 superordinate themes emerged describing this experience: (a) It was more than a job club; (b) God gave me a second chance: the impact of faith on recovery and employment; (c) barriers to employment; and (d) looking ahead. The findings indicate the need for a strengths‐based approach to career intervention that builds upon existing skills and emphasizes identity exploration, uncovering core beliefs and vocational values, bridging the gap between goals and barriers, and leveraging interpersonal skills. The findings also indicate that career counseling with female returning citizens is enhanced by incorporating attention to the role of substance abuse/recovery and by attending to the intersection of calling and vocation.     

Those They Leave Behind: Paternal Incarceration and Maternal Instrumental Support

As the American imprisonment rate has risen, researchers have become increasingly concerned about the implications of mass imprisonment for family life. The authors extend this research by examining how paternal incarceration is linked to perceived instrumental support among the mothers of inmates' children. Results from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study (N = 4,132) suggest that recent, but not current, paternal incarceration is independently associated with less maternal perceived instrumental support and that this association persists after adjusting for a rich set of control variables, including prior perceived instrumental support. For families of recently incarcerated men, incarceration may be a double strike, simultaneously increasing the need for instrumental support while decreasing its availability when incarcerated fathers return to the community.     

Race,Hyper‐Incarceration,and US Poverty Policy in Historic Perspective

In this article, I bring scholarship on welfare reform into discussion with work on crime control and racial and ethnic relations. I locate the genesis of hyper‐incarceration and the moral suasion imposed on the recipients of contemporary social welfare services through the poverty policies of the Victorian era and later the postbellum south, implicating the checkered history of racial domination in the United States in the development of social welfare and criminal justice policy. I conclude by discussing the ways in which the United States has been reconfigured to facilitate these trends and of new terrain in the study of marginality in the neoliberal age. Doing so demonstrates the long‐standing collusion between welfare state and criminal justice actors, identifies the racialized target of punishment and poverty management, highlights the significance of race in the development of social policy, and exhibits the importance of social welfare policy in contemporary race and ethnic relations.     

Assortative Mating and the Intergenerational Transmission of Parental Incarceration Risks

Research on the intergenerational transmission of incarceration tends to emphasize the strong association between fathers' involvement with the criminal justice system and sons' behavioral outcomes, such as experiencing incarceration. The father–son association in incarceration risks is, however, not the only mechanism through which these risks may travel across generations. Although female rates of incarceration are generally low (even for women who experienced parental incarceration when they were girls), women could transmit incarceration risks across generations through their choice of partner. This article uses administrative data on three generations in Denmark to show that assortative mating—the nonrandom selection of partners with similar characteristics—indeed make women just as likely as men to transmit incarceration risks across generations.     

Methadone and buprenorphine in prison: Success in RI

The omnipresence of substance use disorder in prisons and jails cries out for treatment — and so do the inmates — but until recently, it has been scarce. Leading the way is the small state of Rhode Island, where Cranston‐based CODAC, an opioid treatment program (OTP), is providing methadone inside the state's jail/prison facility, with staff working alongside corrections (see ADAW, May 7, 2018).