crime

Photo by futureatlas.com, Flickr CC

In the decades since the Holocaust, the international community created mechanisms like the 1951 Genocide Convention in order to ensure that the world would “never again” experience such tragedy. Even so, genocide and mass violence continue to occur across the world. Recent AP reports provide even more evidence of a genocide in Myanmar, yet military response and global governance are again lacking. In a recent article in The Washington Post, Aliza Luft addresses these failings and suggests that economic tactics may succeed where others have failed.

Many factors can influence violent behavior, like prejudice and propaganda, but for many who commit violence, economic considerations are essential. For example, some governments use poverty to motivate civilians to engage in violence, offering resources in exchange for participation. According to Luft:

“Thus, one strategy for intervention is to even the economic playing field: to lower the capital of the génocidaires while increasing that of their potential recruits. Responses can include targeted financial measures such as asset freezes and economic divestment from major firms that help fund genocidal governments. Additionally, non-governmental relief efforts might focus not only on food, medicine, and housing for the displaced, but also on creating economic opportunities to reduce the potential for recruitment by genocidal authorities.”

Economic strategies can take many forms, including organizations that guide companies towards pro-human rights policy, as well as online campaigns that have dissuaded companies from working with genocidal regimes. Luft argues that anyone can aid in genocide prevention through personal spending choices, outreach, and activism. She suggests civilians use financial strategies that may influence politics and policy:

“To deepen the link between investment or operations abroad and commitments to human rights, civilians can emply boycotts and social media campaigns to pressure these companies over their complicity in genocide. Research has shown that economic and reputational concerns can motivate a company to change its policies. It is time to mobilize on behalf of the Rohingya, and to target businesses whose taxes and revenue fund violence.”

Photo by Gareth Simpson, Flickr CC

With the highest incarceration rate in the world, many policymakers in the United States are looking to reform the criminal justice system. Some have turned to fines as an alternative to jail or prison. Unfortunately, fines may not be the best solution, according to sociologist Alexes Harris

In a recent New York Times article, Harris argues that a fine-based system places a huge financial burden — the responsibility of funding the entire criminal justice system — directly on those who are often least able to pay. Harris writes,

These people are paying for the system of justice from which we all benefit, but they cannot afford to do so. They are often poor, unemployed and of color. In research on monetary sanctions in nine states, my research team and I found that many people have trouble navigating the legal process associated with fines and fees, like finding out how much money they owe and meeting minimum payment requirements. Of the 380 people we interviewed, over half received public assistance and a vast majority had problems paying their legal debt.

Consequences for not paying can be severe. Not only do delays in payment often result in late fees or interest charges, warrants are sometimes issued for those who fail to pay, and they may end up incarcerated anyway. However, Harris explains that there are other alternatives to incarceration besides fines:

“They should instead search for ways to reduce criminal justice budgets by prioritizing preventive measures proved to decrease recidivism and improve public safety such as free drug and alcohol treatment programs, low-cost housing, restorative justice and job training. To start, lower courts should rely on day fines, where monetary sanctions are determined based on a person’s daily wage and the seriousness of the offense. The sanction is proportionate to a person’s ability to pay and the degree of harm inflicted.”

Photo by Maryland GovPics, Flickr CC

In the wake of tragically-familiar mass shootings, the media and concerned citizens understandably look to a perpetrator’s background to understand why they would carry out a shooting and whether it could have been prevented. Many of these investigations identify mental illness as blameworthy.

There’s a problem with this routine, however. It assumes that mental illness is the root cause of violent acts. New research from Miranda Lynne Baumann and Brent Teasdale shows this assumption is not valid. Writing in The Conversation, Baumann and Teasdale detail their findings from a project that followed people who received treatment for mental illnesses and compared them to a demographically-similar group of people who did not. Results demonstrated that respondents with mental illness did not pose a significant threat to their communities. In fact, the authors write that:

“People with serious mental illness who have access to firearms are no more likely to be violent than people living in the same neighborhoods who do not have mental illnesses…the reality of firearm-related risk among individuals with mental illness lies not in the potential for harm to others, but in the risk of harming oneself.”

In other words, the only significant difference between these groups was the suicide rate, not rates of violence against others. These trends suggest that we should also pay attention to other factors, such as access to firearms, emergency response practices, and cultural assumptions about violence and masculinity, in our attempts to limit the impact of mass violence, rather than singularly focusing on mental illness.

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The #MeToo movement and high-profile sexual harassment and assault cases recently brought greater media attention to sexual violence. With this increased attention, however, comes new questions regarding the language used to talk about and write about various forms of sexual violence. This is not only a question of what specific words to use, but also how much detail to give about the act of violence or the victims’ experiences. Using vague or all-encompassing terms like “sexual violence” can flatten and sanitize victims’ experiences. However, when descriptions of sexual violence are not sanitized, they tend to be sensationalized.

In a recent Vox article on the complicated language of sexual violence, sociologist Heather Hlavka argues that sensationalizing violence can be a serious problem.

“Are we, as a culture, so titillated by the extremities of violence — the types, the details, the comportments — that we would like to ingest each sensationalized bit of people’s experiences?” asks Hlavka. “What is the ultimate goal? To better understand? To discredit the experience or mitigate the offense because it fell low on a range of horrors? To discredit the victim by dissecting her actions, her composure, her silence, or her resolve?”

People who experience sexual violence also struggle with language. According to Hlavka, many do not recognize or name their experiences as such, but this does not mean the problem is a lack of words to use to describe sexual violence. Instead, she argues that a broader culture of sexism has the power to reshape the meaning behind such terms, causing them to lose their power. 

Girls do not name their experiences as rape or sexual assault, despite very clearly fitting within established legal categories. Boys, too, struggle to understand, define, and identify as a victim of sexual violence but for different reasons. I would argue that we do not lack a language of sexual violence and harassment…It’s there — it’s a feminist language of power and control and abuse and consent — we just aren’t integrating it in truly meaningful ways, and thus our experiences will not neatly map onto law.”

Photo by Francois Marcotte, Flickr CC

Despite recent declines, the United States still has one of the largest prison populations among comparable nations. Most of those incarcerated in U.S. prisons will eventually be released. Evidence suggests that as many as 600,000 individuals are released from prison each year. Upon release, many people must serve time on parole, which typically involves a period of supervision with a set of conditions that a parolee must follow, such as passing a drug test. In a recent article in The Conversation, Shawn Bushway and David Harding discuss how violations of parole conditions appear to be a key driver of high prison populations, rather than new offenses.

Since people convicted of a felony are randomly assigned judges in Michigan, Bushway and Harding, along with their colleagues Jeffrey D. Morenoff and Anh P. Nguyen, conducted a “natural experiment” to account for how an individual’s background may influence their sentences. As the authors explain,

This random assignment of judges mimics the way a scientist would design a randomized, controlled experiment in the lab. There are no obvious differences between who gets randomly assigned to one judge and who gets assigned to the other. For all intents and purposes, the groups are identical. So if one group ends up with stricter sentences, it’s likely due to the judge’s predilections rather than to anything specific to the individual defendants and their crimes.”

The authors are thus able to understand the specific effects of parole violations. Their findings suggest that people who are imprisoned and then released to parole — rather than those who are put on probation (instead of incarceration) initially — are more likely to return to prison. Further, some scholars remain skeptical that probation may also be another avenue into the prison system. Overall, the work of social scientists suggest that if we want to reduce prison populations, we must reevaluate parole and probation practices, including the response to violations of supervision conditions. 

Pilsen Smart Communities Mural. Photo by Daniel X. O’Neil, Flickr CC

Since the 1990s, rates in homicide, robbery, assault and theft have seen a consistent drop in American cities like New York, Washington, and San Diego. Theories about this great “crime decline” typically focus on larger societal shifts, such as increased access to abortion and reductions in lead poisoning. However, a recent article in The New York Times presents evidence for a different trend: how local non-profit groups played a crucial role in reducing violence in some communities in the U.S.

Using data from the National Center for Charitable Statistics, sociologist Patrick Sharkey and doctoral students Gerard Torrats-Espinoza and Delaram Takyar traced the formation of community groups and nonprofit organizations in 264 cities over the past 20 years. The research team found that the growing number of organizations is connected to a considerable decline in both the murder rate and in violent crime. The article summarizes Sharkey’s findings,

“Every 10 additional organizations in a city with 100,000 residents, they estimate, led to a 9 percent drop in the murder rate and a 6 percent drop in violent crime.”

What is the connection between nonprofits and crime reduction? Sociologist Robert Sampson explains that effective crime prevention does not necessarily require hot-spot policing, mass incarceration, or tough-on-crime control measures. Community organizations engage in a wide variety of initiatives, from building playgrounds to employing young men, which contributes to the creation of vibrant communities and public spaces, dissuading criminal activity. And while the rise of community organizations is not the sole contributor  in the crime drop, it is a step forward in urban crime prevention that does not rely on intense policing or harsh penalties. As Sharkey notes,

“The model that we’ve relied on to control violence for a long time has broken down … This gives us a model. It gives us another set of actors who can play a larger role.”

Photo by Maryland GovPics, Flickr CC

After a mass shooting, we often seek to understand why. Sociologists are well-positioned to help us to make sense of these tragedies. In a recent article for Quartz, Tristan Bridges and Tara Leigh Tober reflect on the importance of American masculinity for understanding the prevalence of mass shootings in the United States.

While the United States does have more guns than many other nations, Bridges and Tober argue that gun access does not fully explain why the United States has more mass shootings. This explanation also does not account for why nearly all mass shootings are committed by men. Bridges and Tober use the concept of “masculinity threat” — when men’s masculinity is called into question — to explain why mass shootings follow a larger pattern. Evidence shows that men who experience masculinity threats are more likely to condone violence, male superiority, and homophobic attitudes. 

“Mass shootings follow a consistent pattern: The men who commit them have often experienced what they perceive as masculinity threats. They’re bullied by peers, gay-baited by classmates, and often perceive themselves as unable to live up to societal expectations associated with masculinity, such holding down a steady job, having sexual access to women’s bodies, or being tough or strong. This does not suggest that men are somehow unavoidably more violent than women. But it does suggest that mass shootings need to be seen, in part, as enactments of masculinity.”

Unmasking the role of masculinity in mass shootings is critical because it removes the individualized framing of mass shootings, including equating white shooters with mental health issues but not extending this discussion to persons of color. Since mass shootings are not an individual issue, they cannot be solved by individual solutions. While gun control is one part of the solution to mass shootings in the United States, Bridges and Tober argue we also must recognize the role of masculinity and invest in a new culture of masculinity that is not so deeply invested in dominance and violence. 

Panel on sexual assault on campus at University of Michigan in February 2017. Flickr CC.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos recently referred to current campus sexual assault enforcement as a “failed system,” indicating that the Trump administration would work to revoke current guidelines. Two sociology PhD candidates from the University of Michigan, Miriam Gleckman-Krut and Nicole Bedera responded with an op-ed in the New York Times entitled, Who Gets to Define Campus Rape?  

Gleckman-Krut and Bedera worry that DeVos’s speech signals a coming change in evidentiary standards for sexual assault cases. During President Obama’s term (both as a result of Department of Education guidance and proactive moves from universities) most institutions shifted the standard of proof in such cases from “beyond a reasonable doubt” to “a preponderance of evidence,” or what the authors define as “more likely than not.”  The authors contend that this new standard is central to encouraging survivors to come forward and receive support from their institutions, especially considering the risks to well-being and educational attainment that assault can bring. They write,

When judging whether someone has been raped, it’s almost impossible to assert that a sex act constituted violence “beyond a reasonable doubt.” Many survivors struggle to produce what campus hearing boards would consider evidence, especially when it comes to acquaintance- or date-based sexual assaults in which alcohol made it impossible for someone to physically resist.”

Gleckman-Krut and Bedera urge the Department of Education to maintain the weaker evidence standard in order to keep campus sexual assault proceedings centered on the survivors, not the accused. Bedera’s research has shown that although college-aged men can articulate their college’s affirmative consent policies, actual practice often does not follow those standards. Gleckman-Klut and Bedera conclude,

“Though they vary, the approximations of how many women have been sexually assaulted in college are always high. That should be the education secretary’s biggest concern.”

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Given the resurgence of media attention to gun control and violent crime following the mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the recent attacks in New York and Texas, many observers are left wondering – exactly how violent is the United States? In a recent Monkey Cage analysis for The Washington PostKieran Healy suggests that it depends on both how you measure violence and with whom you are comparing.

Violent crime in the United States has declined in the past few decades, but it remains an outlier in assault death rates when compared to similarly-situated nations. Using comparative data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), Healy demonstrates that, compared to other OECD countries excluding Mexico and Estonia, the United States has a markedly high assault death rate. Mexico has the highest assault death rate of the OECD countries and Estonia experienced steep inclines during the 1990’s, but Healy suggests that these nations are rarely compared with America in other measures of social interest:

“Mexico has a much higher assault death rate, one that has spiked in the past decade. Estonia experienced a huge wave of (possibly alcohol-related) homicides shortly after its independence in 1991 but has since receded to near-average levels. But when it comes to questions of living standards, public safety, and social policy, Americans do not typically rush to compare themselves with these countries, nor with more violent non-OECD nations such as Honduras or Kyrgyzstan.”

Measures of assault deaths do not distinguish these types of assault, which provides little indication of the specific forms of violence that lead to such a heightened amount of injury in the United States. Healy argues that it is access to guns that fuels the lethality of assaults,

“…there is little doubt that the tendency for assault to be lethal in the United States has a great deal to do with the easy availability of guns….The past decade has seen innovations in terrorist violence elsewhere in the OECD, too, such as random knife and acid attacks, or driving vehicles into crowds. These are similarly horrifying events and — at least the first few times they are tried — may lead to many fatalities. Do not look for them in the United States, though. Their lethality is intrinsically limited. Using a truck as a weapon is just less efficient than using a weapon as a weapon. For as long as powerful firearms remain easily available to private citizens, the United States is likely to remain well above the OECD average when it comes to violent death.”

When it comes to understanding violence in the United States, what matters most is how you choose to measure it. Healy’s assertion that guns are a central characteristic of American violence means that we need comparative measures that help disentangle this form of assault from others.

For the past twenty-five years, Oklahoma has seen some of the highest levels of female incarceration in the United States. In a recent article from Reveal, research by sociologist Susan Sharp demonstrates that incarceration rates and sentence severity varies between different counties within the state, where courtroom cultures and access to legal resources vary.   

Across the state, harsh drug sentencing leading to lengthy prison sentences for women is the norm, and Sharp argues that women in Oklahoma have become “collateral damage” in the War on Drugs. This is in large part due to the cultural norms surrounding women’s roles as mothers. Sharp explains,

“I think the general population of the state feels that a woman – particularly a woman who has children who uses drugs – violates all the norms in a way that they find unacceptable . . . and they would rather see those children grow up in foster care than to be with a mother who had a drug problem.”

However, Sharp has found that rural counties with more “get tough on crime” district attorneys and judges will typically send more people to prison, and poor women in these areas often experience the “wrath of judges and prosecutors.” In urban areas, women have access to more resources — money for private attorneys and specialty courts for drug addiction and mental health issues — which often keeps them from serving a sentence or helps reduce their time served.  The case of Oklahoma demonstrates how local differences influence punishment, as external and situational factors play a central role in shaping personal experiences with the criminal justice system.