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Collateral consequences (CCs) of criminal convictions such as disenfranchisement, occupational restrictions, exclusions from public housing, and loss of welfare benefits represent one of the salient yet hidden features of the contemporary American penal state. This chapter explores, from a comparative and historical perspective, the rise of the many indirect “regulatory” sanctions flowing from a conviction and discusses some of the unique challenges they pose for legal and policy reform. US jurisprudence and policies are contrasted with the more stringent approach adopted by European legal systems and the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) in safeguarding the often blurred line between criminal punishments and formally civil sanctions. The aim of this chapter is twofold: (1) to contribute to a better understanding of the overreliance of the US criminal justice systems on CCs as a device of social exclusion and control, and (2) to put forward constructive and viable reform proposals aimed at reinventing the role and operation of collateral restrictions flowing from criminal convictions.

Despite the volumes that have been written on America's correctional crisis – the peerless incarceration rate, disproportionate confinement of minority group members and democratically untenable policies of disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions – criminal justice policy has changed little within the past decade or more. An important voice has been left out of these correctional policy formulations – that of prisoners. This paper proposes convict labor unions as one way to address this issue. It utilizes the United States Supreme Court majority's arguments in Jones v. North Carolina to assess the feasibility of inmate labor unions in light of current federal, state and local institutional operations; and provides a very tentative outline of how a prisoners’ labor union could be structured and function – exploring the potential democratic ramifications of such unions for corrections and in broader social policy.

Purpose – The African American electorate in Savannah, Georgia, has a history of being managed and manipulated, but over a period of time it reached its full potential. This electorate evolved during the leadership of a white Democratic mayor who manipulated the increased number of black registered voters as a result of the 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA) to maintain white empowerment in a majority black city. This struggle for power proves that national reforms do not always have the immediate consequences that national leaders hoped. This chapter explores how the African American electorate persevered and took advantage of the political mistakes of others to attain its empowerment at the mayoral level. This evolution of political mobilization and empowerment would culminate with the election of the city’s first female African American mayor in 2011.Research design – We conduct a comparative analysis of election results over time.Findings – Federal intervention has been the most powerful and helpful to the African American electorate. However, while the Savannah African American electorate was managed and manipulated, such reforms were implemented in a gradual and limited manner. Hence, the rise of black mayoral power is the result of a lot of lucky political accidents due to a shrewd Democratic mayor who used the 1965 VRA to extend and maintain white empowerment in a majority African American urban city. Thus, national reforms do not always have the immediate consequences that national leaders hoped.

Purpose – To assess the unrelenting argument made by conservative social theorists that low-income women of color have high rates of out-of-wedlock births because they are anti-marriage and have deviant family values.Methodology – Based on a four-year ethnographic study of homeless mothers in San Francisco, this research examines whether or not Latinas and African Americans do in fact denigrate marriage and unabashedly embrace unwed motherhood.Findings – The major contribution of this research is the recognition that low-income African American women and Latinas do value the institution of marriage and prefer to be married before they have children. Unfortunately, the exigencies of poverty force many of them to delay marriage indefinitely. A lack of financial resources, the importance of economic stability, gender mistrust, domestic violence, criminality, high expectations about marriage, and concerns about divorce are common reasons given for not getting married.Research limitations – Although San Francisco is a unique city, and I cannot generalize my findings to other locales, the experiences of homeless women in the Bay Area are analogous to what was happening throughout urban America at the end of the twentieth century.Originality – For homeless mothers in San Francisco, having children without being married is a consequence of poverty in which race, class, and gender oppression conspire to prevent them from realizing their familial aspirations, pushing them further into the margins of society. Using intersectionality theory, this research debunks the Culture of Poverty perspective and analyzes why homeless mothers choose to remain unmarried.

This chapter reviews the book titled Red Tape: Bureaucracy, Structural Violence and Poverty in India by Akhil Gupta and also critically examines the central premise of the book relating the nature of the Indian state to the poverty of its citizens. Gupta’s primary contention is that poverty in India is largely a result of massive bureaucratic failures of the state that severely limit opportunities for the poor and increase their vulnerability to structural violence.

I examine this contention in the context of seven decades of poverty amelioration policies in India with particular attention to the causes and consequences of the policy failures, and the role of the state in exacerbating the conditions of the poor. I conclude by examining the theoretical implications of the book for studies on state violence and normalization of structural violence.

The central finding of the chapter supports Gupta’s assertion that the bureaucratized practices of the state limit the poor’s ability to access and receive goods. Drawing on Gupta’s proposed theory, the chapter argues that the economic development plans of the Indian state that are designed to mitigate poverty are instead frequently invoked to normalize it in the public imagination thereby legitimizing structural violence.

This chapter examines the ethnographic data collected by the author of the book reviewed here.

In addition to offering a theoretically informed and oriented review of research on the Indian state’s role in normalization of poverty, this chapter also identifies some of the limitations of Gupta’s work, and identifies possible research directions for future research on poverty and structural violence in India.

This chapter provides an ethnographic look at higher education strategic planning through the lens of Williams College’s 2018–2020 effort to develop a 20-year plan for the institution. The critical analysis of Williams’ multi-community engagement contributes to studies of higher education and to literature in the sociocultural anthropological field of “policy as a practice of power” by applying core tenets of the field to strategic planning analysis. Drawing on 12 months of participation-observation and documentary research, the investigation brings into focus Williams’ heterarchical leadership structure and the negotiation practices that contributed to establish the legitimacy and appropriation of William’s strategic plan values. The chapter also shifts toward a contextualized perspective of strategic planning, highlighting campus community divides and the practices that contributed to bridge these fault lines and foster trust during the Fall 2019 campus-wide outreach process. Through the chapter, the analysis re-interprets beliefs of strategic planning and implementation as a top-down, normative imposition, and brings an ethnographic lens to reveal practices of negotiation, convergence, and value appropriation.

The purpose of this paper is to draw attention to the work of sociologists who laid the foundation for queer and crip approaches to disability and to address how queer and crip theory has and can help to re-conceptualize our understandings of health, illness, disability, and sexuality.

This paper is an examination of historical moments and prominent literature within medical sociology and sociology of disability. Sociological and popular understandings of disability and sexuality have often mirrored each other historically. Although this literature review focuses primarily on medical sociology and disability studies literature, some works of scholars specializing in gender studies, sexuality, literature, history, and queer studies are also included

In this paper, I argue that the medicalization and pathologization of human differences specifically as it pertains to sexuality and disability within the medical sociological literature have led to constructionist, social model, and feminist critiques. It is these critiques that then laid the foundation for the development of queer and crip theoretical approaches to both disability and sexuality.

Crip and queer approaches to disability provide a clear call for future sociological research. Few social science scholars have applied queer and crip approaches in empirical studies on disability. The majority of work in this area is located in the humanities and concerned with literary criticism. A broader array of empirical work on the intersection of sexuality and disability from queer/crip perspectives is needed both to refine these postmodern theoretical models and to examine their implications for the complex lived experience that lies at the intersection of sexuality and disability. In queering disability and cripping sexuality and gender, we may be able not only to more fully conceptualize disability, sexuality, and gender as individual social categories, but also to more fully understand the complex intersection of these social locations.