Painful Passages: Traumatic Experiences and Post‐Traumatic Stress among U.S. Immigrant Latino Adolescents and their Primary Caregivers

Using data from a stratified random sample of 281 foreign‐born adolescents and their parents in the United States, this study provides data on migration‐related trauma exposures and examines how the migration process influences the risk of experiencing trauma and developing posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). We find that 29 percent of foreign‐born adolescents and 34 percent of foreign‐born parents experienced trauma during the migration process. Among those that experienced trauma, 9 percent of adolescents and 21 percent of their parents were at risk for PTSD. Pre‐migration poverty combined with clandestine entry into the U.S. increased the risk of trauma and the subsequent development of PTSD symptoms. Post‐migration experiences of discrimination and neighborhood disorder further exacerbated this risk, while social support and familism mitigated it. Our results emphasize the importance of understanding how factors prior to, during, and after migration combine to influence the health of immigrants.     

An ontology of power and leadership

In this article I draw upon the social ontologies developed by John Searle, Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer and Tony Lawson in order to distinguish between power and leadership. To do so, I distinguish the different organizing principles behind natural phenomena, collective phenomena and institutional phenomena, and argue that an understanding of those different organizing principles is essential to a clearer conceptualization of power and leadership. Natural power and cultural power, as I argue, depend upon the organizing principles of natural phenomena, and differ depending on whether those organizing principles have been transformed by humans, in which case it becomes cultural power, or not, in which case it simply is natural power. Leadership emerges with the ability of making other humans share mental states through collective intentionality. Institutional power, in contrast, is connected to the creation of a deontology of rights and obligations that provide what Searle calls desire‐independent reasons for action.     

Effectively addressing mental health issues in permanency-focused child welfare practice

The purpose of this paper is two-fold: to highlight to the professional community the ongoing and shifting mental health needs of children exiting the child welfare system into permanent plans, dismissed from public caseloads yet still much in need of services, and, to present a model of one agency's integrated, outpatient intervention with promising preliminary data. The model offers a specialized; effective approach to the field to address the needs of families built by adoption and relative caregiving. The increasing number of adoptions, and relative and near-kin placements, mandate that competent, lifelong services to children and their permanent families correspondingly increase. This practice model poses one example of translating this responsibility into action, so that these children are discharged not just to one permanent family, but also with a plan for permanent competent support.     

Layered Sites of Environmental Justice: Considering the Case of Prisons*

A growing body of scholarship highlights the merits of fusing green criminology and environmental justice frameworks to better understand intersections among carceral systems, race- and class-based stratification, and environmental harm. This paper explores how correctional institutions (CIs) with known histories of federal environmental law violations compare against other previously established environmentally harmful facilities and land uses. In this article, we ask: are prisons and other CIs that have violated federal environmental laws located proximate to areas where there is evidence of existing high-pollution facilities? Relatedly, are CIs that have established noncompliant histories with federal environmental laws located in similarly marginalized and disadvantaged communities compared to other traditionally defined sites of environmental injustice and harm? To answer these questions, we utilize data from the EPA's Enforcement and Compliance History Online (ECHO) database. Our findings provide evidence that, within our sample of facilities that have recorded noncompliance with federal environmental laws, CIs are significantly more likely to be located proximate to Superfund sites than most of the other facility types/land uses and more likely to be located in communities with racially minoritized populations. Our findings have important implications for further research on carceral systems and environmental justice.