inequality

Senior year of high school is often an exciting time for students, as many make decisions about higher education and nervously await college admission letters. Yet, not all seniors join their peers in the move to higher education. The sociological “life-course labeling perspective” suggests that students already involved with the criminal justice system face the enduring consequences of a criminal record and many are forced to take alternative pathways after high school. Drawing from this perspective, Alex Widdowson, Sonja Siennick, and Carter Hay examine how being arrested in high school affects college enrollment.

The authors draw from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth to test whether a student’s arrest within the first three years of high school impedes enrollment into 2-year and 4-year colleges within 9 months after graduation. Out of the 1761 students sampled, nine percent had been arrested during their first three years of high school. The authors also examined a sample of youths who received a GED or dropped out of high school. The authors find that people who had been arrested during high school were more likely to be Black and male, to engage in higher levels of delinquency, and to exhibit lower levels of interest in school. Further, they found that high school graduated youths that were arrested were 42 percent less likely to enroll in 4-year college programs within 9 months after graduating high school, and 41 percent less likely after 10 years. Arrests for GED and high school dropouts followed a similar pattern. However, arrest had no direct effect on enrolling in a 2-year college.  High school students that were arrested were 42% less likely to enroll in four-year college programs. 

The authors conclude that arrest rates account for much of these findings because being arrested hinders performance in school. Youths’ who were arrested had lower GPAs and decreased participation in advanced coursework, which weakened the competitiveness of their college applications and deterred them from enrolling in college. Therefore, improving youths’ performance may limit the long-term effects of an arrest within an economy that increasingly relies on higher education for a stable income.

Recent high-profile incidents of police violence against black citizens have spoiled the reputation and legitimacy of legal authorities among many Americans. In a new study, Matthew Desmond, Andrew V. Papachristos, and David S. Kirk investigate one of the consequences of this police misconduct and its accompanying legal cynicism — people are less likely to call 911 to report criminal activity.

Using 911 call data from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and U.S. Census neighborhood characteristics, the researchers analyze how crime reporting calls fluctuated in the weeks following the high-profile beating of Frank Jude, a black male citizen. Controlling for the level of crime reporting before the incidents, time variation, and neighborhood block-group characteristics, they find that levels of citizen reporting significantly decreased in the weeks following the incident, and that this effect was particularly strong in majority black neighborhoods. This drop in crime reporting lasted for over a full year after the beating, and resulted in an estimated 22,200 fewer 911 crime reporting calls. The researchers also replicate this finding with three other cases of police violence, and show that 911 calls for car accidents were not altered in response to the incidents, suggesting that the reduction in calls was not due to some concurrent event impacting emergency calls overall.  The drop in crime reporting lasted for over a full year and resulted in 22,200 fewer 911 calls.

This study illustrates how the high-profile cases of police force do not just impact those closely connected to the perpetrator and victim, but have broader consequences for police-community relations. The decrease in citizen crime reporting can have tragic outcomes for public safety, and the authors note that the uptick in Milwaukee homicides following the Frank Jude beating could be, in part, the result of decreased 911 calls. Overall, the research highlights how seemingly “isolated incidents,” at least as framed by police departments and politicians, can have wide-ranging effects across a community.

Due to the increased scrutiny of racial bias among the police, the stop and frisk policies of the NYPD continued to fall out of favor in 2016.  Despite concerns of racial bias in police forces around the country, very little is known about the ways that inflammatory events may influence racial bias in policing — we tend to know more about where discrimination in policing takes place than what may influence when it occurs. To address this issue, Joscha Legewie explores how local acts of violence against law enforcement influence discriminatory use of force by the police after the fact.

Using data from 3.9 million police stops of pedestrians in New York City between 2006 and 2012, Legewie compared the effects of four significant incidents involving the death of police officers on the subsequent use of force by law enforcement. Of these four incidents, two NYPD officers were fatally shot by black suspects in two separate events in 2007 and 2011, while three officers were killed in two separate incidents by a Hispanic and a white suspect.  We tend to know more about where discrimination in policing takes place than what may influence when it occurs.

The findings reveal a race-specific pattern. The two shootings by black suspects resulted in an increased use of physical force against blacks, but the two shootings involving a white and Hispanic suspect did not result in a similar increase in force against any group. However, this increase in the use of force lasted 10 days after the event in 2011, where it only lasted 3.5 days following the event in 2007. This pattern of racial discrimination remains even when accounting for the time, location, and the circumstances of the stop, as well as the characteristics and behavior of the stopped individual. Whether this discriminatory response in the use of force is the result of implicit racial stereotypes or an explicit retaliation by law enforcement remains to be uncovered (and it may very well be a combination of both). Regardless, this study shows how violence against police triggers race-specific reactions.  

Female athletes often face an uphill battle in traditional sports — commentators often perceive them as weaker than male athletes, media spectators sexualize them by focusing on their physical attributes instead of their athletic talent, and male athletes often do not take them seriously. Yet, we know little about women’s experiences with fantasy sports, an emerging sports arena where no physical activity is required and men and women can play side-by-side. In a new study in Gender & Society, Rebecca Kissane and Sarah Winslow find that the gendered dynamics of the sporting world persist in fantasy sports, but that some women are attempting to disrupt them by asserting their knowledge and abilities in the traditionally masculine space. 

Despite the potential for fantasy sports to be a more gender neutral space, Kissane and Winslow found that men often questioned women’s presence, and as one woman noted, “you are often looked down upon because you are a woman trying to play a man’s game.” Among the 42 female fantasy sports players surveyed, there were numerous instances of discrimination within fantasy sports leagues and the assumption that men are better and more interested in sports was pervasive. Some women react to this culture in ways that reproduce traditional gender dynamics — many quit or form all-women leagues, while others tacitly accept gendered stereotypes about women by positioning themselves as atypical women with the ability to “play like the boys.” 

On the other hand, several women challenged the gendered discrimination that they experienced. They openly asserted their love for sports and thrill for competition, and many worked to show that they, as females, could be just as competent in the league as men. Female players also challenged gendered stereotypes by openly embracing their femininity and asserting that one could be both feminine and interested in sports at the same time. Others would coin team names that satirized gender norms.   Most women simultaneously resist and reproduce the gendered dynamics of the sporting world. 

However, the authors argue that most women they talked with simultaneously resist and reproduce the gendered dynamics of the sporting world — what they called “mediated” or “conflicted” agency — by questioning stereotypes in some cases but accepting some level of inferiority in others. They conclude that while most women reproduce assumptions about men’s dominance and women’s inferiority in fantasy sports, they also “open up the possibility for transformation of the gender order if through these efforts the climate in their leagues change and they are able to secure recognition as legitimate participants.”

Originally published March 15, 2016

Race is a socially constructed system of classification often conceptualized as different tones of skin color, and it’s easy to see how people may conflate the two. Interestingly enough, however, skin color can have distinct impacts, including tangible ones like differences in paychecks. A recent Sociology of Race & Ethnicity article explains.

Alexis Rosenblum, William Darity Jr., Angel L. Harris, and Tod G. Hamilton draw on the New Immigrant Survey, a nationally representative study sampling over 8,000 permanent-resident immigrants. Other scholars had already conducted some analyses on the NIS, but Rosenblum and her coauthors provide a vital intervention: describing how color variation predicts immigrant wages by home geographic region, disaggregating data previously studied as composite.

Their findings show that, overall, there is a negative relationship between skin color and wages—darker immigrants are paid less. Further exploration goes further to show that immigrants from of European, Asian, and Middle Eastern countries do not contribute to this overall finding: only darker-skinned immigrants from Latin American or Sub-Saharan-African countries are penalized on payday.

The new work also makes it plain that skin shade matters more than race among respondents from Latin American or Caribbean nations. “Light” or “dark” skin color predicted wages in these groups better than “white” or “black” racial identity. The opposite held true for Sub-Saharan respondents, among whom being identified as “black” was a better predictor of lower wages than darker skin. As scholars tackle questions about assimilation, integration, and ethnic diversity, findings like these make us all remember that race and color have important effects, especially when considering how each intersects with class.

See also Ellis P. Monk’s AJS findings that skin tone corresponds to unequal health outcomes, covered on TSP by Amber Joy Powell.

Originally published Jan. 4, 2016

The student loan boom brought a swath of new luxury apartments to college campuses. But on urban campuses, a growing population of bargain-hunting coeds raises concerns about gentrification—the way newcomers change the culture of a neighborhood and push out low-income residents. We usually see gentrification in new businesses and skyrocketing rents, but this process isn’t limited to economic change, nor is it limited to the United States. New research on Israeli students from Ori Schwarz shows how gentrification affects city culture at a very deep level, challenging even the fundamental definitions of what makes a good neighbor.

Schwarz studied a low-income urban Israeli neighborhood he calls “Mixbury” by conducting 85 interviews and two focus groups with student and nonstudent residents and others living in the city, but outside the neighborhood. Many students draw sharp boundaries between themselves and other residents by saying their neighbors acted “shchuna” (a Hebrew slang term similar to the pejorative phrase “ghetto” in English). And Schwarz’s key finding is that rather than talking about dirt or crime, almost everyone identified the bad parts of the neighborhood by noise. “Shchuna” behavior included shouting, socializing loudly, or playing loud music.

While non-residents identified the whole neighborhood by noisy shchuna behavior, student residents often enjoyed the loud music played by their friends, while “judging harshly the lowbrow music played by locals” (223). Schwarz argues these standards of clearly separated private space, the right to live in a quiet neighborhood, and highbrow musical taste all emerged as markers of upper-class status fairly recently (in the 19th century). We could call the students’ views a double standard, but Schwartz goes a little deeper:

…although both students and locals produced loud sounds, these sounds carried different social meanings. Whereas loud party music played by students is considered a merely age-related expression of student lifestyle, the class-specific, stigmatized shchuna sounds of locals… are interpreted as representing cultural and moral deficiencies… Loudness is thus a matter of cultural meanings, not simply of decibels. (227-228)

This research gives us a look at how class can change the way we experience social relationships of all kinds, even experiences beyond sight or touch. It also highlights how certain standards of middle-class behavior are going global and changing urban culture worldwide—Schwartz highlights how the respondents’ stories reflect studies of gentrification in the U.S. and elsewhere. So, before leaving a note or calling the cops, it may be better to check our own volume: Where did we learn to be annoyed by noisy neighbors?

Incidents of extreme violence impact both the victim and the perpetrator, but they also affect the greater community in terms of things like increased fear of crime and negative impacts on child development. Johanna Lacoe and Patrick Sharkey detail another key mechanism by which the neighborhood social climate is altered by violent events: the increased interaction of law enforcement and community residents via stop, question, and frisk activity after a violent crime.

Using data from the NYPD on stop and frisk activity and homicide, as well as U.S. Census data on neighborhood demographics, the authors examine the relationship between neighborhood homicides and subsequent police activity. They find that block groups where a homicide is committed experience a 70% increase in stop and frisk events relative to the stop and frisk activity a week before the homicide. This association holds even adjusting for neighborhood characteristics, such as racial/ethnic composition and poverty rate, the time of year the homicide occurred, and the precinct responsible for the homicide response. Further, Lacoe and Sharkey find that the increase in stop and frisk activity is higher in neighborhoods defined as “high crime” (90% increase vs. 68%). However, the increased levels of stop and frisk in both “high crime” and “not high crime” neighborhoods is experienced predominantly in majority black and majority Hispanic neighborhoods. The researchers find no difference in stop and frisk activity before and after a homicide in predominantly white neighborhoods.   Not only are communities of color more likely to experience violence in their communities, but they are also more likely to experience more stop and frisk activity that extends the range of the “crime scene” into the greater community.

This study illustrates how both the violence a neighborhood experiences and the responses to that violence are disproportionately distributed within the city. Not only are communities of color more likely to experience violence in their communities, but they are also more likely to experience more stop and frisk activity that extends the range of the “crime scene” into the greater community.

In recent years, the political landscape of criminal justice in the United States has shifted away from the “get tough on crime” era of the 80s and 90s,and politicians from all backgrounds seem to be embracing more lenient criminal justice reforms. However, a recent study by Katherine Beckett, Anna Reosti, and Emily Knaphus challenges the assumption that there is a general consensus. Instead, they argue that the state of criminal justice politics and policies is more aptly defined by complexity and contradictions, which may hinder meaningful reductions in prison populations.

Beckett and her colleagues analyzed state correctional policies collected by the National Council of State Legislatures to assess the punitive or nonpunitive nature of legal provisions enacted from 2000 to 2013. The findings suggest that prior to the recession, many states enacted punitive anti-crime policies, but following 2007, more lenient provisions outnumbered punitive ones by nearly 3 to 1. However, these nonpunitive reforms were mainly limited to drug and parole policies, and a punitive trend towards violent or sex offenses remained and even intensified in some states.

The researchers also reviewed newspaper articles and editorials about criminal justice reform from 2008 to 2014 to understand the surrounding political discussions.  Their results suggest that most news coverage regarding criminal justice reform focused on fiscal concerns as the main justification for reducing correctional populations, while the human costs of mass incarceration were rarely mentioned. Moreover, the intended beneficiaries of these reforms were those individuals who were convicted of a nonviolent or drug offenses. There were only two mentions of policies aimed to benefit those convicted of violent offenses within the 163 articles that were analyzed.

While we are witnessing meaningful progress in reducing prison populations, the current reforms are only geared towards nonviolent offenses. Further, political discourse is typically focused on the money lost to mass incarceration, as opposed to its negative effects on the lives of millions of Americans. Reversing mass incarceration will require incorporating broader reforms that address the social costs of imprisonment and emphasize the humanity of all the individuals under correctional supervision.

We often hear about women who “experiment” with their sexuality during college — they hook up with another woman just to “see what it’s like.” But focusing on the same-gender sexual experiences of college women disregards a large portion of women who never go to college, and a 2011 study argues that women with the lowest levels of educational achievement actually have the highest rates of same-gender sex. So how does same-gender sex function for less educated women, especially those with children or who are married to men?

Jamie Budnick conducted in-depth interviews with 35 women who indicated having at least one non-heterosexual experience. Budnick recruited these women based on their answers to supplemental questions in the Relationship Dynamics and Social Life Survey. Of these women, fewer than half attended any four year college and those who did went to schools that were not elite or highly selective.

While all of the women in the study reported some kind of non-heterosexual behavior, only 16% identified as something other than “straight.” Unlike studies of women at elite colleges, the women in Budnick’s study were far more likely to identify as “bisexual” than “queer,” as the term “queer” was often considered derogatory in their social circles. At the time of the interviews, some women remained in relationships with their children’s fathers or felt their same-gender sexualities were simply irrelevant after having children. Instead, having sex with other women — friends in many cases — was a safe and meaningful way to explore same-gender sex and desire.  Although women in less privileged positions may have fewer choices in how they identify, Budnick argues they likely face less pressure to match their identities with their behavior. 

Budnick explains that for many of these women, early motherhood forecloses the possibility to develop or claim an LGBTQ identity and instead these women prioritize their identity as a self-sacrificing parent. And although women in less privileged positions may have fewer choices in how they identify, Budnick argues they likely face less pressure to match their identities with their behavior than more privileged women. Thus, Budnick’s findings demonstrate the importance of social context for understanding same-gender desire and LGBTQ identity.

Ten years ago, Penny Edgell, Joseph Gerteis, and Doug Hartmann published a paper with a surprising finding: atheists were the most disliked minority group in the United States. More Americans said atheists didn’t share their vision of Americans society—and more said they wouldn’t like their child marrying one—than Muslims, gays and lesbians, African Americans, and a host of other groups. Today, however, more Americans have no religious affiliation, and many non-religious groups picked up on this finding as a reason to improve their public image. So, have things gotten better for atheists? The authors recently published the findings from a ten-year follow up to answer these questions, and found that not much has changed.

Despite an increased awareness of atheists and other non-religious people over the last decade, Americans still distance themselves from the non-religious. A new finding from the 2014 data is that Muslims are now statistically tied with atheists for the most disliked group in the United States. This time around, the authors asked some additional questions to get at why so many people dislike atheists. They asked if respondents think atheists are immoral, criminal, or elitist, and whether or not the increase in non-religious people is a good or bad thing. They found that one of the strongest predictors of disliking atheists is assuming that they are immoral. People are less likely to think atheists are criminals and those who think they are elitist actually see it as a good thing. However, 40% of Americans also say that the increase of people with “no religion” is a bad thing.  A new finding from the 2014 data is that Muslims are now statistically tied with atheists for the most disliked group in the United States. 

These findings highlight the ways that many people in the United States still use religion as a sign of morality, of who is a good citizen, a good neighbor, and a good American. And the fact that Muslims are just as disliked as atheists shows that it is not only the non-religious that get cast as different and bad. Religion can be a basis for both inclusion and exclusion, and the authors conclude that it is important to continue interrogating when and why it excludes.