Incarceration and Health: Incarceration

Friday, September 11, 2015

On The Move: Incarceration, Race & Residential Mobility

The present study examines the relationship between incarceration and post-prison residential mobility. In spite of recent research examining the residential context following incarceration, we know little about if or how incarceration affects individual patterns of residential mobility. This study starts to fill this gap in knowledge by drawing on nationally representative data from the 1979 National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY79).

I find that individuals with a history of incarceration are more likely to move after prison than they are before prison. This relationship holds even after accounting for various time-varying and time-stable sources of spuriousness, including other known correlates of mobility. Additional analyses suggest that this effect is strongest early in the reentry period, and that there exists important racial variation in the relationship between incarceration and mobility.

These results imply that, while housing stability is an important feature of successful prisoner reentry, incarceration contributes to larger patterns of residential instability.

Via: http://ht.ly/S6Ifc

By: Warner C1.
1Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Montana State University, P.O. Box 172380, Bozeman, MT 59717-2380, United States

Incarceration & Black-White inequality in Homeownership: A State-Level Analysis

Rising incarceration rates in the United States, as well as the concentration of incarceration among already marginalized individuals, has led some scholars to suggest that incarceration increases economic inequality among American men. But little is known about the consequences of incarceration for wealth, about incarceration's contribution to Black-White disparities in wealth, or about the broader effects of incarceration on communities. In this article, we use state-level panel data (from 1985 to 2005) to examine the relationship between incarceration rates and the Black-White gap in homeownership, a distinct and important measure of wealth.

Results, which are robust to an array of model specifications and robustness checks, show that incarceration rates diminish homeownership rates among Blacks and, in doing so, widen Black-White inequalities in homeownership. Therefore, the findings suggest that the consequences of incarceration extend beyond the offender and may increase inequality in household wealth.

Via: http://ht.ly/S6Hpd

By: Schneider D1, Turney K2.

1480 Barrows Hall, Department of Sociology, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA. Electronic address: djschneider@berkeley.edu.com.
23151 Social Sciences Plaza, Department of Sociology, University of California - Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697, USA

Wednesday, September 9, 2015

Intensive Vipassana Meditation Practice: An Intervention with Promise for Traumatized Prisoners

The United States has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 2,266,800 adults were incarcerated in U.S. federal and state prisons and county jails at year-end 2010 – about 0.7% of the resident adult population. Childhood trauma increases the likelihood of criminal justice involvement in adulthood (Wolf & Shi, 2010). A high percentage of prisoners are survivors of childhood abuse and other traumas before they are imprisoned (Wallace, Connor, & Dass-Brailsford, 2011), and prisons are notoriously violent and traumatic places for inmates. In a survey of inmates in Midwestern prisons, 54% of men and 28% of women reported having been raped in their current facility (Struckman-Johnson & Struckman-Johnson, 2000). In short, prisons are veritable warehouses of traumatized adults.

Read full document at (PDF): http://ht.ly/S1btX HT https://twitter.com/TheJusticeDept