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In this article, we investigate the degree to which prison shapes transgender women’s perceptions of themselves as gendered people in prisons for men. Drawing on original data collected from 315 transgender women in 27 prisons for men in California, a mixed-methods analysis reveals that transgender women in prisons for men report higher levels of self-perceptions of femininity while incarcerated, especially for those who report sexual victimization by other prisoners. The implications of these and other findings are discussed in light of recent calls for more theory and research on femininities as well as the policies and practices that undergird prisons as one of the most sex-segregated institutions.

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Purpose Three-fourths of public schools in the U.S. maintain instructional programs to discourage alcohol, tobacco, and other drug (ATOD) use. State-sanctioned instructional standards attempt to direct this ATOD preventive education. No existing research, however, systematically codes these standards across all grades and states. We performed such an analysis. Methods We retrieved ATOD standards information from all 50 states and the District of Columbia from multiple sources, including the National Association of State Boards of Education's State School Health Policy website. Three independent researchers classified and cross-validated ATOD standards (inter-rater agreement = 98%) based on recommended content domains and pedagogic delivery methods. Results We find substantial grade-level variation in standards. Elementary schools emphasize generic social skills and affective skills, whereas middle and high school standards focus on knowledge about biological and behavioral consequences of ATOD use. States also vary widely in their content and coverage of standards. Two-thirds of states do not include standards in all content areas considered “evidence-based.” Conclusions The ATOD curricular agenda for the majority of states falls well below recommended content and delivery benchmarks. We intend for our harmonized dataset—the first of its kind—to promote research that examines the relation among state ATOD standards, actual classroom instruction, and adolescent ATOD use.

Objectives: We argue that assessing the level of crime concentration across cities has four challenges: 1) how much variability should we expect to observe; 2) whether concentration should be measured across different types of macro units of different sizes; 3) a statistical challenge for measuring crime concentration; 4) the temporal assumption employed when measuring high crime locations.Methods: We use data for 42 cities in southern California with at least 40,000 population to assess the level of crime concentration in them for five different Part 1 crimes and total Part 1 crimes over 2005-12. We demonstrate that the traditional measure of crime concentration is confounded by crimes that spatially locate due to random chance. We also use two measures employing different temporal assumptions: a historically adjusted crime concentration measure, and a temporally adjusted crime concentration measure (a novel approximate solution that is simple for researchers to implement).Results: There is much variability in crime concentration over cities in the top 5% of street segments. The standard deviation across cities over years for the temporally adjusted crime concentration measure is between 10% and 20% across crime types (with the average range typically being about 15% to 90%). The historically adjusted concentration has similar variability and typically ranges from about 35% to 100%. Conclusions:The study provides evidence of variability in the level of crime concentration across cities, but also raises important questions about the temporal scale when measuring this concentration. The results open an exciting new area of research exploring why levels of crime concentration may vary over cities? Either micro-or macro-theories may help researchers in exploring this new direction.