Surveillance plays an increasingly important role in policing and the criminal justice system. Developments in surveillance technology, data storage capacities, and data analytics have made it easier, faster, and cheaper than ever before to gather large amounts of data and track large numbers of people. However, the social psychology of surveillance attitudes remains understudied, especially in the criminal justice context. In addition to recent federal and state legislation limiting the use of law enforcement surveillance technology, efforts by some communities have involved increasing transparency and giving private citizens more opportunity to weigh in on decisions to adopt or continue using specific types of surveillance, making public surveillance attitudes a topic of increased importance. Given the political, social, and individual consequences that crime surveillance can have, it is important to develop a greater theoretical understanding of what factors drive support and acceptance of such practices.This dissertation examined potential factors underlying attitudes toward crime surveillance. Two separate studies were conducted. A survey (n = 299) measured crime surveillance attitudes, legal authoritarianism, right-wing authoritarianism, fear of crime, level of interaction with surveillance-implicating technology, and attitudes toward surveillance by private companies, citizens, and employers. A multiple linear regression and mediation analysis indicated that legal authoritarianism, private surveillance attitudes, and level of interaction with consumer technology that implicates surveillance were all significant predictors of crime surveillance attitudes, and that non-crime surveillance attitudes partially mediated the relationship between consumer technology use and crime surveillance attitudes. A separate 2x2 experiment (n = 257) manipulated the racial demographics and crime levels in a hypothetical city presented to participants and asked them to rate their support for a series of proposed crime surveillance measures. Unexpectedly, there were no statistically significant main or interaction effects. Potential reasons for this and future directions are discussed. Overall, these findings highlight the relationship between everyday interactions with and attitudes toward surveillance by private citizens and companies and how people feel about law enforcement surveillance, despite there being significant differences in terms of the potential implication. The role of legal authoritarianism in predicting crime surveillance attitudes also indicates that support for crime surveillance might also be associated with other punitive crime control attitudes. More generally, these studies represent a step toward bridging the existing gap in the literature on crime surveillance attitudes and offer several future directions for further investigation.

Previous research demonstrates that social support is essential for successful reentry into the community after incarceration. However, little research examines how incarceration itself impacts social support and how individuals with different incarceration histories have different experiences of social support. This dissertation examined how individuals’ social networks, social support, and wellbeing are predicted by incarceration history. Formerly incarcerated men returning from jail and prison (N = 68) were interviewed in a procedure designed to collect information about their criminal justice histories, to map their social networks, to provide open-ended feedback about their reentry experience, and to collect a variety of other relevant demographic and scale measures. Analyses of the resulting data provided little evidence that an individual’s most recent incarceration impacts their social network, social support, or wellbeing. However, conditions of individuals’ previous and lifetime incarcerations did have significant predictive power. Individuals who were incarcerated for longer in prison in the past, incarcerated in any setting for longer in the past, incarcerated in any setting for longer throughout their lifetime, and/or incarcerated further from home throughout their lifetime were found to have less support available to them. Conditions of previous and lifetime incarceration also predicted alter closeness, the incarceration history of alters, and participant wellbeing. The relationships between previous and lifetime incarceration and these outcomes were not mediated by participants’ prisonization or by their identification with people inside or people outside of prison and jail. Qualitative analyses provided additional information about support during reentry, including highlighting the physical and emotional distance created by incarceration, the important role that technology and social media plays in support after reentry, and the complicated nature of relationships with other individuals who have been incarcerated. These findings can be used by correctional facilities, probation and parole officers, and non-profit and government service providers to help determine which reentering individuals are least likely to have support and close network members, and which individuals are most likely to have a greater prevalence of formerly incarcerated network members and poor wellbeing. Providing these individuals with additional reentry services has the potential to reduce recidivism and increase public safety.

In this dissertation, I use critical discourse analysis of congressional floor statements, Supreme Court case briefs, and related policy and legal texts to examine how gendered, racialized, sexualized, and classed representations of citizenship are articulated across three cases: immigration legislation, adoption proceedings involving an “Indian child,” and legal debates about same-sex marriage. Employing a comparative approach focused on The Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act (2013), Adoptive Couple v. Baby Girl (2013), and Hollingsworth v. Perry/United States v. Windsor (2013), I trace the convergent discourses of law, history, sovereignty, and blood/biology in shaping the terms of national, tribal, and familial inclusion and exclusion. Feminist, critical race, and critical policy perspectives inform my queer intersectional framework for thinking about how seemingly distinct terms of debate may, together, naturalize economic, social, and political inequalities. Analysis reveals the ideological and material conditions upon which the normative forms of social and political organization, (non)citizen-subject identities, and terms of political redress are made possible. I begin by exploring how notions of history, blood/biology, and sovereignty undergird (extra)legal productions of, and struggles for inclusion in, normative citizenship. Then, I track the relational figures – with particular focus on the “criminal (alien),” the “(queer) soldier,” and the “single mother” – that anchor these conceptions of normative citizenship across the three debates. I conclude with an examination of one figure – the “child” – whose symbolic vulnerability and rescue undergirds policy positions ranging from the repeal of the Defense Of Marriage Act (DOMA) to support for the DREAM Act and constitutional challenges to the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) and Native sovereignty.

This intersectional, qualitative life history based narrative study explores the impact of stigma on the lives 10 African American women ages 21-55. All 10 women in the study also identify as transgender, transsexual, and transwomen. All of the women also primarily identified as women. Thus, one of the goals of this feminist investigation is to examine, position, and normalize these transwomen as women in contemporary research literature and in society in total. A culturally competent questionnaire was employed to guide the semi-structured, life-history based interviews. Theoretical frameworks of Intersectionality (Combahee River Collective, 1982; Crenshaw, 1993), Black Feminist Thought (Collins, 1991), Cross’ model of Black racial identity (Cross, 1971/1991), and the Hierarchy of Needs (Maslow,1954) were employed to gauge potential correlations between the impact of social stigma and feminist and female/woman group identities, African American race and racial group identities, and how the intersection of multiple oppressed identities interacts with their ability to obtain and sustain healthy, self-actualized, lives.

Participant responses were focused coded and grouped into 6 thematic categories (a) personal identity; (b) gender identity, transgender/transsexual or gender spectrum identity, female/woman identity, feminist understandings and/or identity, gender group connectedness; (c) racial group identity and Black community connectedness; (d) identity disclosure, Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender (LGBT) community connectedness, and political associations; (e) self-esteem, self-actualization, and self-concept; (f) relationships and love; and (g) stigma, discrimination, racism, sex work violence, trauma, suicide ideation, and isolation. A content analysis (Fetterman, 1998) was utilized alongside theoretical examinations.

Findings include: (a) African American transwomen experience an inordinate amount of social stigma that negatively impacts their mental and physical health, limits their ability to access the hierarchy of needs, and impedes their ability to maintain healthy lives; (b) African American transwomen are often ostracized from African American communities and kinship networks; they experiences most acts of violence from other African Americans, yet Black racial identity gave 8 out of 10 of the women a sense of empowerment and esteem; however, the relationship between Black racial identity and self-actualization was still low; (c) African American transwomen overwhelmingly express a desire to be seen, respected as, and protected as, women.

Keywords: African American Women; African American Transgender Women; Stigma; Intersectionality; Black Feminist Theory; Black Racial Identity; Hierarchy of Needs; Social Discrimination; Gender Identity; Narrative; Embodied Narrative; Life History; Violence; Trauma; Social Psychology; African American Studies; Women’s Studies; Gender Studies.

This 2-study program of research has two objectives: 1) evaluate framing and thematic representations in newspaper articles about sex offenders, sex offense, cases, and sex offender policy; and 2) measure the role of similarly framed media exemplars and heuristics on individuals’ attitudes and social judgments regarding the social problem of sex crime. Drawing upon a theoretical basis in social psychology, political psychology, and critical race theory, this research seeks to examine the role of media framing and social identity in shaping people’s attitudes toward crime, crime policy, and those who are labeled as “criminals,” particularly with respect to the particular presentation of sex crimes.

In Study 1, newspaper articles (N=43) about “sex offenses” and/or “sex offenders” in three major California newspapers were analyzed and coded for thematic frames. Analyses were informed by grounded theory (Corbin & Strauss, 1990) and coded accordingly. Independent coders established the validity of core themes, and inter-coder reliability was established using consensus agreement. In Study 2, video newscasts that vary in their framing of sex offender issues were shown to participants (N=183). Participants were randomly assigned to one of four groups based upon the independent variable they received (i.e., the video or combination of videos they watch). Participants watched either: Video A (a newscast about “sex offenders” that is similarly framed to the articles coded in Part One of this study); Video B (a newscast about “sex offenders” that eschews the types of frames found in Study 1); both Video A and Video B; or an unrelated (control) video. After the video, participants completed an 80-item questionnaire to measure their attitudes about crime generally, sex crimes, and sex offenders. Analyses of the dependent variable demonstrate that the variation in framing of the video stimuli affects the degree to which participants endorse the heuristic of the “sex predator” and the degree to which participants favored punishment of sex offenders. More specifically, participants who viewed the more sensational and fear generating news segment endorsed the “predator” characterization and favored punishment more than those who did not view this video. Results were statistically significant. Findings from these studies will have important practical and theoretical implications for understanding the role that the media plays in shaping attitudes about crime, offenders, and overall prison policy in the United States.

Decades of research have documented America’s reliance on mass incarceration and called for an overhaul of sentencing and penal policy to address the failures of our current criminal justice system. This dissertation claims that restorative justice is a viable alternative to incarceration that can both respond to some of these critiques and meet the public demand for justice. A series of studies using multiple methods were conducted in order to explore public attitudes regarding restorative justice and identify the circumstances under which the public would be more willing to endorse restorative justice over custodial sanctions. An on-line experiment with 189 participants examined the impact that social historical background information and race of the criminal perpetrator had on sentence choice, empathy, and criminal justice attitude measures. A second on-line experiment with 253 participants used sentence outcome as an independent variable and examined its impact on justice satisfaction, empathy, and criminal justice attitude measures. Both experimental studies demonstrated that social historical information had a powerful effect—participants who were provided with social historical information about the criminal perpetrator were more likely to choose a restorative justice outcome, were more satisfied with that outcome, felt more empathetic towards the criminal perpetrator, and had higher external attributions for crime. In a separate, related study, five focus groups were conducted (with 29 total participants) to explore whether lay persons regarded restorative justice as a fair criminal justice outcome, what sources of resistance might impede its future implementation, and what strategies might be devised to build support for this transformative reform. Qualitative analyses of the focus group discussions highlighted persistent psychological barriers to the use of restorative justice practices and provided insights into how those barriers might be overcome. Surprisingly, across all three studies, and contrary to much prior research on criminal sentencing, the race of the criminal perpetrator did not appear to affect the results. The lack of a race effect in this context can and should be explored in future studies. Overall, the findings from this research represent important social psychological contributions to the study of punishment, criminal justice policy, and meaningful penal reform.

Abstract

“Becoming the Heroes, the City Deserves”: A Multimethod Approach to Understanding Latino Men's College Friendships

Ruby Arabella Hernandez

There is currently a paucity of research regarding Latino men’s friendships. This dissertation relies on the friendship literature to analyze Latino men’s friendships in the college context. Using a multimethod approach, three studies are presented, (1) How are Latino men defining their engagement with others in their friendships? (2) Does the racial/ethnic composition of their college friends influence their consciousness around feminist attitudes (3) What role does a Latino men’s college organization, and the friendships created within, play in their success?

This dissertation draws from two separate studies. The first study is from “The Success in Higher Education” survey data collected across two UC campuses. The survey encompasses demographics, educational and parental background, home socialization, gender attitudes, encounters with the law, loneliness and friendship characteristics. The first two study chapters use data subsets from this larger study for analysis. The first study chapter analyzes responses of 52 college-going Latino men and the open-ended question, “How do you define a friend?” and measures their levels of loneliness. Latino men in college experienced low amounts of loneliness and define their friendships in caring and vulnerable terms. The second subset uses regression analysis on 102 Latino men’s responses, analyzing their current close ethnic/racial group composition, critical engagement with their male friends, and how they predict feminist attitudes. Having more Latino and diverse close friend group lead to a weak prediction of higher feminist attitude endorsement.

The second study, The Hermanos Study, is an ethnographic study of a Latino men’s college organization and ten qualitative interviews with members in the organization conducted at the University of California, Santa Cruz. A subset of the data was used, I selected two participants who were interviewed as a group to use as a case study. Members of the organization seek familiarity and refuge within the space and friendships to create familial connections in college.

The concluding chapter reviews the findings and implications for Latino men’s friendship definitions, their friends’ influence on feminist attitudes, and the friendship benefits of joining a Latino men’s organization. Future directions for studying Latino men’s friendships are discussed based on the studies reviewed.