Papers by Colleen Hackett
Community Health Equity Research & Policy, 2024
Background: Women with upstream social determinants of health, particularly those with recent exp... more Background: Women with upstream social determinants of health, particularly those with recent experiences of incarceration, homelessness, and/or substance use, encounter a series of barriers in accessing health care services and consequently face poor sexual and reproductive health outcomes. Driven by a community concern for increasing rates of syphilis and congenital syphilis among women who are structurally disadvantaged, this study focuses on their experiences with reproductive healthcare access across healthcare settings.
Research Design and Study Sample: This community-based pláticas (conversational) research project gathered 12 in-depth interviews and testimonios (testimonies) with women who reported a criminalized upstream barrier (incarceration, homelessness, and/or substance use) in a small city in the southwestern U.S. – most of whom identified as Latina/Hispanic.
Analysis and Results: Using a grounded analysis and drawing upon Chicana feminist methodologies, this study identifies four major themes: (1) homelessness and economic vulnerabilities, (2) incarceration and health care, (3) drug use, provider stigma, and motherhood, and (4) desired changes to the healthcare experience.
Conclusion: Results highlight the need for economic and transportation supports, community-based preventive services as alternatives to incarcerated healthcare, along with more compassionate and structurally competent provider-patient dialogue.
Sexually Transmitted Diseases, 2024
Background: Syphilis and congenital syphilis rates have increased sharply in Colorado in the past... more Background: Syphilis and congenital syphilis rates have increased sharply in Colorado in the past 5 years. Congenital syphilis is passed during pregnancy in utero and can cause lifelong physical, developmental, and neurologic problems for the child, or can lead to miscarriage, stillbirth, or early infant death. Congenital syphilis is easily prevented if the mother receives timely testing, treatment, and prenatal care. Providers can play a key role in preventing congenital syphilis for women with social vulnerabilities, who have a higher likelihood of syphilis and/or congenital syphilis infection. Methods: We surveyed 23 and interviewed 4 health care providers in southern Colorado in 2022 to record their experiences in providing sexual health care services. We asked providers with direct care experience about perceived barriers in effectively treating syphilis. Results: The most significant barriers reported in the survey were the cost of treatment (26%) and the loss to follow-up (22%). Interviews revealed further challenges, including discretionary testing procedures, delays in screening results, treatment referral issues, and stigma around substance use and sexual activity.
Abolishing Carceral Society, 2018
This essay explores the changing contours of white supremacy in the United States, and in particu... more This essay explores the changing contours of white supremacy in the United States, and in particular its relationship to systems of control and confinement. Many critics have illuminated the ways that racial control is inherent to and embedded within the penal system. In light of some of the federal- and state-level reforms that claim to incarcerate less and use more “alternative,” community-based sanctions, we interrogate the ways that white racial interests continue to be secured across the carceral landscape, thus granting official politics limited space to entertain negligible decarceration policies. In this preliminary survey of the carceral landscape, we critique several white-dominant social institutions that work together to confine and control communities of color outside of the prison walls, while reproducing varying forms of racial caste. We incorporate historical understandings of racialization and colonization, as well as contemporary concepts and observations from academia and beyond to highlight the extent of this entrenchment. It is our hope that this survey will address the shape of racialized control in the United States that must be considered when addressing just one of its manifestations—the prison state.
Contemporary Anarchist Criminology: Against Authoritarianism and Punishment, 2018
In an effort to rid U.S. society's insidious reliance upon the criminal legal system, abolition t... more In an effort to rid U.S. society's insidious reliance upon the criminal legal system, abolition theory and practice proposes the use of a multi-pronged approach. Some focus on developing restorative infrastructures to deal with harm and to combat the sustained investment in prisons. Others produce counter-hegemonic critiques of the repressive penal system and highlight the material cruelties of imprisoning bodies that are disproportionately poor, trans, and/or of color. And still others push for policy reforms to dismantle the system "brick by brick" while holding on to the long-term goal of total abolition. While we encourage these approaches, we want to highlight the importance of the burgeoning prisoner resistance movement in rapidly advancing the project of abolition. We argue that an increasingly ungovernable prison rebel population can create an internal crisis, disrupting the logics and routines of punishment to render prisons unworkable. In our chapter we examine the strategic value in this approach, the relationships between prisoners and supporters, the creation of robust support networks, and possible outcomes. Abolishing prison on our terms and our timeline can destabilize the status quo by threatening the capitalist, patriarchal and white supremacist order that the prison system upholds.
Contemporary Justice Review, 2017
In this article we explore the intersections between white liberal feminisms and the carceral sta... more In this article we explore the intersections between white liberal feminisms and the carceral state, particularly within nonprofit agencies. We find a strong collusion between ‘dominating feminisms’ and the carceral state, through funding structures and the belief that the legal system can provide protection to victimized women. We use
evidence from our own research on rape crisis centers and gender-responsive programming for criminalized women, respectively, to investigate how some nonprofit agencies further threaten the safety, stability, and self-determination of women of color, queer women, transgender clients, economically disadvantaged women, and disabled women. As a result, when white liberal feminists seek to intervene in the criminal legal system, we often see reform efforts that directly strengthen institutions that perpetuate economic exploitation, colonialist notions of progress, and white supremacy. We conclude our article with an exploration of some guiding principles within noncarceral antiviolence organizations that espouse a liberatory feminist framework.
Contemporary Justice Review, 2015
Journal of Prisoners on Prisons, 2016
In the latest iteration of penal reform, policymakers and correctional practitioners in the U.S. ... more In the latest iteration of penal reform, policymakers and correctional practitioners in the U.S. have been attempting to legitimate the functions of the expansive prison system by advocating for more rehabilitative programming. In women's prisons, we have seen an increase in programs that claim to be "gender-responsive"; that is, classes and curricula that profess to respond to women's histories of trauma and abuse, while empowering them to become noncriminal subjects. The authors use their experiences, observations, and research to critically examine both the socio-political and psychological ramifications of this therapeutic project. First, we argue that therapeutics serve to decontextualize individuals and reduce their complex circumstances to a matter of "choices." Second, we discuss the ways in which women on the inside perform and replicate these therapeutic discourses in ways that solidify social divisions and limit solidarity.
Feminist Criminology, 2013
This article examines how staff members at a gender-responsive, outpatient reentry center constru... more This article examines how staff members at a gender-responsive, outpatient reentry center construct women’s criminality and explain treatment outcomes. Staff members acknowledge the structural causes of women’s criminality, yet during the process of rehabilitation this recognition is paradoxically replaced by a discourse of personal responsibility. By employing participant-observation methods and in-depth interviews with staff, this study demonstrates how the center’s use of “alternative” practices and rehabilitative logics serve to disempower and pathologize women’s lives. This research adds to our knowledge of punishment and governance by revealing how neoliberal strategies of self-regulation may take form in gendered, alternative spaces.
Book Reviews by Colleen Hackett
Public Scholarship by Colleen Hackett
Truthout
This month marks the 25th anniversary of the Lucasville Uprising, the longest prison revolt invol... more This month marks the 25th anniversary of the Lucasville Uprising, the longest prison revolt involving fatalities to occur in the history of the United States. Survivors of this 11-day prisoner takeover of the Southern Ohio Correctional Facility (SOCF) have been active and inspiring participants in the present movement for prisoners' rights, gaining attention that was unavailable to them in 1993. In light of the growing momentum in prisoner uprisings, including the recent South Carolina prison riot that was the deadliest in the past 25 years, the Lucasville Uprising offers timely lessons on the interplay between repressive state forces and prisoner-led movements.
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Papers by Colleen Hackett
Research Design and Study Sample: This community-based pláticas (conversational) research project gathered 12 in-depth interviews and testimonios (testimonies) with women who reported a criminalized upstream barrier (incarceration, homelessness, and/or substance use) in a small city in the southwestern U.S. – most of whom identified as Latina/Hispanic.
Analysis and Results: Using a grounded analysis and drawing upon Chicana feminist methodologies, this study identifies four major themes: (1) homelessness and economic vulnerabilities, (2) incarceration and health care, (3) drug use, provider stigma, and motherhood, and (4) desired changes to the healthcare experience.
Conclusion: Results highlight the need for economic and transportation supports, community-based preventive services as alternatives to incarcerated healthcare, along with more compassionate and structurally competent provider-patient dialogue.
evidence from our own research on rape crisis centers and gender-responsive programming for criminalized women, respectively, to investigate how some nonprofit agencies further threaten the safety, stability, and self-determination of women of color, queer women, transgender clients, economically disadvantaged women, and disabled women. As a result, when white liberal feminists seek to intervene in the criminal legal system, we often see reform efforts that directly strengthen institutions that perpetuate economic exploitation, colonialist notions of progress, and white supremacy. We conclude our article with an exploration of some guiding principles within noncarceral antiviolence organizations that espouse a liberatory feminist framework.
Book Reviews by Colleen Hackett
Public Scholarship by Colleen Hackett
Research Design and Study Sample: This community-based pláticas (conversational) research project gathered 12 in-depth interviews and testimonios (testimonies) with women who reported a criminalized upstream barrier (incarceration, homelessness, and/or substance use) in a small city in the southwestern U.S. – most of whom identified as Latina/Hispanic.
Analysis and Results: Using a grounded analysis and drawing upon Chicana feminist methodologies, this study identifies four major themes: (1) homelessness and economic vulnerabilities, (2) incarceration and health care, (3) drug use, provider stigma, and motherhood, and (4) desired changes to the healthcare experience.
Conclusion: Results highlight the need for economic and transportation supports, community-based preventive services as alternatives to incarcerated healthcare, along with more compassionate and structurally competent provider-patient dialogue.
evidence from our own research on rape crisis centers and gender-responsive programming for criminalized women, respectively, to investigate how some nonprofit agencies further threaten the safety, stability, and self-determination of women of color, queer women, transgender clients, economically disadvantaged women, and disabled women. As a result, when white liberal feminists seek to intervene in the criminal legal system, we often see reform efforts that directly strengthen institutions that perpetuate economic exploitation, colonialist notions of progress, and white supremacy. We conclude our article with an exploration of some guiding principles within noncarceral antiviolence organizations that espouse a liberatory feminist framework.