The Gender Paradox in Prison Suicide Rates

Few studies of prison suicide have focused on suicide among female inmates, and even fewer studies have provided comparisons of rates by gender. Using national data on U.S. prisons and suicide, this study examined the “gender paradox” in prison suicide rates by comparing suicide rates of female and male inmates and U.S. residents and then examined characteristics of prisons that reported suicides. Findings indicated that rates of suicide in prison were similar for female and male inmates, but rates were higher for female inmates and lower for male inmates compared to the respective rates for female and male U.S. residents. Prisons that reported female suicides evidenced significant differences in prison conditions, including higher assault rates and mental health service utilization, compared to prisons for males and female prisons without suicide. Implications of the findings for understanding the gender paradox and for prison suicide prevention are discussed.     

A ‘society … divisible into the blessed and the unblessed’: Michael Young and Meritocracy in Postwar Britain

‘Meritocracy’ continues to unfold as both core conceptual framework and political ideal of the language of social mobility. In recent decades, politicians of various hues have declared it a sine qua non of the so-called ‘classless society’. The longer trajectory of postwar discourses of equality reveal a more chequered conceptual past. Its origins in the forums of revisionist social democracy of the 1950s, and subsequently popularised in the writings of social democratic polymath, Michael Young, are much more circumspect. The article considers pivotal contributions and developments of this conceptual history and trajectory. It considers the origins and emergence of meritocracy as a dimension of discourses of equality in the 1950s, and the formative contribution of Michael Young, reaction and responses on the left to his 1958 seminal work, The Rise of the Meritocracy, and the subsequent ‘meritocratic turn’. In spite of its satirical origins and warnings of dire social consequences, meritocracy presently enjoys a confirmatory position as a concept of opportunity and social mobility, as an embedded ideal of social organisation and means of allocating differential rewards.     

Blood and bone: body mass,gender and health inequality in nineteenth-century British families

In mid-nineteenth-century Britain, a new institution emerged: the modern prison. Some prisons invested in scales. Upon entry, prisoners were measured and personal details documented. These meticulously compiled records afford a new vantage point from which we can peer into the dynamics of the household. Body measurements – height, weight, and body mass (weight adjusted for height) – connect to both patterns of consumption and health risk. Prison data thus speak to both gender and health inequality in the past. The paper juxtaposes a service economy (Wandsworth near London) with a modern manufacturing sector (Paisley near Glasgow) in order to contrast how economic form and opportunities in the market sector shaped relations and outcomes in the household sector. We find that families bargained over the allocation of resources; that bargaining position was influenced by economic value, mediated by maternal sacrifice; that this was an earner bias rather than gender bias; and that new industrial work for women and children supported a more egalitarian distribution that improved everyone's health status via superior heights and heavier weights. We examine Irish immigrants to assess cultural differences in family behaviour. Finally, the paper offers, for the first time, a detailed interpolation of Waaler's health risk for women.