crime

When people do horrible things, it is often too tempting to obsess over the individual perpetrator, to ask “What went wrong?” through a slew of news headlines, childhood photo montages, and impassioned Internet comments. However, one of the basic tenets of Sociology 101 is that nothing happens in isolation—we must also look at the social sphere around an individual.

Michael Kimmel reminds us of this maxim in a recent opinion piece on Ms. Magazine’s website. Writing about the community response around a now-notorious Steubenville, Ohio gang rape, Kimmel argues that public outcry against the individual perpetrators (and trivial “poster boy(s) for teenage male douchery” who make light of the event) misses the point. What about the influence of a male-dominated community that could protect the perpetrators—those Kimmel calls “The 18,437 Perpetrators of Steubenville” in his title? He writes:

As I found in my interviews with more than 400 young men for my book Guyland, in the aftermath of these sorts of events—when high-status high school athletes commit felonies, especially gang rape—they are surrounded and protected by their fathers, their school administrations and their communities.

They did what they did because they felt entitled to, because they knew they could get away with it. Because they knew that their coaches, their families, their friends, their teammates and the police department—indeed, the entire town would rally around them and protect them from the consequences of what they’ve done.

Providing sexual services in exchange for money is illegal in many parts of the world, “oldest profession” or not. And where prostitution is legal, it is often not regulated, leading to a whole new set of problems. On the other hand, being a long-term, extramarital lover may be frowned upon, but it’s generally not illegal. Sociologist and sex researcher Li Yinhe argues (as reported by the online edition of the South China Morning Post) that if mistresses and prostitutes are in the “same supply-chain”—that is, they essentially provide the same service—then prostitution should be decriminalized. In her talk at a “Love and Culture” forum, Li went on to discuss modern marriage, which she also sees in socio-economic terms:

…[T]he sociology professor said that judging from its current form, [marriage] would soon break away from its “shackles” and become more “free”… “The reason we had marriage was [traditionally] to bear children and allow each generation to inherit private property,” she said.

“If there are other uses for property and less cohabiting couples raising children, then the institution of marriage is likely to become extinct,” she added.

It has been a tough year for Chicago. A recent surge in gang conflicts has increased crime—so much so that Chicago saw its 400^th murder of 2012 by the beginning of October. In a New York Times op-ed, Sudhir Venkatesh, Columbia sociologist and author of Gang Leader for a Day, describes ways in which the efforts to control guns in Chicago are insufficient. Venkatesh explains:

Homicides are up about 25 percent over last year. Chicago has surpassed New York and Los Angeles as a hub of gun-related violence, most of it involving young people. Since 2001, it has recorded more than 5,000 gun-related deaths, compared with the 2,000 American military deaths in the war in Afghanistan.

Venkatesh sees several ways to improve outcomes for Chicagoans. First, he identifies a police focus on finding “gun-runners,” who buy from licensed dealers and resell to others, when nearly half of gun purchases actually come from a secondary market comprised of gangs, gun brokers, or informal traders such as family or friends. He suggests more amnesty programs like gun buyback programs could help here. Next, Venkatesh fingers a lack of support for mediation programs like Boston’s CeaseFire. These programs help open up conversations between gang members and police officers, and have been shown to lead to sharp declines in gang violence.

Finally, Venkatesh turns to a back to how guns get from person to person. A surprising amount of firearms, he writes, are passed between friends and family, and he believes a sensible, “clever” media campaign must be launched to discourage gun-lending.

These may seem like small steps, but they could have very important effects. As Venkatesh puts it, “Good gun policy is good social policy.” To underscore the point, he turns to his Freakonomics colleague, Steven J. Levitt, who has estimated “each homicide is associated with out-migration of 70 city residents. The total social costs of gun violence in Chicago have been estimated at about $2.5 billon—$2,500 per household—a year.”

At the second Presidential debate, a comment that linked single parents and gun violence prompted much response in the Twittersphere.  It also prompted Time Health & Family’s Belinda Luscombe to ask, “Is there a correlation between single parents and gun violence?”

Drawing on the research of sociologist Philip Cohen, Luscombe shows that understanding this relationship requires more than simply fact-checking a candidate’s statements.   Citing Cohen, she notes that while the number of single moms has increased since 1990, the number of violent crimes has been going down.

However, this doesn’t negate other benefits that may be associated with two-parent families in certain contexts.  Numerous studies have shown that children who grow up in stable two-parent households perform better across a range of social indicators.  For many, these benefits likely stem from the fact that stable two-parent families generally have more resources.  However,

There are other issues besides money: children from low-income single-parent families are more likely to have less parental supervision and support, simply because the parent is under much more time and economic pressure. With only one parent to do all the disciplining, the relationship can get very strained.

But, this doesn’t necessarily link to gun violence.  Anecdotally, Luscombe also quickly checked data on the 12 most recent mass shootings in the U.S.  Out of these, six of the shooters were raised in two-parent families, while three were raised by single parents.  (And it’s difficult to trace the family structure of the other three.)  So, single parenting may be tough on children in certain circumstances, but the link between gun violence and single parenting is rather murky (if present at all).

Beat cops – and the community-oriented policing projects they practice – are on the decline says Sudhir Venkatesh, Professor of Sociology at Columbia University.

In an article appearing last week in The New Republic, Venkatesh notes that tackling current crime concerns increasingly requires a partnership of federal resources, such as hi-tech gadgetry, and local knowledge of criminal networks. But to support these collaborative taskforces, “[t]he Feds are getting a bigger share of funding, while [local police] are forced to continually make layoffs.”

Venkatesh argues that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. In many ways, joint taskforces have delivered. In addition to racking up arrests and convictions, “[Chicago] [r]esidents felt safer using public spaces, storeowners experienced less extortion, and even gang members exited their organizations at a greater rate after a federal operation.”

But, while traditional community policing may be outmoded for today’s complex investigations, Venkatesh also warns that cuts have had unintended consequences. Fewer cops on the street has created vacuums – opening the door for solutions from local gangs and vigilantes.

Popular wisdom and those who defend the death penalty say that the most heinous crimes should be more harshly punished. But, as Lincoln Caplan points out in a recent New York Times editorial, this is simply not the case. Death sentences are far more random than that, as shown by a study of murder cases in Connecticut from 1973 to 2007.

The Connecticut study, conducted by John Donohue, a Stanford law professor, completely dispels this erroneous reasoning. It analyzed all murder cases in Connecticut over a 34-year period and found that inmates on death row are indistinguishable from equally violent offenders who escape that penalty. It shows that the process in Connecticut—similar to those in other death-penalty states—is utterly arbitrary and discriminatory.

The study revealed that, far from being blind, Lady Justice metes out harsher punishments based not on the egregiousness of crimes but more often on race and geography. These findings echo those of sociologists who have studied the death penalty, such as Scott Philips (as “discovered” in Contexts, Winter 2011). Philips examined how the victim’s social status affected whether a defendant was sentenced to death in Texas from 1992 to 1999. Results showed that if the victim was “high status” (e.g. white, no criminal record, college educated), defendants were six times more likely to be sentenced to death. Black defendants, though, whose victims tend to be of lower social status, were still more likely than others to be sentenced to death.

In light of such evidence and with the death penalty on the decline (some states, such as Illinois in 2011, have abolished it altogether) Caplan argues it’s time for this “freakishly rare,” “capricious,” and “barbaric” form of punishment to go.

As part of its programming surrounding our national day of remembrance in honor of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., NPR’s Fresh Air brought scholar Michelle Alexander to the airwaves last night for a lengthy, fascinating interview. Alexander is the author of the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness (out now in paperback with an introduction by Cornel West), and she argues persuasively that, as NPR puts it, “Jim Crow laws are now off the books [but] millions of blacks… remain marginalized and disenfranchised… denied [the] basic rights and opportunities that would allow them to become productive, law-abiding citizens.”

President Reagan’s “War on Drugs,” was declared, Alexander said, “primarily for reasons of politics—racial politics. … [these] racially coded ‘get-tough’ appeals on issues of crime and welfare appeal to poor and working-class whites, particularly in the South, who were resentful of, anxious about, and threatened by many of the gains of African Americans in the civil rights movement.” And so, the war on drugs keeps Jim Crow going:

Today there are more African Americans under correctional control—in prison or jail, on probation or parole—than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. …In major American cities today, more than half of working-age African American men are either under correctional control or branded felons and are thus subject to legalized discrimination for the rest of their lives

In her conversation with Dave Davies, Alexander went on to explain that, while some, like criminologist David Kennedy, believe  anyone who’s spent time with those fighting the “War on Drugs” on the streets (that is, who’ve embedded themselves with beat cops and DEA agents) knows there’s absolutely no racial or class bias in who gets arrested for what, she’s found in her research that, for white, middle and upper-class kids, some crimes are considered rites of passage deserving only a slap on the wrist. Just a few miles away, though, in poorer communities of color, those same crimes (particularly the sale and use of recreational drugs, which Alexander says research has found are no more likely among black adolescents than white nor among poor vs. white kids) relegate young people to a life haunted by the legal system.

This, Alexander goes on, is especially problematic in one under-examined way: the disenfranchisement of convicted felons means that these communities, which are already low in political capital (that is, real political power), don’t even have the ability to go and vote for the politicians (and policies) that might improve their lives. “My experience and research has led me to the regrettable conclusion that our system of mass incarceration functions more like a caste system than a system of crime prevention or control,” concludes Alexander.

In some circles the social sciences are criticized for “discovering” what common sense supposedly already tells us. But sometimes, societal trends can cause even the experts to scratch their heads. During the recent recession, for example, unemployment rates in the United States rose sharply and many scholars and politicians expected crime rates to follow suit. According to recently released FBI crime statistics, though, they haven’t.

Violent crimes have fallen 6.4 percent in the last year while property crimes dropped 3.7 percent. Plus, last year’s crime decrease was just a continuation of a downward pattern since 2008; since 1991, the homicide rate has fallen 51 percent and property crimes dropped by 64 percent.

When this data went public, news sources like National Public Radio, the LA Times, and MSNBC.com looked to see how experts in criminology reacted to the findings. Richard Rosenfeld, professor at the University of Missouri-St. Louis and former president of the American Society of Criminology, was, “surprised by the overall decline in both violent and property crime during and since the recent recession.” He went on, “I’ve studied crime trends in relation to economic conditions for some time, and the 2008-09 recession is the first time since WWII that crime rates have not risen during a substantial downturn in the economy.” Many, including Rosenfeld, attribute some of the decline to smarter policing, but admit that can’t account for all of it, since in many places policing hasn’t changed much in the past ten years or during the recession.

Franklin Zimring, a criminologist and UC Berkeley law professor, was also a puzzled to see a decline in crime during the last three years when incarceration rates have stalled and the economy has soured. “By both the left- and right-wing leading indicators we should be in a lot of trouble—except [we’re] not,” Zimring maintains. “Everything we thought we knew are deeply challenged by events by the last three years.” In an email written to msnbc.com, Zimring does, though, suggest one possible factor affecting this decline: Inflation. “High rates of inflation are connected with high crime rates, so when inflation drops we should expect corresponding declines in crime, in the first instance property crime.”

Although bewilderment in the face of a crime decline is a relatively good problem to have, most scholars and public officials still agree on the importance of getting to the bottom of what’s causing it—particularly if it might be replicable.

When photographs of Police Lieutenant John Pike pepper-spraying peaceful college students emerged, many people were outraged.  But, Atlantic Monthly writer Alexis Madrigral takes a sociological lens by reminding readers that people always act within the confines of structure.

Structures, in the sociological sense, constrain human agency. And for that reason, I see John Pike as a casualty of the system, too. Our police forces have enshrined a paradigm of protest policing that turns local cops into paramilitary forces. Let’s not pretend that Pike is an independent bad actor. Too many incidents around the country attest to the widespread deployment of these tactics. If we vilify Pike, we let the institutions off way too easy.

Many sociologists, such as Patrick Gillham, have documented these changes in our police forces.  Looking at the 1960s, Gillham notes that police used “escalated force,” which involved mass arrest and indiscriminate use of force.

But by the 1970s, that version of crowd control had given rise to all sorts of problems and various departments went in “search for an alternative approach.” What they landed on was a paradigm called “negotiated management.” Police forces, by and large, cooperated with protesters who were willing to give major concessions on when and where they’d march or demonstrate. “Police used as little force as necessary to protect people and property and used arrests only symbolically at the request of activists or as a last resort and only against those breaking the law,” Gillham writes.

Yet by the 1999 WTO protests in Seattle, negotiated management was seen as a failure.

9/11 put the final nail in the coffin of the previous protest-control regime. By the time of the Free Trade of the Americas anti-globalization protests in Miami broke out eight years ago this week, an entirely new model of taking on protests had emerged. People called it the Miami model. It was heavily militarized and very forceful.

Looking at these changes, Brooklyn College Sociologist Alex Vitalle explains that the “broken windows” theory has also had a major impact on policing.  Broken windows policing doesn’t fight crime directly but rather fights the sense that a street is disorderly.

As Vitale would put it, the theory “created a kind of moral imperative for the police to restore middle class values to the city’s public spaces.” When applied to protesters, the strategy has meant that any break with the NYPD’s behavioral preferences could be grounds for swift arrest and/or physical violence. Vitale described how the theory has been applied to Occupy Wall Street:  Consider what has precipitated the vast majority of the disorderly conduct arrests in this movement: using a megaphone, writing on the sidewalk with chalk, marching in the street (and Brooklyn Bridge), standing in line at a bank to close an account (a financial boycott, in essence) and occupying a park after its closing. These are all peaceful forms of political expression. To the police, however, they are all disorderly conduct.

Combine these and other changes, and you have a completely different type of policing than was seen in previous eras.  Scholars are already studying it, but in the meantime, Alexis’s article is a reminder that while John Pike was the one spraying the pepper spray, a complex system put him in the position to do it.

We’ve all heard that there is no peace without justice and vice versa.  But, when policy makers and leaders discuss how to handle national and international conflicts, peace and justice are often pitted against each other.  Recently, the trial of Hosni Mubarak and the Internal Criminal Court’s opening hearings on Kenya have elicited many criticisms that prosecuting leaders who have grossly violated human rights will in fact undermine democracy and exacerbate conflict.  Political Scientist Kathryn Sikkink considers these claims in a New York Times Op-Ed.

Critics argue that the threat of prosecution leads dictators like Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi of Libya and Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan to entrench themselves in power rather than negotiate a transition to democracy. In El Salvador, where domestic courts have refused to extradite officers accused of murdering Jesuit priests 22 years ago, critics claim that such a prosecution would undermine stability and sovereignty.

But, Kathryn’s research provides evidence to question some of these concerns.

My research shows that transitional countries — those moving from authoritarian governments to democracy or from civil war to peace — where human rights prosecutions have taken place subsequently become less repressive than transitional countries without prosecutions, holding other factors constant.

Of 100 countries that underwent a transition from 1980 to 2004 (the period for which extensive data is available), 48 pursued at least one human rights prosecution, and 33 of those pursued two or more. Countries that have prosecuted former officials exhibit lower levels of torture, summary execution, forced disappearances and political imprisonment. Although civil war heightens repression, prosecutions in the context of civil war do not make the situation worse, as critics claim.

Kathryn believes that the possibility of punishment and disgrace deters future leaders from violating human rights.

From the final Nuremberg trials in 1949 until the 1970s, there was virtually no chance that heads of state and government officials would be held accountable for human rights violations. But in the last two decades, the likelihood of punishment has increased, and newly installed officials may be more cautious before deciding to murder or torture their political opponents.

So, while confronting the past may be painful and difficult, it could result in a better future.