law

The Washington Post ran a story this morning on a new bill that would put tobacco under FDA control. The article provides a thorough look at the positions of both advocates and critics on the issue and benefits from the sociological commentary included in the reporting.

Post reporter Lyndsey Layton writes:

Legislation that the House Energy and Commerce Committee will take up today would place tobacco under the control of the Food and Drug Administration. Among other things, the bill would restrict the ways tobacco companies market cigarettes, require them to disclose the ingredients in their products and place larger warning labels on packages, and give the FDA the authority to require the removal of harmful chemicals and additives from cigarettes.

The legislation also seeks to crack down on techniques tobacco companies have used to attract children and teenagers, making it illegal to produce cigarettes infused with strawberry, grape, cloves and other sweet flavors. And it would prohibit tobacco makers from using the terms “low tar” and “light” when describing their products, suggesting a health benefit that scientists say does not exist.

Bring in the sociologist… Patricia McDaniel…

“It’s crazy — here’s this product that kills half of its longtime users, and there are very few restrictions on how it’s made and marketed,” said Patricia McDaniel, a sociologist at the University of California at San Francisco who has studied the history behind the bill.

“There’s a lot of opportunity for the FDA to do some pretty remarkable things: adding more visible warning labels, banning misleading descriptors, some authority over ingredients and allowing the FDA to prohibit certain types of marketing,” she said. “But there are a lot of unknowns. And there are questions about whether the FDA is the agency to regulate tobacco, especially now with the trouble it’s having regulating food and drugs.”

Read more.

The idea that virginity has a high value harkens back to the days of early humans — if a man has sex with a virgin woman, he knows for sure that her children will be his, anthropologists reason. In early civilizations, women were also considered the property of men, said Laura Carpenter, assistant professor of sociology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.

Through the 1950s in America, women were expected to remain virgins until marriage, Carpenter said. But with the availability of the pill and the IUD in the 1960s, combined with youth counterculture and gay rights movements, it became more common for women to engage in premarital sex, she said.

Attitudes shifted toward the conservative side in the 1980s with the worldwide HIV/AIDS pandemic, which made the stakes much higher for choosing a sex partner, especially for men. Abstinence-based education programs also took off around that time, with government support, she said.

Today, about 95 percent of Americans have sex before they’re 25, Carpenter said. But worldwide, virgin prostitutes can claim larger fees, certain cultures still attach larger dowries to virgin brides, and some women undergo reconstructive surgery to restore their hymens.

In looking at Dylan’s auction, “To some extent it’s not new. The new part is the Internet,” Carpenter said.

And Dylan’s take?

Some men may seek virgins because they want them as trophies, or desire purity. But as to why men would bid so much money on virginity, she said she has no answer.

“I honestly don’t know what they see in it,” she said.

If you think Dylan’s auction amounts to prostitution, she completely agrees. She also said she’s not breaking any laws — after all, prostitution in Nevada is legal.

“I feel people should be pro-choice with their body, and I’m not hurting anyone,” she said. “It really comes down to a moral and religious argument, and this doesn’t go against my religion or my morals. There’s no right or wrong to this.”

Read more.

Yesterday the Minneapolis Star-Tribune ran a story about how undercover sheriff’s operatives from the Ramsey County Sheriff’s office, along with an FBI informer, worked to infiltrate the ‘RNC Welcoming Committee,’ a group that was planning blockades for the Republican National Convention this past September.

On Aug. 31, 2007, Marilyn Hedstrom, who appeared to be in her early 50s, walked into a run-down store-front where anarchists hung out on E. Lake Street in Minneapolis. She introduced herself as Norma Jean. Asked by a man at the Jack Pine Center why she was there, she said she had issues with President Bush and the Iraq war. “I told him I was interested in helping the cause and interested in participating in the protesting,” she later wrote in reports reviewed by the Star Tribune… For a year Deputy Hedstrom led a double life as Norma Jean Johnson, filing her recollections, often daily, with the Special Investigations Unit, as did the other operatives. The covert operation was not without drama. When one informant was accused of being a cop, he broke into tears, convincing his accusers that they were mistaken, according to a report.

As the result of information collected by Hedstrom and the other operatives, these undercover operations led to the arrest of eight members of the Welcoming Committee…

A sociologist expressed concern over these developments:

…But David Cunningham, a professor at Brandeis University in Massachusetts, says that while authorities may have had probable cause to infiltrate anarchist groups, he is concerned about a potential chill on civil liberties. Cunningham, author of “There’s Something Happening Here,” a history of covert FBI activities in the 1960s and ’70s, said there needs to be more oversight of undercover work from Congress. He also believes local law enforcement agencies should be required to obtain court approval for undercover operations.

Read more.

Adam Liptak’s ‘Sidebar‘ column in the New York Times ran the following opening line yesterday: “Two years after Exxon was hit with a $5 billion punitive damages award for the Exxon Valdez disaster, Prof. William R. Freudenburg’s phone rang. The call propelled him, the professor said the other day, into ‘an ethical quagmire of the bottomless pit variety.'”

Freudenburg, a sociologist, explains how the phone call was from an engineer at Exxon who wanted to fund him to carry out a study with a ‘dim view of punitive damages.’ The engineer said the study was imperative as the case would eventually reach the Supreme Court and empirical evidence establishing a negative stance on punitive damages would prove useful… especially if published in an academic journal.

Professor Freudenburg, who now teaches sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, took Exxon’s money and conducted preliminary research. Exxon stopped supporting the study when the early findings did not point in a direction helpful to the company. But Exxon did help pay for several studies critical of punitive damages that appeared in places like The Yale Law Journal and The Columbia Law Review.

The evidence ended up in the Supreme Court proceedings…

As the engineer predicted, the case did reach the Supreme Court. In a 5-to-3 decision in June, the court said the appropriate punishment for dumping 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound in Alaska in 1989 was no more than about $500 million, a tenth of what the jury had awarded. But the court also addressed the aggressive effort to reshape the academic debate over punitive damages. “Because this research was funded in part by Exxon,” Justice David H. Souter wrote in a footnote that has rocked the legal academy, “we decline to rely on it.”

Read on… what do you think? What are a sociologist’s ethical obligations in this situation?

Mother Jones ran a story yesterday that was meant to serve as a ‘field guide’ to vote-blocking tactics titled, “Beyond Diebold: Ten Ways to Steal This Election.” The piece outlined a number of different state and federal measures taken to exclude certain voting populations… and sociologist Chandler Davidson helped Mother Jones sort this out.

Tactics to deny Americans the right to vote are as old as, well, the right to vote. Democrats have been at fault in the past—take the literacy tests Southern states used to deprive blacks of their suffrage from the Civil War up through 1965. Today’s shenanigans—which still target minorities and vulnerable first-time voters—are more often designed to stifle Democratic turnout, perhaps never more than in 2008. “This is obviously an important election, and the turnout may break records,” says Rice University sociologist Chandler Davidson, who has studied vote suppression, “so there is every reason to expect these tactics will be employed.”

Read more.

Although there has long been debate over the connection between crime and the economy, most of the criminologists, sociologists and police chiefs interviewed by Reuters forecast a rise in crimes in certain categories in the coming months as the United States heads deeper into recession territory.

Crime has increased during every recession since the late 1950s, said Richard Rosenfeld, a sociologist at the University of Missouri-St Louis.

Those interviewed stressed they were not talking about an increase in overall levels of crime, which have been falling in the United States since the 1990s, but an uptick in opportunistic crimes like theft and burglary. They say most crimes will still be committed by career criminals but that others in the ranks of the newly unemployed could become drawn in for a variety of reasons.

Reuters also draws upon the work of another sociologist to help explain the potential impact of budget cuts on urban crime…

Lesley Williams Reid, a sociologist at Georgia State University who has studied urban crime, said any cuts to police budgets would be bad news, particularly if the economic downturn is prolonged and more people become unemployed.

“I don’t want to add to a culture of fear, but there is a clear reason to be worried about how this is going to affect crime rates,” she said.

Read more from Reuters.

The folks over at the Freakonomics blog (housed by the New York Times) recently posed the question: ‘Who are the modern-day outlaws? Do we still have outlaws or did they die off with the last of the frontier towns — or maybe later, with the Hell’s Angels?’

Stephen Dubner, the post’s author, approached a number of experts on the issue, including well-known sociologist Chris Uggen. Dubner presented each expert with the following set of questions:  Does America still have an outlaw group? If so, why do you consider them outlaws?Does society need outlaws?

Check out this sociologist’s response…

Chris Uggen, Distinguished McKnight Professor and chair of sociology at the University of Minnesota, executive secretary of the American Society of Criminology, co-author of Locked Out: Felon Disenfranchisement and American Democracy, and co-editor of Contexts Magazine.

Oh, hell yes, there are outlaws in America — and everywhere else, for that matter. Anyone who breaks rules is in some sense an outlaw, subject to social or legal sanctions if their outlawry is detected. These penalties operate on a sliding scale, depending on whether the outlaw smokes cigarettes or meth, pirates DVD’s or ships, or violates college hate-speech codes or state hate-crime laws.

But our standards for outlaws are relative, not absolute; they change over time and social space.

Societies are constantly raising or lowering the bar, outlawing formerly accepted behaviors — like smoking — and legalizing former crimes, like lotteries.

In any group, those with greater power tend to control the rule-making process. And they sometimes go to great lengths to make outlaws out of those who might threaten their power, by restricting their ability to vote or work or have children. Regardless of who holds power, societies operate with a basic set of rules that necessarily beget a basic set of rule violators.

Just imagine, as sociologist Emile Durkheim did, a society of saints made up of exemplary citizens. Would there be no outlaws in such a group? No! They’d pick at each other for minor peccadilloes and trivial misdeeds. In that crowd, even a burp or blemish could mark one as a real bada–.

Nobody is arguing that contemporary America is a society of saints. To the contrary, it often seems as though we’re “defining deviancy down,” as senator and sociologist Daniel Patrick Moynihan put it.

Cultural critics of the hell-in-a-handbasket school worry that our blasé attitudes toward once-shocking behavior –- network telecasts of ultimate fighters beating the bloody snot out of one another, for example — diminish us all. But don’t forget that we’re simultaneously outlawing other nasty conduct that shocks our collective conscience, such as date rape or sexual harassment.

Whether you view our culture’s current constellation of outlaws as ennobling or diminishing is largely a matter of value preferences.

And remember that outlaws put in some important work for a society. When they expose their bodies at the Super Bowl, our reactions — the extent to which we freak out — tell us something about the current boundaries between proper and improper public conduct. When outlaws are arrested at a political convention, we get a heads-up that change is in the wind. When outlaws sell sex or drugs, we get a safety valve to release pent-up frustrations.

Even when outlaws commit consensus crimes like murder, we get a needed opportunity to publicly condemn them and reaffirm our shared values with our fellow citizens.

While society needs outlaws, it doesn’t need a permanent outlaw class. We’d do well to remember that today’s outlaws are tomorrow’s good citizens; and there’s no citizen more zealous than an outlaw redeemed.

Read the full story, here.

A recent article from the LA Daily News discusses the Alvarez death penalty case in California and the recent verdict to sentence him to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Juan Manuel Alvarez, 29, was charged with eleven counts of murder in connection with the Glendale train crash that occurred just north of downtown Los Angeles in 2005. The crash was the deadliest in MetroLink history, killing 11 people. 

More about the Glendale train crash…

The LA Daily News writes: 

University of Colorado at Boulder sociologist Michael Radelet, one of the nation’s leading criminologists and most-cited experts on the death penalty, said that often the extent or even the depravity of the crimes alone does not guarantee death sentencing convictions.

“This case reminds me a great deal of the Jeffrey Daumer case in Wisconsin where so much emotional testimony was allowed during the sentencing phase but Daumer wound up (with) 15 life terms in prison and eventually died there,” said Radelet.

“In this case, the jury agreed that this guy is going to die – it’s just going to be in prison and a few years down the road.”

Read the full article.