The New York Sun recently reported on the release of a new study from sociologist Harry Levin of Queens College titled, “Marijuana Arrest Crusade.” The report claims that police have singled-out minorities during the drug crackdown in New York beginning in 1997. The study makes use of data from the New York Division of Criminal Justice Services which shows that between 1997 and 2007, of those arrested on drugs charges, 52% of the suspects were black, 31% Hispanic, and only 15% white.

Some blame laws…

“Laws were revised in the late 1970s to largely decriminalize carrying small, concealed stashes of marijuana, Mr. Levin said. But he claimed police routinely ‘manufacture’ arrests for possession in public view — still a misdemeanor — by stopping young black men on the street and goading them into emptying their pockets.”

Others blame the administration…

“According to the study, arrests for marijuana possession began skyrocketing in the late 1990s during the Giuliani administration — a trend that continued under Mayor Bloomberg at an estimated cost of between $50 and $90 million a year. There were 39,700 arrests last year alone, according to the study. The 2007 total makes the city ‘the marijuana arrest capital of the world,’ Ms. Lieberman [the Executive Director of the New York Civil Liberties Union] said.”

Charles Tilly, legendary sociologist and Columbia University professor has passed away at age 78. The New York Times obituary cited Tilly’s unique combination of historical and quantitative methods in his work. A prolific scholar, Tilly published 51 books and more than 600 scholarly articles.

Excerpts from the Times obituary:

“In an interview on Thursday, Adam Ashforth, a professor of anthropology, political science and sociology at Northwestern University, called Dr. Tilly ‘the founding father of 21st-century sociology.’ He particularly praised Dr. Tilly’s seamless synthesizing of his own work on witchcraft and politics in South Africa. Dr. Ashforth also mentioned Dr. Tilly’s dizzying output of books, which had been running at more than a book a year for more than two decades.”

“’It was exhausting keeping up with him,’ Dr. Ashforth said. ‘We’ll now have a chance to catch up with our reading.'”

“On April Fool’s Day in 1969, The New York Times asked leading intellectuals what they considered foolish. Dr. Tilly answered, ‘One way I’d like to improve social life is to get a guy to stop for five minutes or one minute or 10 seconds and listen to what the other guy says.’”

New researcher out from Florida State University shows that teenagers who are living with one biological and one step-parent have lower grades and significantly greater behavioral problems than adolescents from intact families. Further, the study suggests that these problems increase over time. Kathryn Tillman and co-investigators studied data on 11,000 adolescents for this new study, published in the journal Social Science Research.

The authors found heightened negative effects for boys living with half-siblings or step-siblings on behavioral measures and concluded that teens who live with both half-siblings and step-siblings than those who live with one or the other.

Reuters reports:
“‘These findings imply that family formation patterns that bring together children who have different sets of biological parents may not be in the best interests of the children involved,’ said Kathryn Harker Tillman, a professor of sociology at the university.”

“‘…One half of all American step-families include children from previous relationships of both partners, and the majority of parents in step-families go on to have additional children together,’ she added in a statement.”

 A recent article from Alex Williams for the New York Times investigated the ways in which young employees in their 20s and 30s discuss their salaries. Williams claims that there is an “etiquette to sharing the information” when young professionals brag about their salaries.

The Times reports:

“For instance, most young people don’t tell their cubicle mates, according to a 2007 study for Money magazine by the sociologist Jeanne Fleming and the writer Leonard Schwarz. Still, young workers seem somewhat less likely to adhere to this convention than older ones. The study found that 90 percent of those over 35 who were surveyed agreed with the statement ‘you should never let your co-workers know how much you make,’ while 84 percent of subjects under 35 agreed.”

“But between friends almost anything is fair game. Beth Kobliner, the author of the best-selling ‘Get a Financial Life: Personal Finance in Your Twenties and Thirties,’ said she had noticed that many young people now ‘have no idea what their boomer parents earn, but know every intimate detail about their close friends’ salaries, 401(k)s and debt loads.’”

The National Post recently published the third of a four-part series on Daniel McGinn’s book House Lust, titled “The Sociology of the Mega-Home.” McGinn’s book examines the obsession we have with our homes, and draws upon scholarly research related to shared living space of all sizes. This article suggests that personal problems and isolation from other family members is a function of the activities and interactions in the home rather than the square footage of the house.

“When sociologists have examined house size and family life, they’ve usually focused on the other extreme: the extent to which living in cramped or overcrowded circumstances leads to problems. In fact, research suggests that it does. New York University sociologist Dalton Conley cites studies showing that people who live in homes where the number of rooms is fewer than the number of inhabitants suffer from increased irritability, withdrawal, weariness and poor physical and mental health. Conley’s own research goes even further, suggesting that children who grow up in an overcrowded home tend to suffer in educational attainment, perhaps because they don’t have sufficient space to study or because the crowded conditions affect their sleep.”

…but…

“Kathryn Anthony is an architecture professor at the University of Illinois at Champagne-Urbana. Anthony believes that while people may worry about a family in a 9,000-square-foot home losing touch with one another, it may be just as easy to lose touch in a 1,500-squarefoot home in which each family member plugs into his own iPod while tapping on a wire-less-equipped laptop. ‘These kind of electronic devices allow people to get into their own worlds and really divorce themselves, at least temporarily, from what’s going on,’ Anthony says. It’s no wonder that pediatricians advise parents to keep TVs and computers out of children’s bedrooms.”

Read more. 

Mike Nizza, author of the New York Times blog The Lede, recently reported on a new study from physicist Cesar Hidalgo of the University of Notre Dame and Calros Rodriguez-Sickert from the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile on the persistence of relationships within the cell phone network.

Hidalgo and Rodriguez-Sickert used data from almost two million people and eight million phone calls over the course of the year. They found that the leading cause of a persistent relationship was reciprocity – one friend returning another’s call.

PhysOrg.com interviewed Hidalgo:

“‘One result that I thought was somehow not so intuitive was the trade-off between the degree (number of links) of a person and the persistence of its ties,’ Hidalgo told PhysOrg.com. ‘It has been known for a long time that some people are much more connected than others, yet it was not known whether these highly connected individuals also had a larger number of strong connections. While time constraints may force people with more ties to be less persistent on average, the data also showed that, in absolute terms, people with more ties also have a greater number of persistent ties than those less connected. Highly connected individuals are not trading quality for quantity; rather, they appear to be more socially expressed in both the numbers of links and the persistence or strength of them.'”

This recent broadcast from National Public Radio attempts to answer the question of why children curse. Drawing upon the expertise of psychologists from premier research institutions, Morning Edition reporter Allison Aubrey provides some interesting answers and comical anecdotes.

Listen here.

Talking about marriage? Call in the sociologists!

In a recent article from TheStreet.com, Lyneka Little reports on the conclusion that marriage can be a ‘double-edged sword,’ providing positive and negative benefits to each member of the couple. The effects have proven to be disproportionately favorable for married men, who make more than their single counterparts. Read more…

“‘Marriage works as a two-edge sword,’ says Stephen Sweet, an assistant professor of sociology at Ithaca College in New York. On the plus side, there is often much stability to gain from tying the knot.”

“‘Married people are better off than single people based on economic status, social status and happiness,’ Sweet says. ‘The economic gains of marriage can come from aligning yourself with another individual and increasing social capital.'”

 “…Other jobs where a ring could raise your profile? Judge, clergyman and police officer. A police officer may want to show a stable life and marriage can help that, says S. Alexander Takeuchi, a professor of sociology at the University of North Alabama.”

“And how about your productivity? ‘Once you get married, you’re going to spend more time with your spouse and family,’ and it may affect your job productivity, according to Takeuchi. For those in a creative career, Takeuchi says, ‘the amount of time that you can spend to think and visualize things, and use your imagination decreases.'”

Science Daily reports on a new publication from Professor Yang Yang at the University of Chicago that concludes that Americans grow happier with age. The findings from this study, published in the latest issue of the American Sociological Review, also concludes that Baby Boomers are not as happy as other generations, that on average, African Americans are not as happy as whites, and men are less happy than women. The study uses data from the General Social Survey from 1972 to 2004. The paper also highlights the rise and fall of happiness between historical time periods in the United States

Professor Yang Yang comments:

“‘Understanding happiness is important to understanding quality of life. The happiness measure is a guide to how well society is meeting people’s needs,’ said Yang Yang, Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Chicago.”

UPDATE: In January 2012, we caught up with Jessie Daniels for her latest picks in the best of the best documentaries, and got replies from several other professors representing different courses. Please check out the new lists! https://thesocietypages.org/specials/documentaries/

Here are more items suggested by the commentors:

Josh Page, a professor of sociology (particularly law, crime, and deviance) at the University of Minnesota, sends in his Top Five list for teaching undergrad courses on the criminal justice system, noting “The ‘reality’ TV stuff about prison life is pretty much uniformly bad.”

Top Five Prison Documentaries for Crime and Punishment Courses

1. Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo (2009) http://sweetheartsoftheprisonrodeo.com/
2. The Dhamma Brothers (2008) http://www.dhammabrothers.com/
3. The Farm (1998) http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139193/
4. Writ Writer (2008) http://www.writwritermovie.com/
5. Ghosts of Attica (2001) http://icarusfilms.com/new2001/gho.html

Favorite Re-entry Documentary
Omar and Pete (prison reentry) (2005) http://www.pbs.org/pov/omarandpete/

Another great friend of The Society Pages, Prof. Andrew Lindner of Concordia College, Moorhead, writes in with his own favorite documentaries with teaching. He said he’d have included “49 Up,” but since it had already been mentioned, these are his next Top Five, culled from the film series he puts on every semester at Concordia:

But I do a film series every semester on campus, so here are a few not mentioned:

1. “Manufactured Landscapes” (2006), based on the work of photographer Edward Burtynsky, it has some unbelievable footage from Chinese factories. Great for teaching about globalization and capitalism.

2. “Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills” (1996) – a classic documentary on the (now recently freed) West Memphis Three. A powerful and disturbing illustration of stigma and social control.

3. “The War Room” (1993) – an insider’s look into Bill Clinton’s path to victory in the 1992 primaries. I use this in my “Political Sociology” course to talk about rhetoric, political strategy, and political professionals.

4. “Flow: For Love of Water” (2008) – a terrifying documentary on our dwindling water supply and how it is owned and managed by corporations for profit. Great for discussions of capitalism, privatization, or environmental sociology.

5. “Secret of the Wild Child” (1994) – an outstanding PBS/Nova documentary on feral children, particularly the famous Genie case mentioned in almost every sociology text. Challenges many students assumptions about socialization.

Nathan Palmer shares:

This is such a great idea and I’d like to thank TSP and Jessie Daniels for doing this. Resources like this and The Sociological Cinema make finding great videos for our classes so much easier. Thanks for taking the lead on this and for allowing the rest of us to share.

My Top Five Documentaries.

Race The Power of an Illusion Pvert 3: The House We Live In (2003)
My favorite film to show how historic and institutional racial discrimination is affecting us to this day. It does a great job connecting whiteness to citizenship and explaining red lining/block busting. I use it in my 101s and race & ethnicity classes.
The Color of Fear (1994)
An oldie, but a goodie. The film is a recording of 9 men of different racial ethnic backgrounds talking candidly about race. My only critique of the film is there are no women included and multiple racial groups are left out as well.

Food Inc. (2008)
More than anything I want my students in my environmental sociology class to understand how social inequality and environmental degradation are connected. The portion of this film dedicated to the mistreatment of farmers, factory workers, and the animals/land they use is priceless.
The Battle for Whiteclay (2008)
This independent film documents how 4 liquor stores in Whiteclay, NE (a town of 14 people) sell 12,500 cans of beer a day. The off-sale liquor stores take advantage of their proximity to the Pine Ridge Reservation, who banned alcohol sales and possession on their lands. Despite there being no legal place for the 12,500 cans to be consumed (Whiteclay only has off-sale establishments) there have been nearly no arrests while the liquor dealers make millions of dollars annually. The video is an excellent example of government corruption, exploitation, and selective law enforcement.

Inside Job (2010)
The 2008 credit crisis is a perfect example of how changes at the institutional level have a cascading affect all the way down to the individual. It also gets at how social problems are socially constructed. This film more than any other explains the complex crisis in a way that is approachable.

From Sarah Lageson:

One site I have relied on for seeking out sociologically relevant videos is Sociology at the Movies.

I also think a neat project for students in food or labor-related courses is to view Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, then view a selection of contemporary documentaries that highlight how little has changed since 1961. Some really great documentaries include:

American Harvest,

The Harvest/La Cosecha,

and New Harvest, Old Shame.

Carolyn Liebler says:

I often use movie clips in introduction to sociology when introducing a set of theories or concepts. Students use the movie clips to pull out examples of each theory/concept. They appreciate the chance to apply sociology to their regular lives.

For example, I show a short clip from:

1) Little Miss Sunshine – for students to pick out examples of material culture, non-material culture, subculture, counterculture, face and face work, front stage, and back stage behavior.

2) Wedding Crashers – as a way to apply the following theories of deviance: rational choice, labeling theory, differential association theory, and obligatory action.

3) The beginning of Ghostbusters – to apply the three major tenets of ethical research methods

4) Fiddler on the Roof – to play “spot that social institution!” and talk about how social institutions are interrelated.

Dedicated friend-to-TSP Joe Soss sends in this list of his Top 5:

1. At the River I Stand
2. Merchants of Cool
3. Occupation: Dreamland
4. Stonewall Uprising
5. Inside Job

And one from a student, Thom Friend:

College student here, taking courses on media & gender. Some of my favorite documentaries we have viewed in the classroom:

– Generation M: Misogyny in Media & Culture
– The Mickey Mouse Monopoly
– Iron Jawed Angels (Dramatization of the Women’s Suffrage Movement)
– Tough Guise: Men and Masculinity in Media
– Further Off the Straight & Narrow
– Makers (PBS)

Then some of my personal recommendations:

– Zeitgeist: Moving Forward
– Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky
– Forks Over Knives

What makes students happier than watching movies during class time? — A new blog post provides some beneficial guidance in selecting films for specific sociological topics.

A recent update to the blog titled ‘Thinking at the Interface‘ provides a thorough and exemplary list of films to use in sociology classes. The list is organized around common themes of introductory sociology courses including the sociological imagination, research methods, race, ethnicity, and gender, just to name a few!

Link to the list…