Many of you may have seen a video featuring Reverend William Barber speaking out against North Carolina’s Amendment One, which banned same-sex marriages (and which was approved by voters on Tuesday). The video is heartfelt and passionate, and is also a great example of the importance of how we frame issues in social movements.
Reverend Barber argues that media coverage of the amendment has asked the wrong questions. Whether same-sex couples should be allowed to get married isn’t the core issue here, he says; what’s really at stake is whether the majority should get to vote on which rights will be guaranteed to those in the minority, a decision he sees as a dangerous standard in a nation that has used it previously to exclude racial/ethnic minorities, women, and the poor from the full benefits and protections of citizenship. This reframes the amendment from an issue about same-sex marriages to a broader question about rights, equal protection, and the dangers of codifying inequality into our governing documents:
The first drug court started in Miami in 1989 as an effort to stop the cycle of drug addiction and crime. The program brought together judges, prosecuting and defense attorneys, addiction counselors, and social workers to collaboratively build an individualized treatment program. Rather than sending people to jail, the drug court program was designed to treat addiction while participants lived in the community. Drug courts have become an increasingly common way for communities to engage with low-level drug offenders.
Seeking to raise awareness and support for drug courts, the National Association of Drug Court Professionals has released a series of PSAs entitled, “All Rise.” Using a mix of celebrities and drug court judges, these commercials assert that 75% of drug court participants are never arrested again.
The promise is clear. Drug courts not only treat addiction, they also treat a number of social problems (“no more families torn apart… no more neglect… no more overdoses”).
Are drug courts really this successful?
The truth is, we still don’t know. The 75% success statistic comes from a study published in 2003. The authors report that only 27.5% of drug court participants had been re-arrested and charged with a serious crime within two years. So, we don’t know what re-arrest rates look like after that two-year period and the data doesn’t include arrests for minor crimes or arrests for serious crimes that did not result in a charge. This is a far cry from the claim made in the video: that 75% of drug court participants are never arrested again.
The claims asserted in the “All Rise” campaign, then, should be treated with caution. That said, drug courts are a significant move away from punitiveness for addicted offenders. Increasing the time to reoffending is a very positive step for the offender, for the community, and for the criminal justice system. Additionally, most recidivism occurs within three years of release, so if the drug court program is helping participants to make it past this milestone it may indeed lead to some graduates leaving criminality altogether.
But before we turn to drug courts as “the” solution, we need more research on the effectiveness of drug courts. Women and Caucasians fare better in the program than men and people of color. And large courts tend to be more effective than small courts. Nevertheless, since the 1990s drug courts have spread across the nation to all major cities and many medium and small-sized cities, some of which have limited resources and less dedication. All Rise’s enthusiasm should be tempered with a critical eye aimed at making these programs work well, and for as many people as possible.
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Kimberly Baker is an assistant professor of Sociology and Women’s Studies at Ithaca College. She teaches classes in crime, deviance, and law. Her research is on drugs, addiction, and U.S. drug policy, including drug courts.
Capital punishment in the U.S. has gotten renewed attention recently, with Connecticut’s governor signing a bill repealing the death penalty this week and Californians set to vote on a ballot initiative in November that would get rid of capital punishment in the state.
Think Progress recently reposted a map showing the legality of the death penalty across the U.S. (now out of date since the change in Connecticut), as well as data on the number of people on death row per state (dark red boxes) and the number executed since 1976 (white boxes):
Talking about capital punishment in the U.S. hides a significant amount of variation. While the death penalty is technically available in most states, its use is very uneven. In many states where the death penalty is legal, prosecutors rarely push for it, and the vast majority of death penalty sentences are never actually carried out (for instance, notice that while over 700 people are currently on death row in California, the state has a much lower number of executions since 1976 than many other states). The exception is the South, which accounts for a disproportionate number of death penalty sentences and carries out such sentences at a much higher rate than other states.
In a podcast just posted at Office Hours, David Garland, author of Peculiar Institution: America’s Death Penalty in an Age of Abolition, discusses why capital punishment persists in the U.S. and also highlights the unevenness in its application. It’s a really great summary of the various factors that lead to the patterns we see in the map.
A resolution to the matter described below was announced yesterday. In order to preserve the religious memorial without violating the separation of church and state, the Park Service has agree to give the land it sits on to two private citizens who take care of the monument. Problem solved?
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The Supreme Court is in the process of deciding whether a cross erected 75 years ago as a memorial to war veterans violates the constitutional separation between church and state. The cross sits on the Mojave National Preserve and, therefore, is on public land:
After lower court rulings, the cross was covered in plywood:
It’s erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead… What would you have them erect?… Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?
Faced with an argument that the cross is distinctly Christian, he said:
I don’t think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that’s an outrageous conclusion.
Scalia’s comments reveal a common phenonemon that we’ve discussed in terms of race and gender, but not yet religion. As Jay Livingston pointed out at MontClair SocioBlog, one can only think of Christian symbols as non-specific if one thinks of Christianity as somehow normal, neutral, and for everyone. In the U.S., because Christianity is the dominant religion, many people simply see it as default. You’re Christian unless you’re something else. Something else that marks you as different and specific, Christianity does not.
This is one way that dominance works. It makes itself invisible.
UPDATE! Dmitriy T.M. pointed out that Steven Colbert addressed this issue on The Colbert Report back in 2009:
See our other posts on how whiteness and maleness are the characteristics we attribute to “person,” unless there are reasons to do otherwise, here, here, here, and here.
Wired has posted a set of photos by Richard Ross highlighting the harsh reality of life in juvenile detention centers — locations where about 60,000 kids reside each night throughout the U.S. According to the article,
The U.S. locks up children at more than six times the rate of all other developed nations. The over 60,000 average daily juvenile lockups, a figure estimated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), are also disproportionately young people of color. With an average cost of $80,000 per year to lock up a child, the U.S. spends more than $5 billion annually on youth detention.
A 12-year-old boy in a detention center in Biloxi, Mississippi, that is operated by a private security firm; in 1982, 27 inmates died in a fire there, leading to lawsuits that reduced the inmate population:
A 16-year-old in isolation receiving his meal through a slot in the door in South Bend, Indiana:
A time-out room in South Bend:
A restraint chair for self-harming kids in Madison, Wisconsin:
School in Greenville, Mississippi; the kids can’t take books to their cells:
Passing time in the intake room in Downey, CA:
A boy in room confinement and under suicide watch in Elko, Nevada:
There are more images at Wired, and you can read more about the project, Juvenile-in-Justice, including a schedule of shows, at Ross’s website. His photos also appear in the Annie E. Casey Foundation report No Place for Kids.
Norton Sociology recently posted an image that illustrate differences in rates of imprisonment in a number of countries. Imprisonment rates are influenced by a number of factors — what is made illegal, how intense law enforcement efforts are, preference for prison time over other options, etc. The U.S. does not compare favorably, with 74.3 per 100,000 10,000 of our population behind bars (click here for a version you can zoom in on, and sorry for the earlier typo!):
Here’s a close-up of the breakdown of the U.S. prison population:
The U.S. does guarantee that new parents receive 12 weeks of non-paid leave, but only for parents who work in companies that employ 50 workers or more and who have worked there at least 12 months and accrued 1,250 hours or more in that time. These rules translate to about 1/2 of women. The other half are guaranteed nothing.
Companies, of course, can offer more lucrative benefits if they choose to, so some parents do get paid leave. This makes the affordability of having children and the pleasure and ease with which one can do so a class privilege. A new report by the U.S. Census Bureau documents this class inequality, using education as a measure. If you look at the latest data on the far right (2006-2008), you’ll see that the chances of receiving paid leave is strongly correlated with level of education:
Looking across the entire graph, however, also reveals that this class inequality only emerged in the early 1970s and has been widening ever since. This is another piece of data revealing the way that the gap between the rich and the poor has been widening.
Just to emphasize how perverse this is:
People with more education, who on average have higher incomes, are often able to take paid time off; but less-economically advantaged parents are more likely to have to take that time unpaid. During the post-birth period, then, the economic gap widens.
There’s more:
Many less-advantaged parents can’t afford to take time off un-paid, so they keep working. But even this widens the gap because their salary is lower than the salary the richer person continues to receive during their paid time off of work. So the rich get paid more for staying home than the poor get for going to work.
We often use the minimizing word “just” when describing what stay-at-home parents do. “What are you doing these days?” asks an old friend at a class reunion. “Oh, just staying home and taking care of my kids,” a parent might say, as if raising kids is “doing nothing.” We trivialize what parents do. But, in fact, raising children is a valuable contribution to the nation. We need a next generation to keep moving forward as a country. Unfortunately the U.S. continues to treat having kids like a hobby (something its citizens choose to do for fun, and should pay for themselves). Without state support for early parenting, being present in those precious early months is a class-based privilege, one that ultimately exacerbates the very class disadvantage that creates unequal access to the luxury of parenting in the first place.
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