Courtney Boen, Brown University, Assistant Professor, Sociology
Title: State Violence & Population Health: The Case of Three Strikes Laws & Racialized Patterns of Birth Outcomes in the U.S.
Abstract: While state incarceration policies have received much attention in research on the causes of mass incarceration in the United States, their roles in shaping population health and health disparities remain largely unknown. This talk will focus on one particularly notorious state incarceration policy — three strikes — and assess whether, how, and why it shaped racialized patterns of birth outcomes in the U.S. Using a difference-in-differences event study research design that models the dynamic impact of this policy over time, results show that birth weight outcomes — including mean birth weight and low birth weight — for Black infants worsened markedly in the year three strikes policies were adopted. Descriptive analyses of U.S. newspapers and other sources further suggest that three strikes policies adversely impacted Black birth outcomes through affective mechanisms, by inducing highly racialized, stigmatizing, and criminalizing public discourse around the time of policy adoption. I use the case of three strikes to make a broader argument about the role of state violence in shaping population health patterns in the U.S. and discuss implications for future research in this area.
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