Distributive Justice Antecedents of Race and Gender Disparities in First-Year College Performance

Public education is a sphere of society in which distributive justice with respect to the allocation of opportunities to learn can have profound and lasting effects on students’ educational outcomes. We frame our study in the distributive justice literature, and define just outcomes specifically from a meritocratic and strict egalitarian perspectives in order to investigate how assignment to academic tracks and the availability of opportunities to learn during high school are associated with students’ academic achievement during college. We examine the role of “just” placement into high school academic tracks, “just” access to high-quality teachers, and “just” assignment of secondary schools’ resources in high school, in relation to college freshmen’s grade point averages (GPA). We utilize longitudinal data from a unique dataset with over 15,000 students who spent their academic careers in North Carolina public secondary schools and then attended North Carolina public universities. Our results suggest that “unjust” assignment of students to certain high schools, access to high-quality teachers, and assignment to learn in specific academic tracks result in long-lasting consequences that are reflected in freshman college GPA. Importantly, findings also show that the direction and magnitude of the relationship between distributional injustice at schools and college performance is moderated by students’ own gender and race. Race and gender interact with the high schools’ institutional contexts operationalized by tracking practices, teacher quality, and by school racial and socioeconomic composition. Results show that similar settings do not affect all students in the same ways.     

Depression Among Mexican Women: The Impact of Nonviolent Coercive Control,Intimate Partner Violence and Employment Status

There is significant empirical evidence documenting the link between intimate partner violence (IPV) and incidence of depression symptoms. This study explores the impact of intimate partner violence, nonviolent spousal coercive control, and women’s employment status on the incidence of depression symptoms in a sample of Mexican women. Results from regression models suggest different types of abusive relationships have differential impacts on incidence of depression. Specifically, a woman’s employment status contributed to the risk of depression in the context of prevalent nonviolent spousal controlling behaviors. On the other hand, employment status did not contribute to the risk of developing depression symptoms when women were in relationships where physical violence was not coupled with controlling behaviors. Results of the study are discussed in the context of the Mexican culture, as well as implications for the treatment of IPV among Mexican women.     

Sex Offender Residential Mobility and Relegation: The Collateral Consequences Continue

Prior research (see American Journal of Criminal Justice 30 (2), 177–192, 2006a) examined the residential locations and mobility of registered sex offenders and showed a common movement into increasingly socially disorganized neighborhoods after 5 years of registration. The present study examines whether or not this downward spiral continues for these sex offenders 10 years later. We examined 212 registrants from the original study and found that since their original arrest 38 % of the registrants have moved into a more socially disorganized neighborhood than their previous address. The only variable found to influence the likelihood of move to a more socially disorganized neighborhood is race, with minority sex offenders most affected. The findings suggest that the collateral consequences of sex offender policies have long-term deleterious effects on housing for sex offenders.     

Do conditional cash transfer programs shift votes? Evidence from the Honduran PRAF

How do national social programs influence local voting? This study utilizes the experimental set up of a conditional cash transfer program to show that small, targeted cash transfers can have large electoral effects. The Honduran PRAF program allocated an average of $18 per capita per year to poor households within municipalities that were randomly assigned to receive the program. Although the program was administered at the national level, the program increased an incumbent mayor's re-election probabilities by 39%, without significantly influencing voting behavior in presidential elections. Moreover, the evidence suggests that transferring cash to poor households were more effective at increasing political support than interventions providing public goods for poor villages.     

Between a Rock and a Hard Place: Resident Mothers and the Moral Dilemmas they Face During Custody Disputes

Recent scholarship has critiqued the tendency for separated mothers in custody disputes to be defined as hostile and alienating. Through the presentation of three case studies, drawn from an interview-based study with 21 women, we show how such pejorative constructions only arise when the conflicting gendered moral accountabilities of contemporary motherhood are overlooked. We found that mothers tend to believe that contact with non-resident fathers is generally in a child’s best interests. However, as a result of balancing complex moral obligations for the care of their children, they may raise questions about particular kinds of arrangements for contact with particular fathers. We argue, therefore, that family law practice will lead to better outcomes for children when professionals listen to the history of, and reasons for, mothers’ positions. To enable family law professionals to undertake this task, we offer an alternative interpretive framework for making sense of women’s stories. Should family law professionals make use of this framework, it is likely that they will understand that the positions mothers adopt are often the outcome of the difficult moral dilemmas they encounter in caring for their children, and that the reductive rubric of the ‘hostile mother’ needs to be treated with scepticism.