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Browsing by Subject "Prison"

Now showing 1 - 6 of 6
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    Analyzing Trust in Carceral Healthcare Settings: COVID-19 and Vaccination
    (2023) Balma, Brandon, W; Shlafer, Rebecca; Osman, Ingie; Muentner, Luke
    Since March 2020, there have been over 630,000 cases of COVID-19 in correctional facilities in the United States. During the pandemic, policies set by the Department of Corrections mitigated the effect of COVID-19 among incarcerated populations through decarceration and limiting interaction inside the correctional facility. Correctional facilities during the COVID-19 pandemic were unable to fully shut down due to political and practical challenges, which created inequities among who can and cannot quarantine and isolate in the United States. Dealing with the reality of these challenges, prison policies legitimized suspensions of prison programming, treatment, and family and legal visitation through promises of a facility free of COVID-19 in the future. In addition, incarcerated people were isolated and often sent to solitary confinement if they tested positive for COVID-19. To emphasize the importance of trusted sources of COVID-19 vaccine information among incarcerated populations, I conducted a quantitative analysis and literature review about the criminal justice system’s role in healthcare delivery during the COVID-19 pandemic and its implications for strengthening trust among incarcerated populations. The University of Minnesota Center for Preventative Research conducted a survey among 1,372 incarcerated people in Minnesota Correctional Facilities. The study was funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and aimed to capture the perspectives of incarcerated people regarding COVID-19 vaccination. My results demonstrate that increased trust in correctional healthcare, community healthcare, and peer-support models significantly increases the probability of receiving the COVID-19 vaccine, with trust in correctional healthcare having the most significant impact. Women and Native Americans were significantly more likely to report trusting health information from healthcare on the outside, while Non-Hispanic Blacks and Latinos were significantly more likely to report trusting health information from healthcare on the inside. The results of this study are essential to strengthen the correctional healthcare system and guide future pandemic policy and practice.
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    “As you from crimes would pardoned be”: Prison Shakespeare and the Practices of Empowerment
    (2020-05) Dreier, Jenna
    My research investigates the growing community of prison arts programs in which people who are currently incarcerated work with outside practitioners to study and perform Shakespeare. Since the 1980s, there has been a steady increase in the popularity of performing Shakespeare in prison, and as this trend continues to change the landscape of prison arts programming across the country, I analyze specific practices that professional artists, practitioners, and participants have used to decolonize the study of Shakespeare and to foster a more empowering and inclusive engagement with his plays. Throughout this dissertation, I use four primary case studies based on extensive field work research to analyze how Shakespeare’s plays have been adapted to speak to incarcerated people’s experiences of oppression as severely marginalized subjects in twenty-first century America. As an intersectional feminist, I analyze these case studies specifically in relation to the forms of oppression created by the imperialist white- supremacist capitalist patriarchy that operates in the United States and that has played a pivotal role in producing the epidemic of mass incarceration. This project proceeds from the belief that a recognition of these multiple and overlapping systematic inequalities is not only relevant, but vital, to analyzing the myriad of potential resonances of Shakespeare in U.S. prisons. In addition to foregrounding the oppressive power dynamics that operate in U.S. prisons, this dissertation is unique in that it also attends closely to oppressive power dynamics within the plays themselves. While advocates have written persuasively about the specific potential that Shakespeare’s plays hold for empowering prison theater participants and audiences, I emphasize the role that professional artists, practitioners, and participants have played in developing practices that illuminate and remedy the shortcomings of Shakespeare’s plays as instruments of social justice. This dissertation is therefore a nuanced examination of 1) how the circumstances of prison performance render newly visible the oppressive power dynamics and damaging social currents that surface in the study and performance of Shakespeare’s plays and 2) the artistic or pedagogical practices used to address, subvert, or overturn these power dynamics and social currents. Ultimately, Shakespeare serves the project of empowerment because of the canonical, elite status of the texts and as a name brand accepted by the gatekeepers of correctional institutions, but a vital step in the pursuit of empowerment in Prison Shakespeare programs is the use of subversive practices which harness the cultural power of these canonical texts while making them more inclusive of the interests of incarcerated communities.
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    Fugitive life: race, gender, and the rise of the neoliberal-carceral state
    (2013-05) Dillon, Stephen
    Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State examines the forms of knowledge produced by anti-racist and queer women activists in the 1970s as they contested the demise of the Keynesian-welfare state and the unprecedented expansion of the prison system in the United States. As economic policies based on deindustrialization, deregulation, and privatization left cities in ruins, mass incarceration emerged as a solution to the unrest produced by a new wave of racialized poverty. In short, the social state of the mid-twentieth century turned into a penal state by the mid-1980s. Although some scholars have analyzed this process at the level of social and economic policy, what remains unexamined are the intimate ways in which gender and sexuality have been integrated into, and affected by the entrenchment of racialized state power in the form of mass incarceration. Fugitive Life turns to culture--the memoirs, communiqués, literature, films, prison writing, and poetry of leftist women activists in the 1970s--to provide an analysis of the centrality of race, gender, and sexuality to a new mode of state power that I term "the neoliberal-carceral state." By contextualizing feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism within neoliberal economics and law and order politics, Fugitive Life offers a reinterpretation of post-1960s activism in relation to the emergence of neoliberalism and the rise of mass incarceration. Throughout the project, I document how leftist feminist and queer social movements theorized and challenged the ways that deindustrialization and privatization required incarceration. I argue that women activists in the 1970s anticipated and challenged the formation of the neoliberal-carceral state.
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    If I give my soul: Pentecostalism inside of prison in Rio de Janeiro.
    (2012-08) Johnson, Andrew Reine
    One of the most dynamic and unique manifestations of global Pentecostalism has been inside of Brazilian prisons. This dissertation examines Pentecostalism inside of the jails and prisons of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and engages with the following three research questions: Why is Pentecostalism so successful in the prisons and jails of Rio de Janeiro, how is the faith practiced by inmates, and what impact does prison Pentecostalism have on the streets and surrounding communities outside of prison? To address these questions, the author collected qualitative data inside of the prisons and jails in Rio, over twelve months. The dissertation argues that Pentecostalism is strong inside of prison partly because it is the dominant faith in the neighborhoods where the vast majority of inmates lived before they were incarcerated. Another component of the faith’s success is the inmate-led Pentecostal churches that operate inside of prisons in Rio de Janeiro. These churches rely on the charismatic leadership of an inmate pastor and replicate the organizational model of Pentecostal churches on the streets. Their legitimacy as a autonomous force inside of prison is reinforced by the criminal gangs who do not subject the Pentecostal inmates to their rules. Pentecostal practice offers more than simply a means for inmates to escape the pains of imprisonment. It offers a counter-cultural identity and corresponding dignity to people who have been historically marginalized, treated as less than full citizens by the state, and who larger society views as expendable. The songs, rituals and communal practices of Pentecostalism offer inmates an opportunity to live dignified lives in the context of an extremely difficult situation. Though Pentecostalism in Rio lacks an explicit, coherent political agenda, the consistent presence of Pentecostals inside of prison is a political act that has material consequences. Pentecostals have achieved an elevated position in prison by providing for the material needs of inmates and directly intervening on their behalf during life threatening crises. The unique space Pentecostals occupy also exposes the problematic nature of their intimate involvement with the inmate population as accusations of illicit financial relationships between some Pentecostal pastors and prisoners have cast a shadow of doubt over the motives of visiting Pentecostal groups.
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    Prodigal daughters: Imprisoned women, reform, and the femine ideal in the British Isles, 1800-1877
    (2013-12) Donahue, Kelly
    In Prodigal Daughters: Imprisoned Women, Reform, and the Feminine Ideal in the British Isles, 1800-1877, I examine the image(s) of imprisoned women, attempts to reform them, movements for prison reform, and the relationship between England and Ireland. After the 1853 Penal Servitude Acts, convict systems emerged in England and Ireland that built upon changes dating from the mid-1770s. As Foucault detailed in Discipline and Punish, the modern prison punishes the mind and not the body of the prisoner. In the case of nineteenth-century English and Irish prisons, this manifested as an obsessive need to reform the prisoner. The English government's attempt to bring Ireland under control justified the testing of new penal theories on Irish prisoners. Also, Irish prisoners of both genders, as well English women prisoners, were assumed to be harder to reform because they were viewed as irrational and hyper-emotional beings. The Irish system struck a balance between punishment and reformation of the prisoner whereas the English system remained primarily punitive. Consequently reformers wanted the Irish system to be implemented in England. Chapter one tells the story of how Elizabeth Fry influenced the opening of Grangegorman Female Penitentiary outside Dublin in 1836. Chapter Two contrasts the development of the English and Irish prison systems in the first half of the nineteenth century. Prison reformers stressed individualization and intermediate prisons as the greatest contrasts between the two systems but the greatest difference between them was the handling of religious minorities. Chapter three shows how women were perceived to be disruptive to prison order while chapter four shows how that perception shaped the prison system for women. The dissertation concludes with the refuges. These refuges for convicts helped women secure work but also helped reassure the public that their reformation had been tested prior to release from prison. Prodigal Daughters juxtaposes the neglected topic of Irish women convicts with English women convicts, because the English and Irish systems were inextricably linked. Irish women prisoners deserve more attention because as I have found they were more likely to be imprisoned than were Englishwomen.