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This pathbreaking book brings to bear a sweeping body of contemporary intersectional feminist work to disrupt the entire discipline of criminology. Women have been largely absent from criminological theory, research, policy, and practice. This fresh, conversational book critiques the field's dominant theories by analyzing gendered patterns of perpetration and victimization and challenging traditional criminological perspectives on characteristics such as race and queerness. Designed as a rebuttal to conventional criminology textbooks, the book mirrors standard course content through an intersectional feminist lens, offering students a valuable opportunity to question the field's underpinnings and forge a new path to understanding the true meaning of justice. Organized in fourteen chapters, each chapter includes accessible learning aids for students: A review of how traditional criminology textbooks cover the topic. Critical perspectives on the topic. Critical thinking breaks. Intersectional Feminist Criminology is a timely intervention and companion to the curriculum that helps to imagine a new world and ultimately lays out a clear abolitionist vision as an alternative to the American criminal legal system. © 2025 by Venezia Michalsen. All rights reserved.

Over the last few decades, treatment-oriented court judges have moved away from being neutral arbitrators in an adversarial court process to treatment facilitators. In the problem-solving court model, judges are part of a more therapeutic treatment process with program participants and a courtroom work group. The shift from the use of the traditional criminal justice process toward the use of more treatment-oriented models for some populations highlights the need to systematically document key elements of treatment court models. In particular, it is important to clearly document the role of Reentry Court Judges because they are a key component of the Reentry Court model. The current study used interviews with members of the courtroom work group, as well as a focus group interview of former participants in the program, to help identify the role of the judge and activities the judge engages. Findings revealed that the judges played a supportive, informal role, balanced with a more formal, authoritarian role, and the judges engaged participants in pre-court meetings, as well as courtroom sessions. Further, the judges facilitated interactions with program participants outside the courtroom, demonstrating that the judge is a core component of success for participants in Reentry Court.

Three experiments investigated the effects of positive mood on perceptions of variability within and between groups. Participants formed impressions of two different and highly variable groups under a neutral or positive mood. When participants expected to learn about both groups, positive mood increased perceived intergroup similarity but did not affect perceived intragroup variability. In contrast, when participants expected to learn about only one group, judgments of intergroup and intragroup similarity were both affected by mood. Mood and the intergroup context influenced the nature and degree of information processing and resultant judgments of variability in social groups.

Research has consistently shown that most women under the control of the criminal justice system are mothers. The robustness of this finding has been accompanied by a failure to consider the characteristics and needs of women without children. In this study, we examine data on 1,334 formerly incarcerated women. Findings indicate that while mothers and non-mothers share some characteristics, they differ on several others, most notably demographic profile, mental health, and timing of contacts with the criminal justice system. These results suggest a need to recognize the diversity among women offender groups, particularly when developing policies and programs need.

The majority of people in America’s prisons are the parents of minor children. Incarcerated mothers, in particular, were likely to have been a part of their children’s lives before their imprisonment, and most will soon be returning to the community and to their children. Research has shown that it is in the best interests of the mothers and the children to maintain a relationship across the prison bars. In this article, we use the example of New York State to show how institutional policies and structures can impede or encourage efforts to maintain ties between women and their children and why demonstrating support for family ties must extend well beyond having visiting hours.

The global prison industrial complex was built on Black and brown women’s bodies. This economy will not voluntarily loosen its hold on the bodies that feed it. White carceral feminists traditionally encourage State punishment, while anti-carceral, intersectional feminism recognizes that it empowers an ineffective and racist system. In fact, it is built on the criminalization of women’s survival strategies, creating a “victimization to prison pipeline.” But prisons are not the root of the problem; rather, they are a manifestation of the over-policing of Black women’s bodies, poverty, and motherhood. Such State surveillance will continue unless we disrupt these powerful systems both inside and outside prisons.

Although there is plentiful research on the impact of marriage, employment and the military on desistance from criminal behaviour in the lives of men, far less

Research has shown the importance of turning points in desistance from criminal behavior. Using qualitative data from a sample of 100 formerly incarcerated mothers interviewed about their criminal behavior, this article explores their descriptions of transition moments and whether and how those moments affected their criminal behavior. The findings indicate that whereas parenting emerges as a turning point, the practical difficulties of reentry may reduce the impact of mothering on women’s desistance. More self-focused turning points, such as those due to incarceration, arrest, and sobriety appeared to be particularly important to the women’s desistance. This article emphasizes the need for research into the subjective and environmental factors that affect women’s desistance behaviors.

In this study, qualitative, in-depth interviews were conducted with 100 formerly incarcerated mothers to explore the relationship between attachment to children and desistance from criminal behavior. Exploratory data analysis revealed that mothers do believe that children play important roles in their desistance, consistent with the tenets of life course theory. However, children were also described as sources of great stress, which may in turn promote criminal behavior. Women also related desistance to reliance on self and a higher power, and to a desire to avoid future involvement with the criminal justice system. The article concludes with a call for more research on women's desistance, and increased consideration of parent–child relationships in corrections policy decision making.

OBJECTIVE: Individuals who mutilate themselves are at greater risk for suicidal behavior. Clinically, however, there is a perception that the suicide attempts of self-mutilators are motivated by the desire for attention rather than by a genuine wish to die. The purpose of this study was to determine differences between suicide attempters with and without a history of self-mutilation. METHOD: The authors examined demographic characteristics, psychopathology, objective and perceived lethality of suicide attempts, and perceptions of their suicidal behavior in 30 suicide attempters with cluster B personality disorders who had a history of self-mutilation and a matched group of 23 suicide attempters with cluster B personality disorders who had no history of self-mutilation. RESULTS: The two groups did not differ in the objective lethality of their attempts, but their perceptions of the attempts differed. Self-mutilators perceived their suicide attempts as less lethal, with a greater likelihood of rescue and with less certainty of death. In addition, suicide attempters with a history of self-mutilation had significantly higher levels of depression, hopelessness, aggression, anxiety, impulsivity, and suicide ideation. They exhibited more behaviors consistent with borderline personality disorder and were more likely to have a history of childhood abuse. Self-mutilators had more persistent suicide ideation, and their pattern for suicide was similar to their pattern for self-mutilation, which was characterized by chronic urges to injure themselves. CONCLUSIONS: Suicide attempters with cluster B personality disorders who have a history of self-mutilation tend to be more depressed, anxious, and impulsive, and they also tend to underestimate the lethality of their suicide attempts. Therefore, clinicians may be unintentionally misled in assessing the suicide risk of self-mutilators as less serious than it is.

This pathbreaking book brings to bear a sweeping body of contemporary intersectional feminist work to disrupt the entire discipline of criminology. Women have been largely absent from criminological theory, research, policy, and practice. This fresh, conversational book critiques the field's dominant theories by analyzing gendered patterns of perpetration and victimization and challenging traditional criminological perspectives on characteristics such as race and queerness. Designed as a rebuttal to conventional criminology textbooks, the book mirrors standard course content through an intersectional feminist lens, offering students a valuable opportunity to question the field's underpinnings and forge a new path to understanding the true meaning of justice.   Organized in fourteen chapters, each chapter includes accessible learning aids for students: A review of how traditional criminology textbooks cover the topic Critical perspectives on the topic Critical thinking breaks Intersectional Feminist Criminology is a timely intervention and companion to the curriculum that helps to imagine a new world and ultimately lays out a clear abolitionist vision as an alternative to the American criminal legal system.

The impact of legal status on romantic relationships has not been adequately explored in the literature. Based on video and phone interviews with 25 undocumented activists from the ages of 18 to 28 years old, this research examines how legal status affects the romantic relationships of undocumented women and men. The hegemony of traditional dating scripts made it difficult for those without legal status to participate. Gender roles were consistent with stereotypical male and female roles in dating, which often attribute more power and responsibility to men. As such, women experienced a slight advantage because traditional notions of courtship did not require them to provide the resources required for dating, such as money or transportation, which in contrast were commonly expected of the men. In contrast, women noted the difficulties of disclosing their legal status and depending on their partners for everyday activities. Additionally, both men and women faced exclusion that inhibited their dating lives, as a direct result of their legal status. This suggests that the impact of legal status may be salient at all stages of family formation and that undocumented young adults are experiencing a distinct phenomenon compared to their documented and native-born peers.

Invisible Mothers: Unseen yet Hypervisible After Incarceration, the new book by Dr. Janet Garcia-Hallett, has almost innumerable contributions to the field. The first thing that the reader will likely notice that makes this work stand out is the impact of Garcia-Hallett’s positionality as an Afro-Latina mother on the holistic understanding of the experiences of the Black and brown women as mothers and victims of the racist American carceral system. Garcia-Hallett grew up in Harlem, witnessing the transformation of her community due to the takeover of the penal system. For this book, she interviewed 37 mothers in New York City with histories of incarceration, and her writing skilfully puts the reader in her shoes as she presents the findings from her interviews, which took place in their kitchens, booths in McDonald’s, and at tables in shelters. In her exploration of these women’s experiences, Garcia-Hallett departs from the traditional pitiful exploration of their lives, but instead, paints a complicated, multifaceted picture of women engaging actively in many different types of motherwork, while facing almost constant obstacles from racist and misogynist criminal legal and child welfare systems that criminalize, pathologize and penalize their survival of their marginalization, rather than helping ‘save’ children and their mothers. She provides a critical and structural analysis while also introducing each woman as deeply unique in her strengths and challenges and is able to acknowledge the importance of the children without letting them overshadow the mothers. This is no small feat.

The grand challenge of preparing for climate impacts through climate adaptation relies on intermediaries, including local NGOs, consulting firms, and government agencies. Climate adaptation elicits evaluative tensions coming from what we call the dual organizational complexity. The dual organizational complexity includes evaluation ambiguity in (1) the interconnectedness and co-evolutionary dynamics of locally bounded social and ecological systems and (2) an increasingly complex network of interconnected organizations, including a diverse set of public, private, and semi-private actors who provide funding, market power, and expertise. We find that intermediaries address evaluative tensions through organizational scaffolding or building socio-material infrastructures that can support resilience and increase evaluative and adaptive capacity for future projects, albeit imperfectly. Importantly, we argue that climate adaptation needs facilitators with the capacity to connect very localized bottom-up needs to top-down resources in a continuous cycle of resource allocation, communication, and accountability, especially in the face of the increasing organizational complexity involved.

As the impacts of climate change intensify, potential relocation is becoming more of a reality for coastal communities throughout the world. This is furthering the demand for the implementation of governance relocation frameworks. In order to stay true to the principles of environmental justice while at the same time ensuring an effective policy that meets the needs and wants of affected communities, an adaptive relocation framework requires collaboration between state and non-state actors. It is thus important to pay attention to how non-state actors are incorporated into public participatory climate change adaptation efforts. In order to affectively address previous limitations of public participation, stakeholders must pay attention to already existing power systems. Through a case study approach of a village relocation project in Fiji, I examine the role of power in a climate change adaptation plan that involved the community of Vunidogoloa, local government, and national government stakeholders. I employ Steven Lukes’s three-dimensional framework of power to the case of Vunidogoloa, a Fijian village that relocated inland due to coastal erosion and shoreline flooding, to illustrate how the political arrangement of participation reinforced existing hierarchies between the village and the government.

How can religion help to understand and contend with the challenges of climate change?Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworld,edited by David Haberman, presents a unique collection of essays that detail how the effects of human-related climate change are actively reshaping religious ideas and practices, even as religious groups and communities endeavor to bring their traditions to bear on mounting climate challenges.People of faith from the low-lying islands of the South Pacific to the glacial regions of the Himalayas are influencing how their communities understand earthly problems and develop meaningful responses to them. This collection focuses on a variety of different aspects of this critical interaction, including the role of religion in ongoing debates about climate change, religious sources of environmental knowledge and how this knowledge informs community responses to climate change, and the ways that climate change is in turn driving religious change.Understanding Climate Change through Religious Lifeworlds offers a transnational view of how religion reconciles the concepts of the global and the local and influences the challenges of climate change.

The United States has only recently begun investing in commercial-scale offshore wind energy (OWE). Although the United States is slow to progress, it is uniquely positioned to build on the existing knowledge that coastal European countries have applied for their own energy transitions. In this study, we analyze how federal and regional plans for expanding the OWE sector in the United States brought to the surface decade-long tensions related to multi-scale governance mismatches, jurisdictional conflicts, and unclear pathways for implementing national industrial policies. Drawing upon the European experience with OWE, we employ a dynamic multi-level perspective framework enriched by socio-ecological elements to examine the United States energy transition through its most promising technology. From our framework we identify six categories of OWE developments characterized by both unique and shared elements between the United States and European coastal countries. These elements are: (1) role of local communities, (2) governance structures, (3) multi-scale government interactions, (4) regional socioeconomic structures, (5) socio-ecological impacts, and (6) relationships with existing industries. Drawing upon our analysis, we identify and conceptually map four research areas in need of further development for the United States and the research community— (1) knowledge, (2) potential, (3) adaptation, and (4) learning. These insights provide critical information to ensure that the United States expansion into offshore energy generation is characterized by elements of justice, equity, and inclusive regional economic development.

Over the last several years, the United States has experienced a surge in bystander videos that have captured incidents of police brutality and prejudice directed largely at Black people. Public outrage surrounding police brutality persists as these incidents continue to reach the public eye. As public discourse around police brutality and racial inequality largely centers on specific events, there is a dearth of information about systemic racism and how race and racism pervade every single aspect of American life. How Black people are often treated by law enforcement is reflective of larger historical racial inequities and injustices that extend far beyond the criminal justice system and intersect with how Black people access housing, occupy public spaces, and are treated in American public schools.Imprisoned: Interlocking Oppression in Law Enforcement, Housing, and Public Educationfocuses on contemporary systemic racism as it relates to how the U.S. criminal justice system, housing system, and education system intersect to create a matrix of inequality for Black people. To illustrate the systemic nature of racism in American policing and communities, this book highlights contemporary policies and practices that intersect with residential segregation and public schooling that continue to affect Black people on a large-scale, structural level―demonstrating the extent to which the United States criminal justice system is tied to where people live and how they are treated and educated in public schools.