“In and Out of Crisis”: Life Course Criminalization for Jefas in the Barrio

Abstract

Scholars have documented how violence, criminalization, and other forms of control impact the life trajectories of criminalized women. Less research exists on the ways that processes of criminalization affect the health of mothers across the life course. This study examines how the legal constructions of criminalized labels such as gang affiliation, are a process of long-term violence and threat of violence and second, how short and long-term criminalization affects family health–what I refer to as life course criminalization. This qualitative study is based on photo elicitation life history testimonios with 13 gang affiliated, system-impacted Chicana/Latina mothers from South Central Los Angeles, California and connects life course theory with feminist abolitionist decolonial perspectives. It documents how crises perpetuated by multi-institutional violence and other forms of violence influence relations between legal, social, and health related experiences for system-impacted mothers and their families. Through their testimonios they show the intergenerational mechanisms that connect the body’s health, family surveillance, and criminalization processes to survival, and spiritual resistance.

The child welfare system as a social determinant of health

“…Similarly, Comfort (2008) shows the consequences of men's incarceration on women and children and how visitation processes create secondary prisonization for families. This secondary prisonization negatively affects the mental health of families – for example, causing depression and anxiety for mothers (Maldonado‐Fabela, 2022). Other studies show how the application of the “criminal” label effects health, including mental health (Hatzenbuehler et al., 2015), cardiometabolic and lung health (Topel et al., 2018), asthma (Frank et al., 2013), and sexual health.…”

“…Few research documents how CPS contact and child removal affect mental health. Maldonado‐Fabela (2022) documents how gang‐affiliated mothers with CPS contact experience detrimental effects on their long‐term health, such as depression and anxiety. She connects the intersectional harms that exist for women involved in child welfare and shares how they affect the health of mothers.…”

“…Other negative life outcomes of contact include involvement in the criminal justice system, unemployment, and teen motherhood (Dettlaff et al., 2020; Doyle, 2007, 2008). The few studies examining the effects of child removal and family separation for mothers describe negative outcomes, such as trauma, PTSD, suicidality, depression, and grief (Haight et al., 2002; Hook et al., 2016; Kenny et al., 2015; Maldonado‐Fabela, 2022). Due to the ideologies stigmatizing mothers who are not from white middle‐ and upper‐class families, CWS responses have centered on therapeutic models that attempt to fix families (Reich, 2005), aiming to rehabilitate and “reform” under the logics of the “best interests” of children.…”

Intersectional Criminalization: How Chicanas Experience and Navigate Criminalization through Interpersonal Relationships with Latino Men and Boys

“…Sociologists and criminologists have traditionally used life course theory to understand the risk of criminal offending from adolescence to adulthood (see, for example, Sampson and Laub 1990). However, recent criminalization scholarship shifts the focus from individual behaviors to the longitudinal effects of institutionally embedded criminalization processes and social control mechanisms (see Maldonado Fabela 2022). I build on this growing body of research to consider how age along with race, gender, and sexuality shapes and is shaped by criminalization processes.…”

“…G. Harris 1994;Mendoza-Denton 2008;Moore 1991;Valdez 2007;Vigil 2008). This research tends to focus on the individual "at-risk" behaviors of Chicana gang members-for example, drug use and unsafe sexual practices-and is often less concerned with racist, heterosexist perceptions that ascribe gang involvement, hypersexuality, and drug addiction to all Chicanas regardless of the gang status (for exceptions, see Díaz-Cotto 2006; V. López and Chesney-Lind 2014;Maldonado Fabela 2022). Continuing to develop critical intersectional theorizing is essential for disrupting harmful ideas that perpetuate Chicana criminalization in the first place.…”