Megan L Comfort
Biographic Data
| ID | 187427 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Megan L Comfort |
| GIVEN NAMES | Megan L |
| FAMILY NAME | Comfort |
| SIGNATURE | COMFORT M L |
| AFFILIATIONS | RTI International |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9730-6601 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 58 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 466 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 58 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
“My Dream Would Be Shut Down
This study examines how social and family environments shape the future orientation and aspirations of adolescents (ages 13–15) in an agricultural, predominantly Latine community in California. We analyzed data from 80 in-depth interviews conducted with 40 participants over two years as part of the A Crecer study. We found that while youth recognized how financial hardship and anti-immigrant policies could hinder their goals, they also drew stren…
“It's more than just being in a place, it's more like a peace of mind”
Navigating pathways from temporary hotel shelters to permanent housing during California’s Covid-19 response
The Operation Safer Ground (OSG) program leveraged newly available funding and vacancies in motels and hotels to house people experiencing homelessness (PEH), protecting them from COVID-19 and facilitating transitions into permanent housing. Little information exists about the experience of program staff and residents in the search for permanent housing. Using qualitative interviews with residents and staff members, we explore the experience of n…
Examining pathways by which socioeconomic instability in adolescence influence sexual health during emerging adulthood in an agricultural setting in California
This study investigates the longitudinal impact of socioeconomic instability on teen pregnancy and sexually transmitted infection (STI) diagnosis among adolescents and young adults (AYA) living in an agricultural region and examines pathways including supportive family and social structures, decision making autonomy in romantic relationships, health access, mental health and coping behaviors, and perceptions of future opportunities. Data were dra…
Jurisdictional Resource Factors Influencing Adoption and Implementation of the Public Safety Assessment During Pretrial
Criminal legal systems are increasingly adopting actuarial pretrial assessments which use statistical formulas to estimate individuals’ probability of adhering to pretrial requirements and guide the conditions of their supervision. A large gap in the study of pretrial assessments is due to inattention to implementation of these assessments in real-world settings. We conducted qualitative research examining personnel and data resource factors that…
Labeling in a California Latinx community
Targeted interventions that foster social belonging and connection rather than exclusion may facilitate health protective behaviors and have positive implications for future trajectories among youth
Creating “Safer Ground”
Our findings highlight that when key elements such as cross-sector collaboration, engaged leadership, and flexible funding align, significant progress can be made in providing housing and integrated medical, behavioral, and social services for PEH with complex needs
The complexities of ‘trust’ in the context of Covid-19 vaccination choices among Black women in Alameda County, CA
Many academic and media conversations about COVID-19 vaccination center on lower uptake among racially minoritized individuals due to what is characterized as 'mistrust.' In 'Is trust enough? Anti-Black racism and the perception of Black vaccine hesitancy,' Wilson argues that questioning Black people's trust in the COVID-19 vaccine fails to 'understand Black people as rational, complex beings who are fit to make reasonable decisions guided by com…
There is a common thread
Where’s the Bias
Pretrial assessments are criticized for inherent biases. We conduct research in Kentucky to assess the predictive validity and differential prediction by sex of one pretrial assessment, the Public Safety Assessment (PSA). Our research is unique because we find equal base rates by sex for missing a court date, which allows us to assess for error rate balance by sex. We find the PSA to have predictive validity within acceptable ranges for the crimi…
Cervical cancer screening barriers and facilitators from the perspectives of women with a history of criminal-legal system involvement and substance use
Decreased homelessness among women involved in the criminal legal system after a Covid-19 housing intervention
The COVID-19 outbreak fueled unprecedented public health efforts to mitigate the spread of infection, including rapid provision of non-congregate housing to people experiencing homelessness. People on community supervision (criminal probation or parole) have high levels of homelessness due to housing discrimination, poverty and racism, and are among the groups most vulnerable to COVID-19. We examined housing status in a cohort of women with proba…
Latina mothers’ perspectives on adverse experiences and protection of Latinx youth in an agricultural community
Latina mothers shared the impacts of immigrant-related experiences on systemic inequities in the United States which are currently missing from the ACEs framework. Immigrant specific adverse events include language-limited accessibility, or family-child separations, and policies impacting structural resources for immigrant families. Mothers highlighted their capacity to build resilience in their children and buffer impacts of systemic racism. Com…
Black Women's Physical, Mental, and Sexual Health in the Criminal Legal System
This study examines pathways from gender-based, racialized violence to health outcomes among formerly incarcerated Black women. We frame violence as gender-based and racialized, with a theoretical stance that we live in a male-dominated society characterized by historic and contemporary race-based oppression. This secondary analysis focused on a subsample of Black women ( N = 288) from three U.S. cities (Oakland, CA; Kansas City, KS, MO; and Birm…
Latinx Adolescent Perspectives on the Effects of United States Immigration Policy on Wellbeing
In a prospective cohort study of Latinx adolescents living in an agricultural county in California, we examined perceptions of federal immigration policy and its effects on community and individual wellbeing. From May to December 2017, 565 youth responded to an open-ended item integrated into ongoing surveys. Median age was 14 (range 13-16 years), 53% female, and 94% Latinx. About 12% were immigrants, 71% children of immigrant parents, and 52% ha…
Routine and preventive health care use in the community among women sentenced to probation
Health and Health Service Needs
Objectives: We profiled the health and health services needs of a sample of older adult women (age 50+) with criminal-legal system (CLS) involvement and compared them with younger women (age 18-49), also CLS-involved. Methods : Using survey data collected from January to June 2020 from adult women with CLS involvement in three US cities, we profiled and compared the older adult women with younger women on behavioral and structural risk factors, h…
Sarah Esther Lageson, Digital Punishment
Criminal Justice–Involved Women Navigate Covid-19
In March–April, 2020, we communicated with a cohort of criminal justice–involved (CJI) women to see how they were navigating COVID-19, chronic illness, homelessness, and shelter-in-place orders in Oakland, Birmingham, and Kansas City. We report on conversations with N = 35 women (out of the cohort of 474 women) and our own observations from ongoing criminal justice involvement studies. Women reported barriers to protecting themselves given widesp…
Public safety assessment
Research Summary We assess the predictive validity and differential prediction by race of one pretrial risk assessment, the Public Safety Assessment (PSA). The PSA was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) to reduce the burden placed on vulnerable populations at the front end of the criminal justice system. The growing and disparate use of incarceration is one of the most pressing social issues facing the United …
Holding On
Holding On reveals the results of an unprecedented ten-year study of justice-involved families, rendering visible the lives of a group of American families whose experiences are too often lost in large-scale demographic research. Using new data from the Multi-site Family Study on Incarceration, Parenting, and Partnering—a groundbreaking study of almost two thousand families, incorporating a series of couples-based surveys and qualitative intervie…
Sexual Risk and Criminal Justice Involvement Among Women Who Use Drugs
Justice involvement and girls' sexual health
What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated
What percentage of Americans have ever had a family member incarcerated? To answer this question, we designed the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS). The survey was administered in the summer of 2018 by NORC at the University of Chicago using their AmeriSpeak Panel. It was funded by FWD.us, which released a separate report using the data. The data show that 45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated…
‘I’m the man and he’s the woman!’
This chapter discusses people’s accounts of the challenges they face when men return to the home from prison. These accounts highlight particular tensions related to shifting from a masculinity constructed in accordance with the punitive constraints and dictates of the penitentiary to one that must operate within the harsh social conditions of life for impoverished people in the ‘outside’ world. Paradoxically, although riddled with emotional dist…
Punishment Beyond the Legal Offender
In the United States, lawbreakers are treated as social isolates, and the sentences imposed upon them are conceived of as affecting a discrete individual. However, people who commit or are suspected of committing crimes are generally embedded in kinship webs and social networks that draw others into the ambit of the state's punishment apparatus. Through their association with someone convicted of a crime, legally innocent people have firsthand an…
What Percentage of Americans Have Ever Had a Family Member Incarcerated
What percentage of Americans have ever had a family member incarcerated? To answer this question, we designed the Family History of Incarceration Survey (FamHIS). The survey was administered in the summer of 2018 by NORC at the University of Chicago using their AmeriSpeak Panel. It was funded by FWD.us, which released a separate report using the data. The data show that 45 percent of Americans have ever had an immediate family member incarcerated…
Consequences of Family Member Incarceration
Political participation and citizens' perceptions of the legitimacy and fairness of government are central components of democracy. In this article, we examine one possible threat to these markers of a just political system: family member incarceration. We offer a unique glimpse into the broader social consequences of punishment that are brought on by a partner's or parent's incarceration. We argue that the criminal justice system serves as an im…
A Twenty-Hour-a-Day Job
In the growing field of research on the consequences of criminal justice contact for family life, a heavy emphasis has been placed on how imprisonment influences the emotional, physical, and socioeconomic well-being of prisoners' loved ones. In this article, I elaborate on and analyze the experiences of family members of people with frequent, low-level criminal justice involvement. I draw on ethnographic data collected in partnership with a clini…
In The Tube At San Quentin
Through the imprisonment of their kin and kith, mass incarceration brings millions of women-especially poor women of color-into contact with the criminal justice system. These women experience restricted rights, diminished resources, social marginalization, and other consequences of penal confinement, even though they are legally innocent and reside outside the prison's boundaries. This article draws on field observations in the visitor waiting a…
You can't do nothing in this damn place”
In an effort to deepen our understanding of how circumstances of forced separation and the interdiction of physical contact affect women's sexual behavior, we investigated the development and maintenance of heterosexual couples' intimacy when the male partner is incarcerated. As HIV-prevention scientists who work with women visiting men at a California state prison, we recognize that correctional control extends to these women's bodies, both when…
Papa's House
Concerned about their partners' potential desensitization to carceral existence and their ensuing loss of ability to function outside of the penitentiary walls, women whose husbands, fiancés, or boyfriends are incarcerated attempt to involve their loved one in personal and family life by relocating various everyday activities into the prison visiting room. As kinship gatherings, family celebrations, and romance are conducted behind bars, the pris…
It Was Basically College to Us”
With the tremendous rise in the United States' incarceration rates over the last four decades, historically high numbers of young African Americans are spending their "emerging adulthood" (as theorized by Arnett) in close contact with the penitentiary. In contrast to the exploration of future possibilities facilitated by academic, military, and professional institutions geared toward people in this life stage, imprisonment typically restricts one…
The costs of incarceration for families of prisoners
Family members of incarcerated people are often faced with financial, social and emotional costs related to the imprisonment of their loved ones. These costs can be conceptualized as investments both in the sustenance of personal relationships and in a greater social good in the form of assisting with the reintegration of former prisoners. In this article, we draw upon data from a mixed-methods study to elucidate the costs of detention on familie…
How Institutions Deprive
Megan Comfort, Andrea M. Lopez, Christina Powers, Alex H. Kral, Jennifer Lorvick, How Institutions Deprive: Ethnography, Social Work, and Interventionist Ethics Among the Hypermarginalized, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1, Severe Deprivation in America (November 2015), pp. 100-119
Marital infidelity, food insecurity, and couple instability
Discrimination based on criminal record and healthcare utilization among men recently released from prison
Recently released prisoners report criminal record discrimination by healthcare workers, and this experience may impact healthcare utilization. Future studies should seek to further characterize criminal record discrimination by healthcare workers and prospectively examine its impact on health outcomes
Doing Time Together
If Family Matters
Justice involvement and girls' sexual health
Public safety assessment
Research Summary We assess the predictive validity and differential prediction by race of one pretrial risk assessment, the Public Safety Assessment (PSA). The PSA was developed with support from the Laura and John Arnold Foundation (LJAF) to reduce the burden placed on vulnerable populations at the front end of the criminal justice system. The growing and disparate use of incarceration is one of the most pressing social issues facing the United …
Taking children into account
Exploring Lifetime Accumulation of Criminal Justice Involvement and Associated Health and Social Outcomes in a Community-Based Sample of Women who Use Drugs
Partner Incarceration and African-American Women’s Sexual Relationships and Risk
Gender-Specific Correlates of Incarceration Among Marginally Housed Individuals in San Francisco
Objectives. We assessed how different patterns of housing instability affect incarceration and whether correlates of incarceration are gender specific. Methods. We used multivariate logistic regression to assess associations between patterns of housing instability and recent jail stays among a reproducible sample of 1175 marginally housed adults in San Francisco, California. Results. Over the previous year, 71% of men and 21% of women in the samp…
C'est plein de mecs bien en taule
Ces dernières années ont vu l'émergence d'une discussion des « effets sociaux » - ou des « conséquences collatérales » - du modèle américain d'emprisonnement de masse sur la société et sur la vie familiale. Les chercheurs tendent à considérer que la condamnation à la réclusion est la force déstabilisatrice qui provoque la perte d'emploi, la désintégration de la cellule familiale, l'ostracisme social, etc. Une analyse des relations amoureuses qu'e…
A qualitative analysis of male couples' coping with HIV
Research suggests that optimal couple functioning depends on adopting a "we" orientation to health. Using qualitative data from 20 male couples in which at least one partner was HIV-positive, we examined how couples viewed their health involvement and its relation to social support. One group described their health as highly interconnected; in a second group, at least one partner viewed health as a personal responsibility. Results revealed that t…
Black Women's Physical, Mental, and Sexual Health in the Criminal Legal System
This study examines pathways from gender-based, racialized violence to health outcomes among formerly incarcerated Black women. We frame violence as gender-based and racialized, with a theoretical stance that we live in a male-dominated society characterized by historic and contemporary race-based oppression. This secondary analysis focused on a subsample of Black women ( N = 288) from three U.S. cities (Oakland, CA; Kansas City, KS, MO; and Birm…
Latinx Adolescent Perspectives on the Effects of United States Immigration Policy on Wellbeing
In a prospective cohort study of Latinx adolescents living in an agricultural county in California, we examined perceptions of federal immigration policy and its effects on community and individual wellbeing. From May to December 2017, 565 youth responded to an open-ended item integrated into ongoing surveys. Median age was 14 (range 13-16 years), 53% female, and 94% Latinx. About 12% were immigrants, 71% children of immigrant parents, and 52% ha…
Health and Health Service Needs
Objectives: We profiled the health and health services needs of a sample of older adult women (age 50+) with criminal-legal system (CLS) involvement and compared them with younger women (age 18-49), also CLS-involved. Methods : Using survey data collected from January to June 2020 from adult women with CLS involvement in three US cities, we profiled and compared the older adult women with younger women on behavioral and structural risk factors, h…
Papa's House
Concerned about their partners' potential desensitization to carceral existence and their ensuing loss of ability to function outside of the penitentiary walls, women whose husbands, fiancés, or boyfriends are incarcerated attempt to involve their loved one in personal and family life by relocating various everyday activities into the prison visiting room. As kinship gatherings, family celebrations, and romance are conducted behind bars, the pris…
In The Tube At San Quentin
Through the imprisonment of their kin and kith, mass incarceration brings millions of women-especially poor women of color-into contact with the criminal justice system. These women experience restricted rights, diminished resources, social marginalization, and other consequences of penal confinement, even though they are legally innocent and reside outside the prison's boundaries. This article draws on field observations in the visitor waiting a…
You can't do nothing in this damn place”
In an effort to deepen our understanding of how circumstances of forced separation and the interdiction of physical contact affect women's sexual behavior, we investigated the development and maintenance of heterosexual couples' intimacy when the male partner is incarcerated. As HIV-prevention scientists who work with women visiting men at a California state prison, we recognize that correctional control extends to these women's bodies, both when…
Punishment Beyond the Legal Offender
In the United States, lawbreakers are treated as social isolates, and the sentences imposed upon them are conceived of as affecting a discrete individual. However, people who commit or are suspected of committing crimes are generally embedded in kinship webs and social networks that draw others into the ambit of the state's punishment apparatus. Through their association with someone convicted of a crime, legally innocent people have firsthand an…
C'est plein de mecs bien en taule
Ces dernières années ont vu l'émergence d'une discussion des « effets sociaux » - ou des « conséquences collatérales » - du modèle américain d'emprisonnement de masse sur la société et sur la vie familiale. Les chercheurs tendent à considérer que la condamnation à la réclusion est la force déstabilisatrice qui provoque la perte d'emploi, la désintégration de la cellule familiale, l'ostracisme social, etc. Une analyse des relations amoureuses qu'e…
Doing Time Together
Gender-Specific Correlates of Incarceration Among Marginally Housed Individuals in San Francisco
Objectives. We assessed how different patterns of housing instability affect incarceration and whether correlates of incarceration are gender specific. Methods. We used multivariate logistic regression to assess associations between patterns of housing instability and recent jail stays among a reproducible sample of 1175 marginally housed adults in San Francisco, California. Results. Over the previous year, 71% of men and 21% of women in the samp…
Effectiveness of an HIV Prevention Program for Women Visiting Their Incarcerated Partners
Having an incarcerated partner presents a unique HIV risk for women, particularly low-income women of color. We developed a population-specific risk reduction intervention for women visiting men in prison that was peer educator-based and included individual and community-level intervention components. Women who were assessed prior to the intervention period had a positive association between the number of unprotected penetrative intercourse (UPI)…
Primary Relationships, HIV Treatment Adherence, and Virologic Control
Considerations in HIV Prevention for Women Affected by the Criminal Justice System
Stigma and HIV risk among Metis in Nepal
Similar to other parts of Asia, the HIV epidemic in Nepal is concentrated among a small number of groups, including transgender people, or Metis. This study was conducted to explore the social context of stigma among Metis in Nepal to better understand their risk for HIV. Fourteen in-depth interviews were conducted with Metis in Kathmandu, Nepal. We found that stigma from families leading to rural-urban migration exposed Metis to discrimination f…
Taking children into account
It Was Basically College to Us”
With the tremendous rise in the United States' incarceration rates over the last four decades, historically high numbers of young African Americans are spending their "emerging adulthood" (as theorized by Arnett) in close contact with the penitentiary. In contrast to the exploration of future possibilities facilitated by academic, military, and professional institutions geared toward people in this life stage, imprisonment typically restricts one…
A New Vulnerable Population? The Health of Female Partners of Men Recently Released from Prison
Single room occupancy (SRO) hotels as mental health risk environments among impoverished women
The phenomenon of low-frequency heroin injection among street-based urban poor
La famille à l’épreuve de la prison, C. Touraut
Dans son premier livre, Caroline Touraut invite ses lecteurs dans une « zone d’ombre persistante à la périphérie des institutions carcérales » (p. 3) pour y découvrir les émotions, expériences, et raisonnements des familles des détenus. Son enquête est basée sur plus de deux ans de travail de terrain en France pendant lesquels elle a effectué des observations aux parloirs de trois établissements pénitentiaires, devant deux maisons d’arrêt et une …
Discrimination based on criminal record and healthcare utilization among men recently released from prison
Recently released prisoners report criminal record discrimination by healthcare workers, and this experience may impact healthcare utilization. Future studies should seek to further characterize criminal record discrimination by healthcare workers and prospectively examine its impact on health outcomes
Consequences of Family Member Incarceration
Political participation and citizens' perceptions of the legitimacy and fairness of government are central components of democracy. In this article, we examine one possible threat to these markers of a just political system: family member incarceration. We offer a unique glimpse into the broader social consequences of punishment that are brought on by a partner's or parent's incarceration. We argue that the criminal justice system serves as an im…
Health service use and social vulnerability in a community-based sample of women on probation and parole, 2011–2013
Most women involved in the criminal justice system are not incarcerated, but rather on probation or parole. We examined the receipt of health services and social vulnerability among women on parole or probation in the past year. In a community-based sample of 776 women who use crack cocaine or injection drugs, we compared those who had been on probation or parole in the past year with those who had no criminal justice involvement in the past year…
How Institutions Deprive
Megan Comfort, Andrea M. Lopez, Christina Powers, Alex H. Kral, Jennifer Lorvick, How Institutions Deprive: Ethnography, Social Work, and Interventionist Ethics Among the Hypermarginalized, RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences, Vol. 1, No. 1, Severe Deprivation in America (November 2015), pp. 100-119
Partner Incarceration and African-American Women’s Sexual Relationships and Risk
The costs of incarceration for families of prisoners
Family members of incarcerated people are often faced with financial, social and emotional costs related to the imprisonment of their loved ones. These costs can be conceptualized as investments both in the sustenance of personal relationships and in a greater social good in the form of assisting with the reintegration of former prisoners. In this article, we draw upon data from a mixed-methods study to elucidate the costs of detention on familie…
If Family Matters
A Twenty-Hour-a-Day Job
In the growing field of research on the consequences of criminal justice contact for family life, a heavy emphasis has been placed on how imprisonment influences the emotional, physical, and socioeconomic well-being of prisoners' loved ones. In this article, I elaborate on and analyze the experiences of family members of people with frequent, low-level criminal justice involvement. I draw on ethnographic data collected in partnership with a clini…
Criminal Justice and Corrections Analysis (38 works) · Psychology (34 works) · Medicine (32 works) · Political science (28 works) · Homelessness and Social Issues (25 works) · Criminology (24 works) · Sociology (23 works) · Psychiatry (21 works) · Public health (18 works) · Law (17 works)