Courtney Boen, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Faculty Affiliate in the Population Studies and Training Center at Brown University will be on campus on Thursday, January 15 to present at a SocSEM event from 12:30 am-2:00 pm in Savery Hall room 409. Her talk is entitled State Violence & Population Health: The Case of Three Strikes Laws & Racialized Patterns of Birth Outcomes in the US.
Dr. Boen's 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 US. 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 US 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. Boen uses the case of three strikes to make a broader argument about the role of state violence in shaping population health patterns in the US and will discuss implications for future research in this area.
Her research has been published in a number of leading journals, including Social Forces, Demography, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, among others. She has written and contributed to articles and
editorial pieces in The Atlantic, The Washington Post, The Hill, The Philadelphia Inquirer, and Vox, among other outlets. Her work has received funding support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.