11.1 Chapter Reading Guide
Elizabeth B. Pearce
In this chapter, you will read selected essays by three student authors, Alexis Castenada-Perez, Christopher Byers, and Carla Medel, as well as the “In Focus” section by a fourth student, Heather Denherder. The students themselves selected these topics within the framework of justice and families. While the balance of the book consists of either faculty writing or collaborative writing between students and myself, these essays are theirs. When it comes to justice, I want you to read directly the words of students and see what matters to them. Going forward, I will add to this chapter with additions by other students. Each of the individual students will speak to a meaningful aspect of justice, their experience writing the text, and their developing understanding of justice.
The reading is designed to help you meet the following chapter objectives. Preview those to have an idea of where you are headed. You may also want to preview the key terms that follow. These terms will be bolded the first time they appear in the chapter. You can read the definitions here and also in the hyperlinks.
Chapter Learning Objectives
- Define various forms of justice.
- Explain what is meant by “the criminalization of poverty.”
- Describe how the founding documents of our country define justice.
- Describe how intersections of race, ethnicity, gender, immigration status, and socioeconomic status create different experiences of justice for individuals and families.
- Describe how several aspects of the justice system, such as policing, courts, and prisons, are related to race.
- Explain how mental health and substance use disorders are related.
- Identify two 21st-century federal immigration bills and explain how they would impact immigrant families.
Key Terms Preview
- Criminalization: the act of making an activity or person illegal by making their activity a criminal offense.
- Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA): a U.S. immigration policy that allows individuals who arrived in the United States as children to remain and work in the country for a renewable period of two years. This policy has been legalized and implemented inconsistently in the 2000s.
- Implicit bias: an unconscious tendency to favor one person, group, or point of view over another, usually based on social characteristics such as gender, sexuality, race, or socioeconomic status.
- Incarceration: being confined within a prison or jail.
- Justice: concerned with equity, equality, fairness, and sometimes punishment.
- Militarization: the process of preparing for war or another conflict; can refer to the transformation of a civilian agency becoming more like a military operation.
- Social justice: focuses on equal rights, equal opportunities, and equal treatment as well as meaningful actions to correct past discrimination.
- Substance use disorder (SUD): a disease that affects the brain and includes the uncontrolled use of something despite harmful consequences (sometimes called substance abuse).
Licenses and Attributions for Chapter Reading Guide
Open Content, Original
“Chapter Reading Guide” by Elizabeth B. Pearce. License: CC BY 4.0.
concerned with equity, equality, fairness and sometimes punishment.
the act of making an activity or person illegal by making their activity a criminal offense.
the categorization of humans using observable physical or biological criteria, such as skin color, hair color or texture, facial features, etc.
the shared social, cultural, and historical experiences, stemming from common national, ancestral, or regional backgrounds, that make subgroups of a population different from one another.
a socially constructed expression of a person’s sexual identity which influences the status, roles, and norms for their behavior.
the state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.