Current Works in Progress
Haile, Solome, Angela Bruns, Savannah Larimore, and Hedwig Lee. “‘I’m Not Gonna Let The Devil Take Two for One’: Negotiating Relationships across Carceral Lines” [Submitted for Presentation at ASA 2021]
Description: Incarceration of an individual does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, those who are incarcerated are connected to a social network of loved ones who experience “collateral consequences” of their attachment—who are left confined, or at least restrained, in their choices and circumstances. There are subpopulations that are particularly impacted by the incarceration of their loved ones—one of those being women. It is already known that women remain the primary caregivers in the US, and research suggests that incarceration exacerbates this disproportionate burden. Yet, due to a variety of socioeconomic factors, not all women experience and have the same capacity to respond to these external pressures to provide care. Despite the varied abilities to meet these gendered, societal demands, the attempts of women to engage with or disengage from their incarcerated loved one, engenders questions of the forces that pressure the women to engage or disengage and the implications of their engagement on their health. Our qualitative analysis of data from interviews with 56 socioeconomically diverse women who were attached to an incarcerated family member across FL, WA, and MO, showed that engagement and disengagement were poles along a continuum of engagement. Augmented by their socioeconomic context, forces would pressure—at times coercively—women to move towards or away from engagement. As they moved along the continuum due to the compounded forces, the participants would describe their health changing: when they engaged it would deteriorate, but when they disengaged there was not a proportional improvement of their health. The findings trace a journey of women engaging in complex negotiations of their relationships in search of a position along the continuum where they and their incarcerated loved one are both as well as they can be, despite the rippling consequences of incarceration.
Esposito, Michael, Savannah Larimore, and Hedwig Lee. “Aggressive Policing and Population Health.”
Description: Since the 1990s, police departments across the United States have folded aggressive order-maintenance policing strategies into their operations. Emerging empirical literature suggests that aggressive policing is negatively associated with a number of population health outcomes, as well as with health equity. The elevated risk of involuntary police contact; strict punishment of low-level deviance; and persistent surveillance of communities observed under aggressive policing regimes can affect individuals’ mental and physical health through multiple mechanisms. Individuals need not experience direct contact with law enforcement to be impacted by aggressive policing. Communities of color—particularly Black communities—are over-exposed to these strategies and, by extension, the health harms that they engender. By adding to the health hazards that racialized populations already face, the over-policing of Black and other P.O.C communities amplifies health disparities. Data availability and causal identification complicate researchers ability to understand how aggressive policing impacts population health. Broad, structural changes to “how we do policing” may be needed to eliminate the population health harms caused by law enforcement.
Description: Incarceration of an individual does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, those who are incarcerated are connected to a social network of loved ones who experience “collateral consequences” of their attachment—who are left confined, or at least restrained, in their choices and circumstances. There are subpopulations that are particularly impacted by the incarceration of their loved ones—one of those being women. It is already known that women remain the primary caregivers in the US, and research suggests that incarceration exacerbates this disproportionate burden. Yet, due to a variety of socioeconomic factors, not all women experience and have the same capacity to respond to these external pressures to provide care. Despite the varied abilities to meet these gendered, societal demands, the attempts of women to engage with or disengage from their incarcerated loved one, engenders questions of the forces that pressure the women to engage or disengage and the implications of their engagement on their health. Our qualitative analysis of data from interviews with 56 socioeconomically diverse women who were attached to an incarcerated family member across FL, WA, and MO, showed that engagement and disengagement were poles along a continuum of engagement. Augmented by their socioeconomic context, forces would pressure—at times coercively—women to move towards or away from engagement. As they moved along the continuum due to the compounded forces, the participants would describe their health changing: when they engaged it would deteriorate, but when they disengaged there was not a proportional improvement of their health. The findings trace a journey of women engaging in complex negotiations of their relationships in search of a position along the continuum where they and their incarcerated loved one are both as well as they can be, despite the rippling consequences of incarceration.
Esposito, Michael, Savannah Larimore, and Hedwig Lee. “Aggressive Policing and Population Health.”
Description: Since the 1990s, police departments across the United States have folded aggressive order-maintenance policing strategies into their operations. Emerging empirical literature suggests that aggressive policing is negatively associated with a number of population health outcomes, as well as with health equity. The elevated risk of involuntary police contact; strict punishment of low-level deviance; and persistent surveillance of communities observed under aggressive policing regimes can affect individuals’ mental and physical health through multiple mechanisms. Individuals need not experience direct contact with law enforcement to be impacted by aggressive policing. Communities of color—particularly Black communities—are over-exposed to these strategies and, by extension, the health harms that they engender. By adding to the health hazards that racialized populations already face, the over-policing of Black and other P.O.C communities amplifies health disparities. Data availability and causal identification complicate researchers ability to understand how aggressive policing impacts population health. Broad, structural changes to “how we do policing” may be needed to eliminate the population health harms caused by law enforcement.