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The Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program is an experiential learning program that involves teaching college courses inside correctional facilitates to classes that include incarcerated and nonincarcerated students. This teaching note describes the program and argues that its congruence with social work values makes it a valuable tool for preparing students to take on social justice work. The impact of the program’s pedagogy and structure on students’ and faculty’s capacity for critical thinking and self-reflection is described. Logistical issues to consider in developing programs are discussed.

Background: HIV risk behavior in women who use drugs is related to myriad psychosocial issues, including incarceration. The experience of incarceration elevates women’s HIV risk by disrupting social networks, housing, employment, and access to health care. During the COVID-19 pandemic, changes in criminal-legal practices resulted in decreased incarceration, especially among women. These changes may have largely altered HIV risk among women who use drugs, depending on their access to care in the community. Objective: This study seeks to build knowledge about the impact of shifts in criminal-legal practices during the COVID-19 pandemic on HIV risk behaviors of justice-involved women who use drugs. Methods: Qualitative methods are used to gather and analyze women’s narratives about their life experiences before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on individual and structural determinants of HIV risk behaviors. Thirty formerly incarcerated women with a history of substance use are being recruited through collaboration with community partners. Each participant completes a sociodemographic survey and two interviews. The first interview uses a life history instrument that invites participants to reflect on key turning points in their lives. The second interview uses a calendar approach to gather information about participants’ lives during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic (March 2020-March 2021). The interviews (1 hour each) are audio-recorded and transcribed for analysis. Rapid Qualitative Inquiry and thematic analysis are being used to manage, organize, and interpret the data. The study team will collaborate with a subset of participants to develop digital stories about their COVID-19 experiences, a process that allows for member-checking and triangulation. Findings will be disseminated to program and policy makers in academic venues, community settings, and social service agencies. Results: To date, 10 women’s data have been collected. In total, two themes have been identified in this preliminary data: (1)the chaos and instability of participants’ lives increased during the COVID-19 pandemic: participants reported a wide range of psychosocial and health problems and limited engagement with social service systems. Interaction with criminal-legal systems was rife with uncertainty; participants described living in a state of limbo, which was extremely stressful. (2) When asked to describe a “turning point” in their lives, many participants attributed their substance use to the traumatic loss of a child due to death, incarceration, or termination of parental rights. During the COVID-19 pandemic, participants’ struggles to cope with these unresolved experiences of grief and loss were intensified by the widespread death and dying of the pandemic. Conclusions: Preliminary findings suggest that HIV risk factors increased for participants during the COVID-19 pandemic and invite further investment in community-based harm reduction programs, especially housing, that support women who use drugs. Interventions that address experiences of maternal grief and loss may reduce women’s substance use. Trial Registration:

Sensory Penalties aims to reinvigorate a conversation about the role of sensory experience in empirical investigation. It explores the visceral, personal reflections buried within forgotten criminological field notes, to ask what privileging these sensorial experiences does for how we understand and research spaces of punishment and social control.

Sexual minority women are disproportionately incarcerated and more likely to experience structural and interpersonal violence while incarcerated than heterosexual cisgender women. To build knowledge about this population and inform social work practice, theories of embodiment were used to conduct thematic analysis of five interviews with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer masculine-identified people who had been incarcerated in a women’s prison. This analysis explicates how participants used bodily practices to construct gender and communicate identity to themselves and others. Uniforms, prison regulations, and physical manifestations of female embodiment complicated these efforts. Participants described the ways in which they monitored and evaluated their own bodies while also managing the constant surveillance of their bodies by others. Taken together, these findings explicate the ways in which participants’ bodies were produced both through their actions and the external gaze of others. Implications for social work include exploration of language and masculinity in practice settings and suggestions for correctional policies. Findings encourage inclusion of non-binary frameworks and increased attention to the embodied self in order to expand understandings of human behaviour in the social environment. IMPLICATIONS Interpret with caution any information about gender identity surmised from intake forms and observation of clients’ bodily practices. Ask clients to describe their gender identity. Prioritise correctional policies that promote the health and safety of incarcerated people and staff over policies that enforce social norms related to gender and have no implications on security. Encourage re-entry service providers to collaborate with LGBTIQA+ organisations that provide social support to clients who identify as sexual minorities. © 2021 Australian Association of Social Workers.

Justice-involved women face myriad challenges as they negotiate the terms of community supervision and manage the long-term implications and stigma of living with a criminal record. Major tasks that women juggle include securing safe, affordable housing, finding and retaining employment, accessing physical and mental health care (including substance use treatment), and handling relationships with family, friends, children, and intimate partners. In addition to these responsibilities, women must meet their basic physiological needs to eat, sleep, and use the toilet. Women’s ability to safely meet their personal care needs may impact their capacity to manage their criminal-legal challenges. This study uses qualitative methods to understand justice-involved women’s lived experiences related to urination. Specifically, the study reports on a thematic analysis of 8 focus groups conducted with justice-involved women (n = 58) and the results of a toilet audit conducted in the downtown areas of the small city in the United States where the focus group participants were living. Findings suggest that women had limited access to restrooms and reported urinating outside. Lack of restroom access impacted their engagement with social services support and employment and their ability to travel through public spaces. Women perceived their public toilet options as unsafe, increasing their sense of vulnerability and reinforcing the idea that they did not have full access to citizenship in the community because of their criminal-legal involvement. The exclusion and denial of women’s humanity that is perpetuated by a lack of public toilet access impacts women’s psychosocial outcomes. City governments, social service agencies, and employers are encouraged to consider how lack of toilet access may impact their public safety and criminal-legal objectives and expand opportunities for people to access safe restroom facilities.

Thousands of people living with HIV are incarcerated in the United States. Research about this vulnerable community has focused on access and adherence to medical care, including the impact of stigma on these treatment outcomes. This study presents qualitative data collected from 18 incarcerated and formerly incarcerated men and women living with HIV to expand knowledge about how HIV stigma shapes the lived experience of incarceration. The HIV Stigma Framework, including theory about enacted, anticipated, and internalized stigma, was used to analyze participants’ narratives. Findings demonstrate an ongoing struggle with all three of these stigma mechanisms. Most participants deliberately concealed their HIV status and, therefore, experienced little enacted stigma. However, their narratives do describe anticipated stigma and, to a lesser extent, internalized stigma. There were gender differences in HIV disclosure and symbolic stigma and intersectionality are used to understand this variation. These findings illustrate the persistence of HIV stigma in correctional institutions and underscore the importance of fighting HIV stigma and homophobia within social work practice.

Sexual minority women (SMW) are a resilient yet vulnerable population who may experience poor psychosocial outcomes due to minority stress associated with their marginalized status and traumatic experiences resulting from interpersonal and structural violence. When SMW are incarcerated, the trauma of this experience can exacerbate existing mental health challenges. Self-concept is a key measure of mental health that is associated with increased self-efficacy and positive psychosocial outcomes. This analysis explores the ways in which incarceration impacts the self-concept of SMW. Secondary data analysis of three qualitative interviews with formerly incarcerated SMW was conducted. Specifically, Gilligan’s Listening Guide was used to create “I poems” that articulate the participants’ narratives and contrapuntal voices. These poems were then analyzed to build knowledge about participants’ self-concept. This analysis informs our understandings of self-concept among SMW, violence against women, the vulnerability of binary constructs, and the ways in which people negotiate past, present and future selves. The findings can inform interventions that seek to mitigate the psychosocial risks faced by SMW and formerly incarcerated people and improve outcomes for these populations.

This article presents findings from a survey of undergraduate social work (Bachelor of Social Work [BSW]) students about their experiences with remote learning during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. In response to this crisis, remote learning was rapidly implemented and many BSW educators and students experienced online classrooms for the first time. Findings from this study shed light on how remote learning shapes the interpersonal relationships and communication that are so critical to building students’ sense of classroom belonging, engagement, and learning.

Norms and behaviors about toileting in prison can expand understanding of women's lived experience of incarceration. Knowledge about this subject is significant because access to clean, safe toilets is a human rights issue, and toilet habits can impact social, mental, and physical outcomes. Three focus groups were conducted with 15 incarcerated women about their quotidian prison toilet experiences. While the toilet was physically available, institutional regulations, social norms, and women's individual psychologies limited their access and utilization. The ways in which toilet use was negotiated with self, peers, and are described, and the implications of these findings are discussed.

This study examines the post-incarceration housing experiences of 33 women. Using Residential Timeline Followback methodology, participants were asked to report where they lived at arrest and every location since their release. Follow-up questions asked women to describe these locations, who they lived with, how much they paid, and whether or not they felt safe. Demographic information and criminal justice history were recorded. The data paint a complicated picture of social and community resources, persistence, and struggle. Housing assets lost at incarceration were difficult to recover. Most women bounced between various locations, relying heavily on short-term subsidized congregate housing programs and rarely securing independent housing. Participants described the family, friends, and acquaintances who housed them during reentry as overextended and vulnerable. Implications for policy and practice are explored. © The Author(s) 2020.

Background: While incarcerated people are known to experience trauma at higher rates than the general population, little is known about how the correctional health system contributes to trauma rates. Methods: We conducted 20 semi-structured qualitative interviews with men who were recently released from a correctional system to understand their experiences with healthcare systems and medical staff during incarceration. Using reflexive thematic analysis within a critical realist framework, we coded and analyzed the data iteratively to refine and unify emerging themes. Results: The unanticipated concept of healthcare-induced trauma emerged and was revealed in three overall themes: (1) healthcare leading to fear of serious illness or death, (2) healthcare leading to fear of people, including healthcare providers, correctional staff, and other incarcerated people, and (3) the correctional institutional, social, and physical environment leads to fear of place. Conclusions: Healthcare in correctional settings has the potential to induce trauma, even when the medical conditions addressed are not life-threatening. Future research should examine the factors contributing to the development of healthcare-induced trauma in correctional settings and develop interventions to prevent and address this phenomenon. © 2021, The Author(s).

Lebanon is a diverse and dynamic nation of six million people that has experienced considerable disruption for the last two decades. The Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011, resulted in the displacement of 1.1 million Syrians to Lebanon. Today, Lebanon is the country with the largest per capita number of refugees in the world. In addition, the country experienced a social, economic, and political crisis in 2019 that destabilized the entire society-circumstances that were further complicated by COVID-19 pandemic. With all of the competing calamities in Lebanon, there has been limited scientific investigation into substance use and the risk of HIV infection among the country's population. To address this gap in knowledge, a qualitative rapid situational assessment (RSA) of substance use and risk of HIV infection in and around Beirut, the nation's capital, was conducted. The goal of this analysis is to describe the demographics and drug use patterns of this population, explore their HIV knowledge and risks, and build knowledge about their perceptions of and access to substance use treatment and other social services.