crime/law

Pam Oliver sent in this graph that shows disparities in Blacks’ and Whites’ new prison sentences:

While blacks are more likely to be sentenced for all the offenses shown, clearly drug offenses stand out as the area with the biggest racial disparity in prison sentences. The other thing that stands out is the huge jump that occurred in the late 1980s and how much higher the disparity was by the 1990s than in the 1980s. Either African Americans suddenly started doing a whole lot more drugs, Whites stopped doing them altogether…or Blacks started getting arrested and sentenced at a much higher rate than Whites for drug offenses.

From an article by Oliver:

…the rise in imprisonment since the 1970s is not explained by crime rates, but by changes in policies related to crime…Determinate sentencing, which eliminates judicial discretion, longer sentences for drug offenses, increases in funding for police departments and large increases in prison capacity, the exacerbation of racial tensions and fears following the civil rights movement and the riots of the 1970s, and the politicization of crime as an election issue all seem to have played some role.

In Focus 21 (3) pp. 28-31 Spring 2001.

Other sociologists have pointed out that Whites tend to sell drugs inside buildings (houses, dorm rooms, workplaces) to people they know, while Blacks are more likely to engage in open-air sales to strangers. It’s much easier for police to see and arrest people engaged in open-air sales because they’re visible and, being out in public, can often be stopped and frisked without a warrant. Clearly it would be more difficult to know about drug sales taking place in private residences, and there would be more procedural hurdles to searching for them. And when you’re selling to strangers, you’re more likely to see to an undercover cop or to sell to people who don’t really have a problem saying who they bought their drugs from. So the very manner in which they sell makes it much more likely that Blacks will be caught and arrested, even though enormous amounts of drugs are bought and sold by Whites.

You can find a lot more graphs and articles on this topic (including disparities broken down by state) at Pam Oliver’s website. Also see this post about international imprisonment rates. Thanks, Pam!

Oh, and Lisa’s at the American Sociological Association meetings, which is why you’re stuck with just me this week.

Did you know that the U.S. has a higher imprisonment rate than even Russia?  And the U.S. imprisonment rate is about six times that of many European countries. 

(This first figure was made by Kieran Healy.)

When and how did this happen?  It started in the 1980s with Reagan’s “war on drugs.”  The figure below shows the increase in the incarceration rate beginning in the 1980s (# of people out of 100,000).

So our imprisonment rate is the result of imprisoning people who break drug laws, NOT violent criminals or even people who commit property crimes.  The increase is largely due to more aggressive policing of drug law violations. 

And, as you can see in the figure below, the aggressive policing of drug law violations can be found disproportionately in black neighborhoods.  (White and black people take drugs at a very similar rate, but black neighborhoods are more heavily policing and drugs more common among blacks than white have carried heavier sentences — i.e., crack versus cocaine until recently).  This figure shows that the increase in the incarceration rate is mostly an increase in the black incarceration rate. 

Thanks to the amazing Pam Oliver for reminding me that this last graph comes from her work on the incarceration rate (found here).

In his book Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (2005; New York: Touchstone), James Loewen discusses cities that had a “no Blacks after dark” policy. They were called “sundown towns” because African Americans were actively informed that they should be out of town by sundown; if not, they were subject to arrest or violence. Of course, the purpose of these regulations was to keep Blacks from settling permanently in these towns. If they couldn’t be in town limits after dark, they clearly couldn’t live there. Here is an example of a sundown town: this ad encouraging people to move to Siloam Springs, Arkansas, says, over in the lower right corner, “No Malaria, No Mosquitoes, No Negroes.”

Found here.

NOTE: As Mr. Loewen pointed out in a comment, I had originally said he discussed “cities in the South,” as though that was all his book concentrated on. That was poor wording on my part, as I had been reading the sections of the book that covered some areas in the South I was specifically interested in (particularly Oklahoma). I did not mean to imply that sundown towns existed only in the South or that Mr. Loewen only discusses the South.

I don’t know how “real” any of this is, but this what I’ve been able to collect on this matter…

If you are connected to the internets, you have probably heard these messages left on some unsuspecting woman’s answering machine.

The messages have been attributed to Dmitri the Lover, a professional seducer of women and teacher of seducers of women. Here is a screen shot of his wholly misogynistic website:

Here, too, is a news article detailing how he lost his medical license due to inappropriate sexual advances and has been accused of rape many times ‘n other great stuff.

Thanks to Jason S., Brett W., and CoRri V. for the links and info!

NEW!  Still at it, a reader alerted us to Dmitri’s “meeting” this January:

THERE IS ONLY ONE OPPORTUNITY EACH YEAR FOR HORNY MEN TO SEDUCE WOMEN THIS INSECURE, GROSSLY UNDERFUCKED, AND HIGHLY IMPRESSIONABLE.

More (his emphasis):

As a MEDICAL DOCTOR, Dimitri The Lover is extremely cognizant of the fact that studies have show over 60% of women worldwide suffer from a psychological disorder at some time during their lives.  In Canada’s northern climate, January is the worst month of the year for psychological symptoms, primarily because a decrease in the level of sunlight and shortened hours of daylight cause “Seasonal Affective Disorder”.  Exacerbated by both the post-holiday psychological letdown from unrealistically high pre-holiday expectations, and the effects of alcohol withdrawal on the neural pathways, this condition causes many women to fall into a MILD REACTIVE DEPRESSION.  Therefore, these once proud sluts become insecure and begin to doubt the value of their existing relationships, which even in the best of times are just barely adequate to meet their psychosexual needs.

I don’t have an image for this post. What I have is a quote from Bill Napoli, a South Dakota state senator. He doesn’t believe that bills banning abortion should have an exception in cases of rape, because if the woman “really” deserved to get one, she could get it under the health-of-the-mother exception. Here is a direct quote:

A real-life description to me would be a rape victim, brutally raped, savaged. The girl was a virgin. She was religious. She planned on saving her virginity until she was married. She was brutalized and raped, sodomized as bad as you can possibly make it, and is impregnated. I mean, that girl could be so messed up, physically and psychologically, that carrying that child could very well threaten her life.

I came upon part of this quote in issue #40 of Bitch magazine (p. 17), but I found the full quote here (scroll down a little past halfway).

What’s interesting to me here isn’t about abortion per se, but the implication of who would and wouldn’t “really” suffer if they were impregnated from a rape. Apparently if you aren’t a virgin or religious, or ARE a virgin but weren’t necessarily planning on staying that way until marriage, then being raped and getting pregnant just wouldn’t be as traumatic as it would to “nice” girls.

It’s also creepy how we often like to think in rather fine detail about the ways good little virgins can be violated. I mean, he could have just said “she was raped,” but no, he decides to make it a bit more graphic. And how bad is “as bad as you can possibly make it”? Is there some measuring stick for how traumatizing different violations are, so you can be sure the girl has suffered enough to qualify as a deserving victim?

It reminds me of an article I read about the myth of the black rapist and the virginal white victim in the post-Reconstruction South (sorry, I don’t remember the article); the author said that detailed stories about how animalistic, savage black men had ravaged delicate white women served as a form of folk porn–people repeated the stories over and over, embellishing as they went. Telling rape stories provided a socially sanctioned outlet for people to talk about sex even in “nice” society, since you were only doing it to warn others of the danger, of course.

So even though there’s no image, I thought the quote might spark some interesting classroom discussion, either about abortion or about sexuality, victimization, and the enduring idea of the deserving and undeserving rape survivor. Or, hell, even a discussion of the social construction of porn–I mean, if you took Napoli’s exact words and put them in a different context and didn’t tell people he was a senator discussing a proposed bill, I bet a lot of people would think it was obscene but interpret it very differently since he was just talking about a hypothetical situation while discussing serious matters such as the law.

This ad, playing on white resentment about affirmative action, ran during the 1990 North Carolina Senate race between Harvey Gantt and Jesse Helms:

Before the ad ran (during the last week of the campaign), Gantt was ahead in the polls. The ad is widely believed to be the reason Helms won.

Might be good to pair with the infamous Willy Horton ad from the 1988 Presidential campaign in a discussion of how images of minorities have been used to frighten white voters.

In the late 1930s, the movie Reefer Madness dramatized the effects of marijuana abuse (watch the entire video here). In the 1970s, it was ridiculed as hysteria and propaganda.

In light of this, and without trivializing meth addiction (which I understand to be devastating… but where does my information come from?), what do we think of these anti-meth PSAs from the Montana Meth Project? (You can also find television commercials there to go with these print ads.)

Hat tip to copyranter for bringing my attention to this ad campaign.

Chris M. noticed something bizarre on the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) website.

If you scroll about 1/4th of the way down this page, there is a list of pdfs and videos about security on airplanes. There are separate videos for the female and the male “business traveler.” They both show liquids in a plastic bag, but apparently only men carry laptops and women are relieved from having to take off their shoes.

Chris thought it was especially interesting to see this on a .gov site. Nice find Chris!