there was a righteous mullet at the theatre last weekend, which directed my attention to this minneapolis blogger:

In 1959 journalist John Howard Griffin darkened his skin for an undercover experiment with racial tensions that would later be published as ‘Black Like Me.’ Now, fifty years later, a man with markedly less courage takes on a mission with markedly lower stakes. mullet like me.

strange how a haircut can fall so far out of fashion that it becomes hip, then become such an icon of irony that it becomes painfully unhip. apart from being unfashionable today, a mullet also conveys something about working-class rural white masculinity. so, wearing it now provokes derision in middle-class urban spaces, much like stone-washed jeans. yet the local hipsters are sporting mullets today, in much the same way they affected foam trucker hats and grain belt premium a few years back.

that’s why mullet like me might be a bit too arch for a breaching experiment or sociology exercise. if a sociology student recorded the reactions to his mullet at the mall, karaoke night, and the high-end grocery store, any savvy bystander would quickly suss him out as an ironic hipster. he’d either blend into the background or get the half-smile of the half-amused.

there are, of course, men and women who can pull off a real unironic mullet with style. for example, jared allen of the vikings offers a 3-part code to living the life of the mullet:

1. In everything you do and wear, you must highlight your mullet.
2. Always respect another mullet — no matter where it’s at, a mullet always has the right of way.
3. Most importantly, sleeves are optional.

tor could really rock a mullet in his lanky preschool years, so i wouldn’t be surprised if he returns to form in college — a couple incisions in the mane and he’d be good to go.

there’ve been a few problems at the big cinco de mayo celebration on st. paul’s west side, including a drive-by shooting last year. this year, the city is seeking an injunction against 10 suspected members of the sureno 13 gang.

having grown up around the west side, i’m sympathetic to the organizers’ concerns about public safety in a growing, kid-friendly event. as a criminologist, i’m well aware of the repeated violence and disruption in similar festivals, as well as this festival in previous years. that said, i’m agnostic-bordering-on-skeptical about the claimed effectiveness of such narrowly targeted civil gang injunctions. as a citizen, i’m concerned about restrictions on freedom of assembly, movement, and spatial exclusions.

according to the pi press, the city got the injunction by proving that the gang is a public nuisance whose members have been involved in at least three instances of gang activity in the past 12 months. a ramsey county judge ordered the 10 alleged surenos 13 gang members to be prohibited from engaging in the following activities inside a circumscribed “safety zone” on the west side from 4 p.m. may 1 to 6 a.m. may 3:

No association with known criminal gang members
No intimidation
No use of gang signs
No gang clothing
Don’t force any person to join the defendant
Don’t prevent any person from leaving the defendant

about 100,000 people attend the event, so the order only targets .01% of the anticipated participants — the other 99.99% are apparently free to flash gang signs and consort with other gang members. it would be impressive police work indeed if such strategies proved effective in reducing violence at festivals. what happens if any of the 7 named adults or 3 juveniles violates the court order? violation is a misdemeanor, which also provides probable cause for police to remove them from the event.

via susan tucker at the open society institute:

The Released a new FRONTLINE/PBS documentary, will be broadcast and made available online starting Tuesday, April 28th at 9pm est.

This documentary promises to be as powerful and disturbing as The New Asylums, also from MeadStreetFilms, where we saw seriously mentally ill men in cages receiving “therapy” and being shuttled back and forth between a maximum security prison in Ohio and the state’s hospital for the criminally insane. And we came to understand the genuine complexity of their situations and yearned for more equally complex and humane responses.

The Released follows some of the same men featured in the first film who were subsequently returned “to the community” — but more often to the street — and in some cases have ended up back in prison.

We’re pleased that OSI has been able to support dissemination of the film and development of a, highly informative website… Similar support was awarded for The New Asylums (which can still be seen on Frontline’s website) and before that for The Exonerated by director Ofra Bikel, also shown on PBS.

via boingboing:

i’ve read some good histories on minneapolis’ old gateway and skid row, but this is the first film i’ve seen from the period. it isn’t pretty, but the footage is amazing. the narrator is johnny rex, proprietor of the sourdough and king of skid row.

via mnspeak and stuff about minneapolis:

this sign dates to the early days of the incarceration boom. with so many going to prison each year, i’m surprised that i’ve never seen such an advertisement before. more typically, i see divorce cited as the reason that a car or household goods must be sold.

perhaps prison is too stigmatized to make for an effective marketing pitch. note that the parenthetical — (for tax evasion) — appears to have been added after the rest of the sign was prepared. this presumably destigmatizes the seller so as to overcome customers’ fears of visiting a prisoner’s home. it could also draw buyers, signalling that high-quality goods will be available at the sale. that said, bernard madoff would have a tough time attracting customers if he offered a full-disclosure parenthetical: (for securities fraud, wire fraud, mail fraud, money laundering, perjury and making false filings with the SEC). i suspect he’ll use christie’s instead.

justin piehowski at minnpost points to lori mocha’s fine depression and laughs, addressing the phenomenon of depression blogging. ms. mocha’s response was spot-on:

after confessing to 14 murders, chicago mobster nicholas calabrese was sentenced to serve 12 years and 4 months by u.s. district judge james zagel. in fact, he could be out as early as 2014, given that he’s been incarcerated since 2002 and he’ll be credited for time served.

why does an admitted mob hitman merit a lighter sentence than, say, the poor guy in florida who bought too much oxycontin to manage chronic pain? because mr. calabrese gave up the family secrets, that’s why, and those secrets helped bring down bosses frank calabrese, joey “the clown” lombardo, and james marcello, as well as lesser enforcers and wayward police officers.

there’s a clear utilitarian logic behind cutting such deals, in which the social benefits of locking up the big fish are thought to outweigh the social costs of giving preferential treatment to hit men who snitch. yet how is a judge supposed to balance the clear value of mr. calabrese’s cooperation against the clear harm he’s done? and how should a judge or prosecutor weigh the normative costs of cutting deals with some of most destructive individuals they encounter in the criminal justice system?

the tribune quotes a u.s. attorney on the paradox, who notes that “pure justice” would have meant lifetime incarceration. nevertheless, unlike a lot of informants, mr. calabrese was uniquely positioned to bust up the “toughest nut to crack” — and his testimony was indeed a boon to public safety. moreover, the deal offers a general incentive to others, as well as a specific incentive to mr. calabrese: if others come forward, they know there’s at least a chance they won’t spend the rest of their lives in prison.

of course, 12 years (or 4 years and time served) still feels like an arbitrary and unsatisfying compromise. such sentences remind me of harry blackmun’s famous opinion, as he fumbled around for some sort of medical, cultural, and legal rationale to specify the precise moment at which a fetus becomes a human being. while a judge may act with a pragmatic orientation toward the greater good, any cut-point between zero and life (or conception and birth, i suppose) is likely to seem arbitrary. i’m not sure whether such judges are compromised or courageous. probably both.

two years after the amazing cnn report below, the washington post reports that 52 sex offenders are living under a miami bridge.

“In Miami-Dade County, such people must live at least 2,500 feet from places children gather, making only a handful of areas _ generally out of an offender’s price range _ possible homes. … Many offenders have family or friends who would house them but can’t because they live too close to a school or playground or bus stop. … The state says offenders found the bridge because it was among the few covered places in compliance with the local ordinances. Officials say probation officers haven’t suggested it outright, though some residents dispute that.”

in harvard’s applied statistics workshop, gabriel lenz will be presenting a clever paper (with kevin lim) on corruption and wealth accumulation in congress. according to the abstract, u.s. representatives do not appear to get significantly richer than other citizens — at least not during their terms in office. their wealth indeed grows faster than that of other citizens, but the differences wash out when a statistical matching strategy (some sort of propensity-score method, i assume) is applied.

the authors interpret the results as providing evidence against aggregate-level corruption in the u.s. house. the paper calls to mind the case of minnesota’s (former?) u.s. senator norm coleman, whose financial difficulties have been well-documented. if senators leave office poorer than when they entered, should this be taken as evidence against their (individual-level) corruption?

while senator coleman has earned a good living in office, his $180k annual salary apparently hasn’t provided the financial wherewithal to sustain his washington and st. paul lifestyle. i was initially surprised to learn that the senator had refinanced his house 14 times in 12 years, that he had been living in a friend and donor’s washington basement, and that even his clothes were sometimes purchased by donors.

but now i see this difficulties as virtues. senator coleman is the main (if not sole) breadwinner in his family, he’s got a couple kids near college age, and, in terms of relative deprivation, he surely ranks among the least-wealthy senators in congress. my guess is that the senator has probably lived above his means — those donated suits apparently came from nieman-marcus rather than men’s wearhouse — but in some ways his financial problems simply mirror those of other americans.

though i’ve disagreed with senator coleman on many issues over the years, i’d have to grant that there’s no evidence he has accumulated great personal wealth by cashing in on his position. the aggregate-level argument by professors lenz and lim, equating wealth and corruption, would seem to imply some sort of corollary about poverty and virtue. by this logic i can almost talk myself into believing that a penny-ante misdeed, such as failing to pay one’s utility bill, is evidence that one is successfully resisting the temptations to sell out on a major scale.

while i’m definitely intrigued by the study, i’d ask a few more questions about the basic relationship before i went that far: (1) how well is wealth measured (or hidden) among the representatives and in the comparison sample? (2) shouldn’t we really expect about a five-year lagged effect, in which government service leads to greater wealth accumulation after one leaves office? and, more personally, (3) would the authors extend their argument to equate personal wealth with corruption for academic department chairs?

the new pew foundation report, one in 31, the long reach of corrections, assembles some fascinating state-level data. below, i’ve graphed the “adult correctional control rates” for the 50 states. i’ve shaded some of the midwestern states red for easy comparability. notice how minnesota has a very high rate of correctional control? about 4% of the adult population is under supervision — mostly being supervised in the community while serving probation sentences.

the next figure is based on the spending information in the pew report, taking corrections spending as a percentage of state general fund expenditures. although our correctional control rate is high, minnesota pays relatively little on corrections because probation is cheap relative to prisons (pew reports that about 82 percent of total corrections spending goes to prisons). i can’t vouch for the expenditure data here, since i haven’t used it or vetted it, but the correctional control figures look right to me. michigan is clearly an outlier, but i think this is due to data comparability problems (education spending is excluded from the gdp denominator).

finally, i made a little scatterplot showing the correlation between spending as a percentage of state gdp and overall correctional control. i dropped michigan from the figure, but ran the correlation with and without it.

i didn’t label every state, but you can get a sense for the overall patterns. minnesota (and alabama?) spend little, but have moderate to high control rates. georgia supervises a surprising 8 percent of the adult population, but spends a percentage of gdp comparable to low-control states like iowa or illinois. florida, arizona, and oregon all spend a great deal relative to their rates of correctional control. new hampshire and maine have few people under control, but still spend a fair percentage of state resources on them.

i should repeat the caveat that i haven’t vetted these data, so i’m not sure whether we’ve really got reliable and valid information on all variables, or whether the information is consistently reported across states. nevertheless, i very much appreciate the sorts of questions that the pew report is raising. at minimum, it should spur some productive discussions about policy choices.