crime

As California grapples with a recent Supreme Court decision that mandates the state to reduce its prison population, sociologist Joshua Page examines an alliance that speaks out against prison reform.

This alliance, between Crime Victims United and the California Correctional Peace Officers Association, has existed for over two decades, as both organizations have lobbied for harsher sentences and other “tough on crime” policies.

The union had a strong personal interest in developing the victims group, which it realized could be an effective ally in achieving the guards’ policy objectives: enhancing members’ pay and benefits, keeping private prisons out of California and promoting “tough on crime” sentencing laws. Crime Victims United shares the union’s commitment to lengthy, harsh mandatory sentencing laws such as “three strikes.” The alliance has been good for both partners.

And the two groups have become a powerful force.

But their success has had a downside. When Crime Victims United turns complicated criminal justice matters into simple choices between helping and hurting victims, reasoned debate and thoughtful policymaking are necessarily constricted. Lawmakers are reluctant to oppose advocates. . .for fear that they will be tarred in the media and targeted in future elections. No politician wants to stand against a woman whose daughter was murdered and be deemed soft on crime. With financing from the guards, the victims group has the resources to seriously help or damage a politician’s image and career.

So while Crime Victims United provides support to people who suffer crimes, their actions may also cause harm.

By claiming pride of place as “the voice of victims,” the group marginalizes alternative victims’ voices. Some victims’ rights groups in the state maintain that vengeful, ultra-tough penal policies do not help victims of crime but simply create more suffering and resentment. These groups say that challenging offenders to take responsibility for the harm their crimes cause through restorative justice practices and helping prisoners develop the tools necessary to live crime-free lives help prevent future victims. These alternative voices reject zero-sum logic; they do not reflexively pit offenders against victims — or, in Nina Salarno Ashford’s words, the “bad people” against the “good citizens.”

According to Page, both groups will likely ensure their voices continue to be heard.  “If policymakers continue to follow the voices of expressly punitive victims rights advocates and ignore the opinions of those who promote alternative, less punitive conceptions of justice, California will not shrink its $9-billion prison system or alleviate its correctional crisis. The status quo will prevail.”

Check out the entire Op-Ed in the Los Angeles Times.

After the recent shock of a federal indictment of 29 Somali and Somali American individuals on sex trafficking charges, the New York Times reports on the Minnesota Somali community’s attempts to deal with the situation.

The allegations of organized trafficking, unsealed this month, were a deep shock for the tens of thousands of Somalis in the Minneapolis area, who fled civil war and famine to build new lives in the United States and now wonder how some of their youths could have strayed so far. Last week, in quiet murmurings over tea and in an emergency public meeting, parents and elders expressed bewilderment and sometimes outrage — anger with the authorities for not acting sooner to stop the criminals, and with themselves for not saving their young.

The indictment was the latest in a series of jolting revelations starting around 2007, when a spate of deadly shootings in the Twin Cities made it impossible to ignore the emergence of Somali gangs. Then came the discovery that more than 20 men had returned to Somalia to fight for Islamic extremists, bringing what many Somalis feel has been harsh and unfair scrutiny from law enforcement and the news media.

A sociologist weighs in on why this pattern of problems seems to be continuing:

Cawo Abdi, a Somali sociologist at the University of Minnesota, said that past surges in concern about troubled youths had not been followed up with money and programs to help them. “This is viewed as such a huge scandal and outrage,” she said of the new charges, “that it has to lead to some kind of action.”

Read the rest of the article for discussion of some of the challenges facing Somali people in the Twin Cities.

How do businesses affect neighborhood crime rates?  Some people would answer this question by asserting that the increased foot traffic that businesses bring to neighborhoods translates into more eyes to curb crime.  According to others, residents withdraw into their homes to avoid crowds, which could make crimes more likely. 

To test these opposing ideas, Christopher Browning and his Ohio State colleagues examined 1999-2001 rates of homicide, aggravated assault and robbery in 184 census tracts in Columbus, Ohio; and Psych Central News reported on their findings.

Neighborhoods that combine residential and business developments have lower levels of some types of violent crime[homocide and aggravated assault]…The findings were equally true in impoverished areas as they were in more affluent neighborhoods, possibly offering city planners and politicians a new option in improving crime-afflicted areas, according to the researchers.

But, neighborhood density also plays a role.

In sparsely populated neighborhoods, increases in business-residential density initially lead to more frequent violent crimes.  However, once the building density reached a certain threshold, certain types of violent crime began to decline.

As Christopher Browning put it, “A residential neighborhood needs more than the addition of one or two businesses to see any positive impact on violent crime.”

The researchers are hopeful that bringing businesses into neighborhoods could help cut back on some violent crimes.

Sociologist  David Garland has written in the Washington Post about the contentious issue of the death penalty.

Much of what we think we know about American capital punishment comes from the longstanding debate that surrounds the institution. But in making their opposing claims, death-penalty proponents and their abolitionist adversaries perpetrate myths and half-truths that distort the facts. The United States’ death penalty is not what its supporters — or its opponents — would have us believe.

According to Garland, Americans are not as death-penalty-happy as you may think.

In fact, this country barely uses the death penalty today. Fifteen states and the District of Columbia have abolished capital punishment. Of the 35 “death-penalty states,” one-third rarely sentence anyone to death and another third impose death sentences but rarely carry them out. In many states, the only people to be executed are “volunteers” — death row inmates who abandon an appeals process that would otherwise keep them alive.

And the U.S. has made the practice more humane, though European nations have been quicker to abandon it altogether.

For most of the past 200 years, American states have been on the vanguard of death-penalty reform…The United States led the effort to develop less painful execution techniques, replacing hanging first with the electric chair, then the gas chamber, and finally with lethal injection…It is only in the past 30 years that a gap has opened up, with Europeans abolishing the institution and Americans retaining it in an attenuated form.

Government structure has a lot to do with why nations keep or abolish the death penalty. European leaders have managed to get rid of the death penalty in spite of public approval of the practice.

The United States’ democracy is different. Each state can choose whether to have the death penalty. It’s not a central government decision, as it is in other countries. Our criminal justice system is different, too. In many cases, we elect prosecutors and judges — a politicization of the process that is unheard of elsewhere. In this country, the Supreme Court is the one national institution that has the power to abolish capital punishment throughout the nation.

Finally, whether the death penalty “works” or not to deter crime, Garland says it serves other social purposes.

In a nation where the prison system is so overused that the currency of imprisonment is largely devalued, the death penalty allows juries to make an emphatically punitive statement. Politicians give voters what they want by enacting capital punishment statutes even when they will never be enforced. Prosecutors use the threat of a death penalty as leverage to elicit plea bargains and cooperation. The news media are drawn to death-penalty cases because they elevate a routine case to a suspenseful drama where life and death are at stake.

We avidly consume these dramatic stories and enjoy the opportunity to engage, once more, in the old and familiar debate. But it’s time to change the terms of that all-too-familiar debate. Getting past the myths and looking at how the death penalty actually operates is one place to start.

The Chicago Tribune reports on recent public violence in China:

A series of grisly attacks in China, including school stabbings, a courthouse shooting and a slashing rampage on a train, have forced the public and officials to confront what experts say is the long-hidden problem of spiraling violent crime.

Criminologists at home and abroad say violent incidents in China have long been underreported by police, but it’s becoming harder for authorities to stifle news about the worst cases when ordinary people are quick to spread information via mobile phones and the Internet.

Some criminologists and sociologists are skeptical about China’s official crime statistics:

According to official statistics, violent crime in China jumped 10 percent last year, with 5.3 million reported cases of homicide, robbery, and rape. It was the first time since 2001 that violent crime increased, said the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in its Chinese Rule of Law Blue Book released in February.

Experts like Pi Yiyun, a professor of criminology at the China University of Political Science and Law in Beijing, are skeptical about those figures.

Pi said he doesn’t know what the actual rates are, but he doesn’t think it’s plausible that violent crime was falling between 2001 and 2008. He said provincial or county level officials, not the central government, are likely misreporting their data.

“Many local officials believe the crime rate is just a number that can be randomly modified,” he said. “They tend to cover up the truth and report a false number, because a high crime rate might affect their chance of being promoted.”

He said the big jump in 2009 could be an attempt to bring the figures closer in line with the real situation.

Borge Bakken, an expert on Chinese crime and professor of sociology at the University of Hong Kong, said his research indicates violence, particularly homicides, has been climbing since 1980.

“The real crime problem is much higher than the recorded official crime rates, and the police are well aware of that fact,” he said.

Social scientists weigh in on what underlying causes of the violence may be:

Experts say China’s problem is not a lack of police, high-tech security equipment or surveillance cameras, which are plentiful in the big cities, but simmering and widespread frustration over the growing wealth gap, corruption and too few legal channels for people who have grievances.

“Societies are pressure cookers — and Chinese society, arguably, is particularly high-pressure and has relatively few legitimate avenues for recourse and few legitimate ways to release intense psychological pressure,” said Harold Tanner, a professor of Chinese history at the University of North Texas. “The system as a whole, even when it is working more or less as designed, does not provide people with enough legitimate avenues for pursuit of justice.”

Pi, the Beijing criminology professor, said he considers the school attacks and the court killing similar examples of social anger boiling over into violence.

“We can’t just say those people were angry, lost control. They won’t do it for no reason, and we have to ask, ‘Where does that anger come from?'” Pi said. “The benefits of economic reform have been exhausted and now it’s a turning point. The wealth gap is widening, the unemployment problem and corruption are becoming more severe.”

Pi said the government needs to tackle all these issues but “most importantly, they must provide a proper channel for appeal.”

Read more.

Two recent failed terrorism attempts have some wondering if terrorists are losing their touch. Christian Science Monitor reports:

Faisal Shahzad, the Pakistani-born US citizen arrested and charged with the attempted attack, appears to have had little real training in explosives technique, according to US officials. And the Times Square bungle was preceded by the Christmas Day incident in which a Muslim Nigerian man on a Northwest Airlines flight tried, and failed, to ignite plastic explosives sewn into his underwear.

Are these twin flops evidence of systemic ineptitude? Perhaps. But it is at least as likely that they show Al Qaeda and its allies have moved towards a new, more decentralized, method of targeting the US and other Western nations.

Although the attacks on 9/11 were spectacular and highly destructive, experts note that typical terrorist attacks are generally less coordinated and more amateurish.

In a way, what the US is seeing now may be judged a return to more usual terrorist tactics.

After all, terrorism, by definition, is an attention-getting strategy employed by those without the ability to mount conventional military attacks.

Criminologist Gary LaFree explains:

“Terrorism is a tool of the less-powerful, and they use what they have at hand,” says Gary LaFree, a professor of criminology and director of the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism at the University of Maryland in College Park.

The deadly successes of the 9/11 attacks perhaps have made Islamist terrorists appear more competent than they are, in general. Mr. LaFree counts some 50 or 60 thwarted attacks linked to Al Qaeda or its allies since 2001.

“Terrorists use readily available, low-tech weapons, and they often screw up,” says LaFree.

The San Bernadino Sun recently reported on Louisiana State University sociologist Edward Shihadeh’s recently published research on the effect of Latino immigration on black labor market participation:

A recent survey of retired police commanders in New York City has been causing a stir in the news media and the blogsphere this week, including this article in the New York Times:

More than a hundred retired New York Police Department captains and higher-ranking officers said in a survey that the intense pressure to produce annual crime reductions led some supervisors and precinct commanders to manipulate crime statistics, according to two criminologists studying the department.

The retired members of the force reported that they were aware over the years of instances of “ethically inappropriate” changes to complaints of crimes in the seven categories measured by the department’s signature CompStat program, according to a summary of the results of the survey and interviews with the researchers who conducted it.

Further…

In interviews with the criminologists, other retired senior officers cited examples of what the researchers believe was a periodic practice among some precinct commanders and supervisors: checking eBay, other Web sites, catalogs or other sources to find prices for items that had been reported stolen that were lower than the value provided by the crime victim. They would then use the lower values to reduce reported grand larcenies — felony thefts valued at more than $1,000, which are recorded as index crimes under CompStat — to misdemeanors, which are not, the researchers said.

Others also said that precinct commanders or aides they dispatched sometimes went to crime scenes to persuade victims not to file complaints or to urge them to change their accounts in ways that could result in the downgrading of offenses to lesser crimes, the researchers said.

“Those people in the CompStat era felt enormous pressure to downgrade index crime, which determines the crime rate, and at the same time they felt less pressure to maintain the integrity of the crime statistics,” said John A. Eterno, one of the researchers and a retired New York City police captain.

His colleague, Eli B. Silverman, added, “As one person said, the system provides an incentive for pushing the envelope.”

The research has been criticized roundly by some, including former police commissioner William Bratton in an op-ed response yesterday:

The notion that there has been widespread downgrading of felony crime under CompStat is way off base. First, categories of crime that are nearly impossible to downgrade, notably homicide and auto theft, have declined much more than the categories that might be more readily manipulated. Auto thefts, which must be reported accurately because victims need crime reports to make insurance claims, are down 90 percent since 1993, the year before CompStat was inaugurated. In contrast, grand larceny, the category that can be most readily downgraded (by reducing the value of the property stolen), has declined only about 55 percent. Homicides, which generally report themselves when the body is discovered, are down about 76 percent, from 1,951 in 1993 to 471 in 2009.

Sociologist Jay Livingston also provides an alternative look at victimization data for burglary over the same time period in NYC that would appear to back Bratton up.

So, who to believe? Again, from the New York Times article:

The seven-page summary of the survey certainly indicates that many of the retired officers believe the system has gone significantly wrong.

Indeed, the researchers said the responses supported longstanding concerns voiced by some critics about the potential problems inherent in CompStat. The former officers indicate that it was the intense pressure brought to bear on the commanders of the city’s 76 precincts in twice-weekly CompStat meetings — where they are grilled, and sometimes humiliated, before their peers and subordinates, and where careers and promotions can be made or lost — that drove some to make “unethical” and “highly unethical” alterations to crime reports.

Given that concern over crime and crime numbers are not unique to New York, this is undoubtedly not the last we’ll hear on this topic for a long time to come.

Despite rumors and media reports at the time, new research claims that Hurricane Katrina did not spawn waves of crime in other cities. As USA Today reports:

In the current Journal of Criminal Justice study led by sociologist Sean Varano of Roger Williams University in Bristol, R.I., the authors look at statistics for robbery, rape, murder, car theft and other violent crimes in Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix before and after Katrina evacuees arrived in those cities. The 2005 storm, which killed about 1,800 people and caused more than $80 billion in damages, according to the National Hurricane Center, led to the relocation of more than one million people…

The study found a slight rise in murder and robbery in Houston, when adjusted for the long-term crime patterns, but no increase in other crimes (and suggested drops in rape and aggravated assaults); no effect at all in San Antonio; and another slight statistical rise in the murder rate in Phoenix. “Any increase in murder is intolerable,” Varano says, but a lack of increase in crimes such as car theft and robbery, where economic motives most clearly would tempt so many displaced people, argues against a crime wave driven by evacuees, he says.

Meanwhile, “Many communities across the United States … also reported increases in violent crime between 2004 and 2006,” notes the study, including a 30% increase in aggravated assault in cities such as Baltimore and Detroit.

The belief that rises in crime and disorder arise from disasters like Katrina is nothing new.

A crime wave spawned by evacuees is typical of “disaster myths” seen after catastrophes, such as the mythical Superdome riots reported in the days after the hurricane, says disaster management scholar Joseph Trainor of the University of Delaware, who was not part of the study. “This is a very strong study showing long-term effects and (showing) people’s resiliency after a disaster.”

Disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti almost always spawn fears of riots or criminality, seen in some early reports from Port-Au-Prince. But on Jan. 18, U.S. Navy Rear Admiral Mike Rogers, Director of Intelligence for the Joint Staff, told a news conference, “we have seen nothing that suggests to us that we have widespread disorder; no sense of widespread panic.”

“Fifty years of social science show people are not victims of disasters, they are survivors,” Trainor says. “People are adaptive and altruistic, mass rioting and mass looting are just disaster myths for the most part.”

The take home message?

“One lesson is that after disasters we have to think about where evacuees land, and not just the disaster site itself,” Varano says. He argues that crime rate changes after displaced people arrive in a city like Houston or Phoenix tells us more about the conditions at the arrival location than about the displaced people themselves. Strong communities undoubtedly handle influxes of evacuees better than already weak ones, he says.

“Another is that public officials, and news organizations, have a responsibility to speak very carefully about the reality of disaster situations,” Varano concludes. “There’s a danger of host cities not wanting to accept people in desperate straits because of false perceptions.”

According to the Jamaica Gleaner, University of West Indies sociologist Claudette Crawford-Brown has identified a new phenomenon: Western Union children.  She said this is replacing “barrel children” in Jamaica:

Barrel children in the past were identified as those who did not have the physical presence of their parents, but were sent goodies through shipments from overseas.  The sociologist, however, said that the barrel-children phenomenon has been surpassed by parents who give their children remittances. The difference between the two is the amount of care involved.

“You don’t have the barrel children as I highlighted seven years ago, where you had parents sending children things in a barrel. We now have what you call ‘Western Union’ children, and these are children who are parented by cellphones and they are sent the money. However, when you have a barrel child, that mother goes into K-Mart or Wal-Mart and I see them and watch them and they say: ‘I wonder if this going fit Sasha’, and she takes out the shoes with the mark out on the paper and match it with the shoes, and say this will fit her, this will fit her. You know what that shows? Some amount of care,” she said.

There are consequences of these changes in long-distance care:

Crawford-Brown pointed out even with remittances and barrels, the absence of mother in a child’s life has the same impact on youths as the absence of fathers. She noted that the absence of parental guidance leaves these children vulnerable to negative influences, where many turn to violence and drugs to cope.

According to her, many of these children who receive money through remittances are not given proper guidance, thus the money they have access to can be used to purchase drugs or facilitate their participation in illicit activities.

The noted child advocate and sociologist said many behavioural problems shown among some children are as a result of the breakdown in the family and exposure to violence. Crawford-Brown also said that Jamaica needs to tackle apathy towards murder in the society, which has trickled down to children she has worked with.

Crawford-Brown’s research on “Western Union children” was also recently featured in a column in the Jamaica Observer.