crime

The San Francisco Chronicle reports that sociological research has motivated Los Angeles city Councilman  Richard Alarcón to take action to make nonpayment of wages illegal.

The issue:

“People think that just because they pick up somebody on the street or at a day laborer center that they don’t have the responsibility to pay them if they don’t like the work,” Alarcón said. “This would make it illegal for somebody to do that.”

Los Angeles would join a handful of cities, including Denver and Austin, Texas, that hold employers criminally responsible for not paying their employees. State and federal laws govern overtime, minimum wage and other labor standards, but the penalties typically are civil. A local ordinance would enable city prosecutors to file misdemeanor charges against employers.

The research:

Alarcón said he was motivated by a recent study that showed many low-wage workers in Los Angeles, New York and Chicago often don’t receive minimum wage or overtime pay. The study, based on interviews with more than 4,300 workers, found that 26 percent of workers weren’t paid minimum wage the week before and that 76 percent of those who worked overtime the previous week weren’t paid the proper overtime rate. According to the report, the violations were widespread and occurred in various industries, including construction, child care and apparel.

“We were shocked ourselves,” said Ruth Milkman, a University of California, Los Angeles sociology professor and one of the authors of the study.

Milkman said employers need to know the laws – and that there are consequences for not following them. “If criminal penalties are what is needed, there is no reason not to try that.”

The Boston Globe ran a story over the weekend about fascinating research by sociologist Diego Gambetta…

In his new book, ”Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate” (Princeton University Press), sociologist and Mafia expert Diego Gambetta explores this subculture and unearths an unspoken language among bad men. He offers insight on how mobsters, pedophiles, prisoners, and other shady characters earn one another’s trust and prove their mettle. And what he documents is both disturbing and, sometimes, hilarious.

It turns out–according to Gambetta, a native Italian and a sociology professor at the University of Oxford–that there are really practical reasons why Sicilian mobsters like to use nicknames, why pedophiles might out themselves to others online, why prison inmates fight (or don’t fight), and why mobsters from Japan to Russia might be out there, right now, reciting lines from ”The Godfather,” such as, ”Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

Excerpts from the Globe’s interview with Gambetta:

IDEAS: Based on your research, what would people find most surprising about how people communicate in the criminal underworld?

GAMBETTA: I would say doing things that would seem irrational to us. Like revealing bad things that you’ve done. Or hurting yourself. Or hurting innocent people. I have a chapter on self-harm, which is probably the most unexpected thing you find.

IDEAS: What are some examples of ways criminals compromise themselves to prove their toughness or trustworthiness to another criminal?

GAMBETTA: One thing you can look at is how pedophile rings on the Internet work. Some of them work by asking new members to contribute previously unknown photographs to their website. In that sense, they contribute to the website of pedophile photographs, but at the same time they’re also giving information that they themselves have done that. So they are unlikely to be undercover agents. And with respect to physical harm, the best domain in which criminals have to prove their toughness, day in and day out, is prison. You find a lot of self-harm in prison.

Read more of the interview…

The BBC World Service Program, The Forum, ran a segment this weekend featuring sociologist Diego Gambetta…

About the program:

This week we take a trip into real and imagined dystopian worlds…

We travel to the future to meet the environmentally friendly humanoids from Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood’s latest book, “The year of the Flood”. She asks whether an environmental religion can prevent the extinction of the human race as we know it, or whether it would accelerate our evolution into a new, unrecognisable species.

The British opposition security minister Baroness Pauline Neville-Jones argues that the right balance needs to be struck between privacy and the efficiency of the state.

And sociology Professor Diego Gambetta peers down into the underworld to crack the codes and signals of criminal communication.

We discuss how we modify our bodies and our communication in order to protect our planet and evade the state, both today and in a possible dystopian future.

LISTEN HERE.

The San Jose Mercury News ran a story this weekend about how women’s role in sex crimes has resurfaced as an issue. Citing a handful of recent crimes in which women have played significant parts, the article delves into women’s roles in the crimes and the leniency they sometimes receive in the courtroom.

Charlene Williams of Sacramento lured six teenage girls and four young adults to their deaths as her husband demanded the perfect “sex slave.”

Michelle Lyn Michaud, also of Sacramento, customized curling irons to help her boyfriend torture and murder a 22-year-old student abducted from a Pleasanton street.

In Utah, Wanda Eileen Barzee was accused of helping her husband kidnap 14-year old Elizabeth Smart at knifepoint from her Salt Lake City bedroom so that he could secure another “wife.”

Now along comes Nancy Garrido of the Bay Area. Like the others, Garrido is accused of teaming up with a male partner — in Garrido’s case, her husband of nearly three decades — and allegedly committing unthinkable crimes against other women and children.

The arrests Aug. 27 of Nancy and Phillip Garrido revealed a stunning story about the 1991 kidnapping of 11-year-old Jaycee Lee Dugard, snatched off the street near her home in Meyers. Authorities say Jaycee, now 29, had been living for 18 years in the Garridos’ backyard near Antioch and is the mother of two children fathered by Phillip Garrido.

While attention focuses on Phillip Garrido’s history of sexual assault, his reduced prison term and evasion of parole oversight, the case also raises haunting questions about what role his wife may have played.

The article draws upon sociological commentary from Jack Levin…

One noted criminologist said he believes that some female offenders actually have benefited by the persistent notion that women could not possibly be the leaders — especially in a sex crime.

“The court typically throws the book at the man, believing that he was the instigator — that he initiated the attack. So he’ll get the death penalty,” said Jack Levin, a professor of sociology and criminology at Northeastern University in Boston.

“His female companion is considered an accomplice who went along for the love of her man. She gets a much lighter sentence.”

That view is not always accurate, said Levin, an expert in serial murder and hate crimes.

In one case in Canada, he said, a woman caught up in a rape and murder case involving teenage victims testified against her husband in exchange for leniency.

In a move decried in Canada as the “Deal With the Devil,” Karla Homolka got a 12-year sentence in 1993 for manslaughter in the murders of two Ontario teens.

Motivations vary widely

She is now believed to be living in Paris, Levin said. Her former husband, Paul Bernardo, was sentenced to life in prison in Canada, which does not have the death penalty.

But after the deal was struck, Levin said, videotapes showing the rape and torture of the schoolgirls revealed Karla Homolka was a willing participant.

“She was seen enjoying herself and participating fully,” he said. “Karla Homolka was just as guilty as her husband.”

But women in these types of cases can also fall into the category of being so passive they “just go along with the plan,” said David Finkelhor, director of the Crimes Against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire.

He said besides women who are battered or psychologically controlled, some are simply “low-functioning” and dependent on their mates.

“It’s not like there’s a single profile,” he said.

Read more.

As many of you have probably read in the newspapers this week, the case of Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s mistaken arrest has stirred debates about racial profiling in numerous media outlets as well as among academics. The New York Times summarizes: “Henry Louis Gates Jr., a prominent Harvard scholar of African-American history, was arrested at his home in Cambridge, Mass., last week by an officer investigating a report of a burglary in progress. Although charges for disorderly conduct were dropped, the incident has caused a stir over the issue of racial profiling.” (See the full story here.)

Although the some of the details of the case are still contested by the Cambridge police and Professor Gates, the events have generated some thoughtful sociological commentary on the course of events.

NYTimes blog ‘Room for Debate‘ hosted a discussion that featured commentary from scholars of law, psychology, criminology, criminal justice, and sociologist Peter Moskos, who noted:

As long as race matters in America, racial profiling will exist. But counter intuitively, police need to have more discretion, not less, to lessen profiling.

Police, at least in theory, are trained to avoid profiling. The same can’t be said for the public. If a citizen calls to report a suspicious person, police are suddenly forced into a situation that could very well stem from the ignorance or racism of some anonymous caller. And ignorance, which comes from all races, does not lend itself to effective community policing. Unfortunately, the age of the knowledgeable local foot officer is over.

There is a small segment of the population — street-corner young male high-school drop-out drug dealers come to mind — that should be profiled. Police attention will and should focus on high-crime corners. If these corners are black, well, reality often isn’t politically correct. In New York City, there are about 40 white and 330 black homicide victims per year.

Read more.

At the end of last week the New York Times ran an article about how the effects of parental imprisonment have led to a ‘tide of troubled kids.’

The Times reports (with sociological commentary):

The chances of seeing a parent go to prison have never been greater, especially for poor black Americans, and new research is documenting the long-term harm to the children they leave behind. Recent studies indicate that having an incarcerated parent doubles the chance that a child will be at least temporarily homeless and measurably increases the likelihood of physically aggressive behavior, social isolation, depression and problems in school — all portending dimmer prospects in adulthood.

“Parental imprisonment has emerged as a novel, and distinctly American, childhood risk that is concentrated among black children and children of low-education parents,” said Christopher Wildeman, a sociologist at the University of Michigan who is studying what some now call the “incarceration generation.”

Work by sociologist Sara Wakefield offers additional insight:

Quantifying other effects of parental incarceration, like aggressive behavior and depression, is more complex because many children of prisoners are already living in deprived and turbulent environments. But researchers using newly available surveys that follow families over time are starting to home in on the impact.

Among 5-year-old urban boys, 49 percent of those who had a father incarcerated within the previous 30 months exhibited physically aggressive behaviors like hitting others or destroying objects, compared with 38 percent of those in otherwise similar circumstances who did not have a father imprisoned, Dr. Wildeman found.

While most attention has been placed on physical aggression, a study by Sara Wakefield, a sociologist following children in Chicago, found that having a parent imprisoned was a mental-health tipping point for some. Thus, while 28 percent of the children in her study over all experienced feelings of social isolation, depression or anxiety at levels that would warrant clinical evaluation or treatment, about 35 percent of those who had an incarcerated parent did.

And additional sociological commentary…

With financial woes now forcing many states to rethink the relentless expansion of prisons, “this intergenerational transfer of problems should be included as an additional cost of incarceration to society,” said Sarah S. McLanahan, a sociologist at Princeton University and director of a national survey of families that is providing data for many of the new studies.

Read more.

The Philadelphia Inquirer ran a story about the recently-released paperback edition of a volume edited by Elijah Anderson entitled, Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black and Male. The collection of sixteen essays, includes work by William Julius Wilson, Gerald D. Jaynes, and David Kairys, with a foreword by Cornel West.

The Inquirer reports:

They are overrepresented in the ranks of the unemployed and the incarcerated, and underrepresented as college students, as live-in husbands, and as fathers raising children. They are more likely than most to die early and violently. Perhaps most important, young black men are among the most misunderstood people in America.

To bring awareness and understanding to their plight and to offer solutions, sociologist Elijah Anderson has brought together a roster of eminent and emerging social scientists and activists in his latest work, Against the Wall: Poor, Young, Black, and Male.

The review goes on to say…

Anderson has made certain to include the perspectives of emerging young thinkers as well, including his son Luke, a community organizer in Chicago; Waverly Duck, a postdoctoral fellow in sociology at Yale; and Imani Perry, a professor of law at Rutgers-Camden who is joining the faculty at Princeton University.

Anderson has long contended that in impoverished black communities, income is derived from three main sources: low-paying jobs, welfare, and an irregular, underground economy based on bartering, borrowing, hustling and street crime.

The failure of any one of those sources, he asserts, pushes individuals to one of the two others, and the disappearance of low-paying jobs and welfare drives people to the underground economy, which is governed by violence. This assertion is the premise of Anderson’s seminal books Code of the Street: Decency, Violence, and the Moral Life of the Inner City (1999) and A Place on the Corner (1978).

In his own essay, Anderson writes that inferior schooling, employment discrimination, and stereotypes have taken a heavy toll on the social capital of young black men.

“All this set the stage for the situation we face today. The social costs of impoverishment fell particularly hard on the heads of young black men who are feared by the rest of society and left to fend for themselves by white authorities,” Anderson writes. “In his alienation and use of violence, the contemporary poor young black male is a new social type peculiar to postindustrial America. This young man is in profound crisis. His social trajectory leads from the community to prison or cemetery, or at least to a life of trouble characterized by unemployment, discrimination and participation in an oppositional culture – which is how he goes about dealing with the alienation from society.”

The overwhelmingly positive review encourages interested readers to seek out this book to better understand an array of social problems, but reviewer Vernon Clark notes that “a weakness of the book is that the prescribed solutions are not nearly as concrete or commensurate in number as the relentless documentation of the problems and the long list of them.”

Read more.

The Houston Chronicle reported yesterday on the increasingly brazen tactics for crossing into the United States from Mexico. The Chronicle reports, “U.S. Border Patrol agent John Lopez has seen it all: Men hiding in tiny holes in the ground, in car trunks and behind seat backs. He’s even captured an illegal immigrant hiding in a suitcase. ‘You don’t expect to find someone in a suitcase. You never expect that,’ said Lopez, who is based in the Rio Grande Valley.”

These attempts to sneak people and drugs across the border are constantly changing and are often increasingly harmful to the immigrants, an alarming trend illustrated in several recent incidents.

• In Presidio County along the Texas-Mexico border, a man trained illegal immigrants who had just crossed the border to fake illnesses and call 911. Unwitting ambulance attendants took them to an Alpine hospital beyond the Border Patrol checkpoint near Marfa. The immigrants would refuse treatment and run away. Lionel Armendariz-Cabezuela, 38, was arrested in March and pled guilty to smuggling charges in the scheme.

• In the past few months, officials have intercepted three ultralight aircrafts attempting to smuggle drugs into the U.S. The small planes fly so low they evade radar and have been particularly active on the Arizona-Mexico border.

• In California, smugglers meticulously painted vehicles to resemble DHL package delivery trucks and a company contracted to help build the border fence. They used the vehicles to transport illegal immigrants to the U.S. in March and April. Some people in the construction company truck wore reflective vests and hard hats.

But the debate about reform versus enforcement is a complex one, and the Houston Chronicle calls upon sociologist Nestor Rodriguez, who has studied these migrants based at the University of Texas.

Immigrant rights advocates warn that it’s flawed and dangerous to put more focus on enforcement instead of reform. As it becomes more difficult to cross the border, people will take extreme risks, said Jennifer Allen, executive director of Arizona’s Border Action Network.

“People have to rely on smuggling networks. This means that smuggling networks continue to grow and become more costly, and they become more professionalized,” Allen said, adding that she expects smuggling to increase in remote areas.

Said Nestor Rodriguez, a sociology professor at the University of Texas: “What I have learned from talking with migrants is that smugglers try a variety of old and new approaches to cross the border, so I don’t think there is just one approach.”

And another sociologist weighs in…

Unless officials reform immigration laws, though, it doesn’t matter whether border officials step up enforcement, said David Spener, a sociology professor at Trinity University in San Antonio.

“If the past is prologue, this will just mean more danger for migrants and more risky crossings,” Spener said.

Read more.

This week, Newsday ran a story about what might lead certain people to commit murder-suicide, drawing upon scholars’ expertise on identifying key traits of perpetrators. The article was specifically concerned with the practice of familicide, also referred to as ‘family annihilation,’ which is committed by men nearly 95% of the time according to the Violence Policy Center.

The psychological perspective…

Louis Schlesinger, forensic psychology professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, said there were two different types of familicidal offenders.

One takes a proprietorial view of his wife, gets angry, and attacks her and everyone around her. The second type is “the despondent male,” who feels he must kill his family and himself to spare them the humiliation or pain of what life will bring, Schlesinger said.

“It’s not rational, it’s not reasonable,” he said. “If he tries to kill himself and survives, he views the [slain] family with sympathy. . . . He feels tremendous regret.”

The sociological perspective…

But Jack Levin, a sociologist and criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said there is almost always a “catastrophic loss that precedes a family annihilation.”

Triggers can be a loss of a job, money, a relationship or a loved one. Often, he said, there is a feeling of isolation.

“Most family annihilators, and typically it’s the husband and father, have been frustrated and depressed over a long period of time,” he said. “But they, unlike other depressed individuals, blame everybody else for their miseries.”

Or, he said, in cases when the man may be described as a dedicated husband and devoted father, the motive may be “a perverted sense of altruism that they’d be better off dead than live in this miserable existence.”

In general, he said, most familicides are suicidal rampages, “but first the killer will take care of his loved ones.”

If the person is religious, “He may feel he can reunite with loved ones in the hereafter, or wants to spare his loved ones the humiliation of his suicide.”

Read more.

This past weekend Pink News, a UK-based media outlet, ran a story on a new study out of the University of Derby suggesting that lesbian women in abusive relationships may resist seeking assistance for fear of being outed. Findings from the study were presented at the British Sociological Association’s annul meetings last weekend in Cardiff and indicate that abusive relationships between gay women “can can include physical assaults, sexual coercion and emotional cruelty but victims are put off seeking help because of fear of being outed to friends, colleagues and family.”

The scale of the problem:

Forty women between the ages of 21 and 70 were chosen for the study, believed to the most detailed research into abusive lesbian relationships to date. All of those who took part had experienced abuse in some capacity.

Around 88 per cent of those questioned had suffered physical abuse such as punching, kicking and slapping. Forty five per cent reported had been bullied into performing unwanted sexual activities and ten per cent admitted to having been forced into having sex.

Thirteen per cent had been threatened with being outed by their partner to friends, family and colleagues or outed altogether by the abusive partner, while 18 per cent had felt suicidal or had attempted suicide during the abusive relationship.

The author’s comments:

Dr Rebecca Barnes, who led the study, said: “Only women who had been abused by a previous female partner were invited to participate in the study, with the aim being to examine these relationships in detail rather than trying to establish what proportion of lesbian relationships as a whole is abusive.

“The findings show that women in abusive same-sex relationships experience very similar challenges to women in abusive heterosexual relationships.

“However, being in a same-sex relationship poses additional barriers to seeking and receiving effective support. My findings also showed that abuse in lesbian relationships can involve wide-ranging forms of emotional, physical, financial and sexual abuse, as it can in heterosexual abusive relationships.”

“One of the key differences with same-sex abuse is the secrecy which surrounds many same-sex relationships – a few of my participants had had relationships lasting years which their family or colleagues knew nothing about or which only a few close friends were aware of. This particularly applied to women who were in their first same-sex relationship.”

Read more.