Explore the vast range of titles available.

The author used qualitative data collected in 2005 and 2006 in California to explore how former inmates (men and women) understand and explain prison violence and inmate culture--Chapter 1.

Despite interest in the subject, the study of prison gangs has been meagre since the late 1980s. Occasional studies appear, but they tend to focus on only the largest prison systems in the US. This introduction to this special issue, Prison Gangs as Organized Crime, provides an overview of notable literature on the emergence and evolution of prison gangs, their relationships with protection, and their organized criminal activities. Moreover, the articles in this special issue explore important questions: How might we study prison gangs at a large scale? How do prison administrators’ responses to prison gangs cause prison gangs to adjust their power structures? How do prison gangs seek to establish protection arrangements? And what happens when prison gangs successfully establish protection arrangements beyond prison walls?

We know very little about how incarcerated men justify assaults against at-risk inmates such as child molesters. For this article, we fill this gap in the literature by examining how men describe these assaults as a way to align their own violent behavior with more conventional mores. We find that formerly incarcerated men justify violence as a way to raise their own social status and promote cultural norms against child abuse. When inmates attack someone convicted of child molestation, they do so to punish him and provide a \"service\" to their community. Furthermore, they elevate their own social status and distance themselves from these offenders. Theoretically, this work broadens our understanding of verbal justifications for violent action.

Using interview and observational data collected in 2008, we examine how community leaders discuss gender norms and social stigma in Yemen. We focus on how interviewees describe how and why they stigmatize and discriminate against women. We pay particular attention to the connection between stigma and life chances ( Link and Phelan 2001 ). Informants explain that women committing fornication are subjected to imprisonment, banishment, or honor killing. Men, on the other hand, are able to engage in impression management and mediation rituals in order to return to their communities. These practices connect the formal legal system in Yemen to gender norms and allow men in this society to maintain power over women.

Law schools are criticized for graduating students who lack the skills necessary to practice law. Legal research is a foundational ability necessary to support lawyering competency. The American Bar Association (ABA) establishes standards for legal education that include a requirement that each law student receive substantial instruction in legal skills, including legal research. Despite the recognized importance of legal research in legal education, there is no consensus of what to teach as part of a legal research course or even how to teach such a course. Legal educators struggle to address these issues. The practicing bar and judiciary have expressed concerns about law school graduates ability to conduct legal research. Studies have been conducted detailing the poor research ability of law students and their lack of skills. Although deficiencies in law student research skills have been identified, there is no agreement as to how to remediate these deficiencies. This dissertation suggests the legal research resources that should be taught in law schools by identifying the research resources used by practicing attorneys and comparing them to those resources currently included in legal research instruction at the 202 ABA-accredited law schools. Multiple data sources were used in this study. Practitioner resource information was based on data provided by practicing attorneys responding to the 2013 ABA Legal Technology Survey. Resources taught in ABA-accredited law schools were identified through three sources: a 2014 law school legal research survey sent to the 202 ABA-accredited law schools, a review of law school syllabi from ABA-accredited law school legal research and legal research and writing courses, and the Association of Legal Writing Directors 2013 annual survey of legal research and writing faculty. The combined data from these three sources were compared to the resources used by practicing lawyers identified in the annual national 2013 ABA Legal Technology Survey. This comparison of what is taught with what is used in practice identifies a deficiency in law school instruction in the research resources used by practicing attorneys. These survey results detail distinct areas of inadequate instruction in legal research resources and provide legal educators with detailed information necessary to develop a curriculum that will result in graduating students with practice-ready competencies.

For this dissertation, I focus on how former inmates align action with cultural norms. Specifically, I examine violent action as not only justified by the offender but used as a method of social control. I use survey and interview data to examine how former inmates describe the conditions under which violence occurs in prison. My findings indicate that (1) men and women struggle to maintain racial divisions in prison yet some women are more open to the idea of integration; (2) gender roles are pervasive and women occupy the subjugated role; (3) inmates struggle to gain autonomy in a total institution and yet men and women differ with regard to how to gain autonomy. Throughout this dissertation, I extend several theoretical perspectives. First, I extend theories on gender and crime (Connell 2000; Messerschmidt 2006) to theoretically move beyond a dualist criminological perspective. This means examining violence as a \"male\" social reality and ignore why women and girls engage in violent behavior (Messerschmidt 2006). Secondly, I examine how former inmates align action with cultural norms (Felson and Ribner 1981; Scully and Marolla 1984; Scully and Marolla 1985). Overall, I frame this dissertation in the paradigm of symbolic interactionism (Blumer 1969; Goffman 1959; Goffman 1961; Goffman 1977; Goffman 1983; Mead 1956; Mead and Morris 1967) which allows my interviewees to discuss the social construction of reality (Berger and Luckmann 1967) in prison and how violence is interwoven into this reality. Verbal accounts allow interviewees align action (Stokes & Hewitt 1976) with norms about race, gender and social control. As Tilly (2006) points out, stories and accounts organize social relations in a way that produces a cause and effect model of social behavior. In this sense, interviewees describe their prison experience in a way that gives them agency. Men and women released from prison bear the stigma of incarceration for the rest of their lives. Therefore, it makes sense that their accounts direct attention to the fact that they maintained order in an institution known for chaos and violence.

Using several different observing techniques, I have investigated the evolutionary process by which stars of one to eight solar masses expel their outer envelopes, create planetary nebulae (PNe), and subsequently cool as white dwarfs. I present spectropolarimetry of 31 AGB/post-AGB stars, and find that 17 of these objects have intrinsic polarizations that are indicative of large scale asymmetries. This result indicates that aspherical structure is frequently present early in PNe formation process. Spectropolarimetry also provides a tool to separate the reflected and direct spectra, which are superimposed to produce the total spectra of some young planetary nebulae. For GL 618, M1-92, and M2-56, I find that the bipolar lobes are shock heated (V$\\sb{\\rm s}$ = 30-100 km s$\\sp{-1}$), not photoionized. Near-IR spectra of M1-92 and M2-56 indicate that the observed H$\\sb2$ emission is also produced in a shock. I have also used spectropolarimetry to investigate the nature of the knots seen in the bipolar lobes of M2-9. I propose that the lobes of M2-9 contain rings or arcs of clumpy, higher density material. The central source illuminates a section of the lobe causing these rings of material to glow, producing the appearance of knots. I also obtained near IR spectra of M2-9. The H$\\sb2$ emission in M2-9 is probably radiatively excited and its overall distribution is consistent with the optical results. I have developed a new dual beam imaging polarimeter for use on the McDonald Observatory 2.1m telescope. Using this instrument and a direct CCD imaging system, I have obtained imaging polarimetry and imaging of four objects. With this data I have studied the distribution of shock heated gas in GL 618 and M1-92, and find that the shock emission appears to be concentrated in regions whose brightness peaks are exterior to the peak in the continuum emission. In M1-91 and M2-9, I find bar-like structures extending from the knots across the lobes, perpendicular to the bipolar axis. At approximately the same positions as the bar extensions, the level of polarization increases, indicating a higher density of scatterers in this region. There seem to be rings of higher density material in the lobes of these objects, possibly resulting from episodic mass loss events.