Apple’s profits more than quintupled in the last five years, but their tax burden has risen much more slowly.  Last year, just 9.8% of their profits went to taxes.   “By comparison,” writes economist Marty Hart-Landsberg, “Wal-Mart was downright patriotic — paying a tax rate of 24 percent.”

How does the company do it?  Hart-Landsberg summarizes the New York Times: “The answer is tax loopholes and a number of subsidiaries in low tax places like Ireland, the Netherlands, Luxembourg and the British Virgin Islands. ”  More details at Reports from the Economic Front.

Last week Gwenyth Paltrow tweeteda photograph of Kanye West and Jay-Z performing in France along with the text: “Ni**as in paris for real.”  The tweet started a conversation about her right to use the n-word, even with asterisks. Paltrow defended herself, claiming that it is the name of the song they were performing (which it is).

At Colorlines, Jay Smooth offers a characteristically entertaining and insightful analysis of the incident.  What’s interesting, he observes, isn’t so much her use of the word, but her defensiveness about it.  Here’s how he puts it:

No matter how justified you feel, as soon as you start arguing about your right to use the n–, that is a sign that you have become too attached to the n–.

He calls on her to apologize and move on with her life because…

The right to use that word is not a right worth fighting for.

A great watch:

Yesterday I posted about the extraordinary number of people in Louisiana prisons.  The rise in imprisonment mirrors the U.S. growth that began with the so-called war on drugs, but was also triggered by a crisis in the early 1990s, after two decades of growth.  A federal court ordered Louisiana to reduce overcrowding in prisons, which had risen to an inhumane level.  They  had to either let criminals out or build more prisons.  They did the latter.

Instead of building more state-funded prisons, though, for-profit prisons were built by sheriffs and residents of local parishes.  Today there are more inmates housed in local, for-profit prisons than in state prisons (left) and Louisiana has more inmates in private prisons than any other state in the U.S. (right):

Why should we care if so many prisoners are housed in private, for-profit institutions?

The conditions in these prisons are worse than those in state prisons, especially when it comes to quality of life (like the opportunity to develop hobbies or practice their religion) and rehabilitative services (like high school equivalency classes and job training). These are desperately needed services; the average Louisiana prisoner has a 7th grade education and nearly a 3rd read below a 5th grade level:

State facilities simply spend more money, while for-profit prisons skim as much off the top as possible.  Writes reporter Cindy Chang:

An inmate at the Angola state penitentiary costs $63.15 a day, compared with the $24.39 sheriff’s per diem. State facilities house the sickest and oldest, but [Department of Corrections] Secretary Jimmy LeBlanc admits part of the differential is the lack of educational offerings.

In fact, Louisiana spends less on its prisoners (in state and private facilities combined) than any other state in the U.S.:

Law enforcement officials and parish residents may not like what’s happened in Louisiana, but many feel trapped.  For-profit prisons are sustaining local communities: they fund police departments and employ residents. Often they are the only local jobs with decent wages and benefits. Those residents support the local economies and keep small towns alive.

In this short video, an employee talks about the occupational opportunity the prison provides:

Many Louisianans, then, see the harsh sentences and high imprisonment as a price worth paying.  Says Sheriff Charles McDonald: “I know it sounds crazy and impersonal… but we’re stuck with this jail. We can’t walk away. We’ve got investors, employees.”

A new 8-part Times Picayune series on the prison industry in Louisiana starts off with these foreboding sentences:

Louisiana is the world’s prison capital. The state imprisons more of its people, per head, than any of its U.S. counterparts. First among Americans means first in the world. Louisiana’s incarceration rate is nearly five times Iran’s, 13 times China’s and 20 times Germany’s.

One out of every 86 Louisianans is in prison.

The motivation is money.   Most prisoners in Louisiana are in for-profit prisons.  The state spends $663 million a year on imprisonment; $182 million of that goes to for-profit correctional companies or contracted local sheriffs.  Many small towns depend on the prisons to fund their law enforcement.

Burk Foster, a criminologist who’s been studying Louisiana prisons, explains:

They don’t want to see the prison system get smaller or the number of people in custody reduced, even though the crime rate is down, because the good old boys are all linked together in the punishment network, which is good for them financially and politically.

State Rep. Joseph Lopinto (R-Metairie) agrees:

The bottom line is, if locking everybody up and throwing away the key works, then we should have the lowest crime rate in the United States. We don’t. So then you have to really look at your policies. In my opinion, it’s strictly a fiscal issue.

Those who benefit from the prison industry have pushed through some of the severest sentencing laws in the country and aggressively resist reform.  “Few lobbies in Louisiana,” writes reporter Cindy Chang, “are as powerful as the sheriffs association.”  As a result, Louisiana’s sentencing laws are out-of-step with the rest of the country:

All life sentences are, automatically, without any chance of parole and more than one in ten Louisiana prisoners are serving life sentences (the majority of lifers were convicted before age 30):

Harsh where other states are lenient, and harsh where other states are harsh, Louisiana has “a much higher percentage behind bars for [non-violent] drug offenses.”  In 2009, 82% of the 17,223 new admissions to Louisiana prisons were convicted of non-violent felonies.

Tomorrow I’ll follow up with a post on why there are so many for-profit prisons in Louisiana and how it’s affected the lives of prisoners both during and after incarceration.

In January the U.S. government announced a new definition of “forcible rape” to include male victims and oral or anal penetration in addition to vaginal. This has legal implications, of course, but also symbolic ones.  Language shapes how we experience the world, potentially changing how we feel about an event in our lives.  This happened to at least one person, prompting them to send in a postcard to Post Secret:

The more inclusive definition is a net good, I believe.  Legally, it’s best that we have the tools to prosecute these crimes and, for some people, being able to use this word to describe something terrible that happened to them will be validating and empowering.  For others, however, it may heighten the trauma. “Rape” is a powerful word and many Americans imagine it to be among the most harmful of crimes.  Like child abuse, but unlike even very violent non-sexual physical assaults, rape is often believed to be a long-lasting harm, maybe even one that you can never truly recover from.

Perhaps the word “dammit” in the card is meant to convey exactly this sentiment.  It was easier, perhaps, to think it was a bad night.  Now, though nothing has changed except for the language, the victim has to contend with having been raped.

NPR’s Planet Money asks an interesting question.  If there are more women in the workforce now than there were forty years ago (and there are), where did all the additional jobs come from?

The pie charts below tell some of the story.  On the left are charts representing the percentage of women in various occupations in 1972.  The size of the circle corresponds to the size of the sector: larger is equivalent to more total jobs; on the right are the same charts for 2012.

Notice two trends: first,  in almost all categories today women are a larger percentage of the workers than they were in 1972 and, second, many of the occupational sectors that have high percentages of women have grown (e.g., education and health), whereas many in which men dominate have shrunk (e.g., manufacturing, media/telecommunications).

So, as women have joined the workforce, they’ve contributed to the overall growth of the American workforce and, specifically, filled the demand for employees in growing occupations.

SocImages Updates:

The University of Cinncinati’s J.A. Carter has put together a fabulous resource: a Course Guide for Sociology of Sport classes.

Gwen has put together a new Pinterest page.  This is our 16th and it covers various attempts by marketers to Masculinize Femininized Products in order to sell them to men.

An article tracing the history and philosophy of SocImages is now in pre-publication.  Feel free to email socimages@thesocietypages.org for a copy if you’d like one.

In the News:

Peggy Orenstein, author of Cinderella Ate My Daughter and other books, offered a blush-inducing review of SocImages at her website.

Peg Streep discussed Lisa’s research on hook up culture in Psychology Today: Finding Anastasia Steele and Looking for Christian Grey.

Matt Cornell’s fantastic post on his “man-boobs” was featured, in French, at Rue89.

Our fabulous four-part series on LEGO’s history of marketing (and not marketing) to girls, by David Pickett, was featured at Boing Boing, Neatorama, and HuffPo Parents.

Finally, this month we enjoyed being linked from sites the likes of Cracked, Kotaku, Utne Reader, TVTropes, Good, Gamasutra, AdWeek, and Business Insider.

Most Popular in May:

• Student’s Brain Flatlines During Class
• The Story of My Man-Boobs
• The Difference Between “i.e.” and “e.g.”
• Holes in the Social Fabric: An Artist Quilts the Foreclosure Crisis
• Depp’s “Tonto” Costume Based on a Non-Native’s Wild Imagination
• “Nude,” Racial Marginalization and the Wedding Industry
• Support for Gay Marriage Rising in Every Demographic
• Equal Opportunity for Idealized Employees
• The “Motherhood Penalty”
• The U.S. #1 in Health Costs
• Framing North Carolina’s Amendment One
• Historical Perspective on the LEGO Gender Gap

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and Pinterest.  Lisa is on Facebook and most of the team is on Twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, @jaylivingston, and @wendyphd.

Just before Mother’s Day, TIME grabbed America’s attention with a cover image accompanying the headline “Are You Mom Enough?”  Its photo featured 26-year-old Jamie Lynne Grumet nursing her 3-year-old son.*  The image electrified the blogosphere. With 24 hours there were over 18,000 comments on one site alone.  LA Weekly called her a MILF and reported that internet traffic flooding her website caused it to crash.

Within no time, spoofs of the cover appeared.  Tiger Mom made a reappearance.  “Are You Phone Enough?” plays on the idea of attachment, but between user and electronic device.  One site offered “magazine makeovers” and generated a “make your own TIME magazine cover” template.

The responses, though, were mostly negative.  In a TODAY.com poll about the image, more than 131,000 people weighed in; 73% saying they would have preferred not to see the image.  Saturday Night Live wasted no time in skewering both mother and child. Purportedly, some newsstands covered up the image and when it appeared on some news shows, Grumet’s breast was blurred.

For those for whom the image was offensive, Grumet’s physical attractiveness and her exposed body conflate feeding with sexiness, hence constructing the image of her suckling son with creepy or incestuous undertones — exactly the kind of one-note misconstrual of the breast (for sexual appeal rather than nutrition) that breastfeeding advocates revile.  Objections to the image included revulsion that a child — clearly still not a baby — would be connected to his mother’s body this intimately, alongside a fair share who claimed he would surely later be scarred — if not by the experience of cognitively remembering breastfeeding, then by this image circulating through his future school yards.  One commentator claimed deep concern that Grumet’s son may “never be better-known for anything than for being a breastfeeding 3-year-old on the cover of a national magazine,” and that the image was one of “psychological abuse,” as well as “an act of media violence against a child” perpetuated by manipulative journalists.

Breastfeeding advocates (so-called “lactivists”) seemed torn. On the one hand, the image drew attention to their cause: the benefits of long-term breastfeeding, including both nutritional benefits and mother/child bonding.  On the other hand, it was clear this was being done for shock value and exploitative purposes.  Grumet’s hand-on-hip, defiant stance and her son’s stepladder perch hardly convey the sense of intimacy that breastfeeding can offer.  Most agreed that TIME‘s choice of a 26-year old, blonde, white woman who looks like a model was a deliberate move meant to provoke.  In a “Behind the Cover” online sidebar photographer Martin Schoeller admits that he posed Grumet and her child upright in order to “underline that this was an uncommon situation” (i.e., to be provocative). The story accompanying the article doesn’t mention Grumet at all; instead, it profiles 72-year-old Dr. William Sears, the “father” of the attachment parenting movement.  All this exacerbated the sense that the sensationalistic pose of Grumet’s lithe body and her son’s latch was generated just to move copies of the magazine.

By capitalizing on shock value and American squeamishness about breastfeeding, there is no doubt the image will continue to generate reaction for a while longer.  And it likely sold magazines.  It inspired a few “print is not dead” articles, with one writer calling the cover “a shocking stroke of genius” that serves as a testament that a powerful image can still generate buzz and boost magazine sales.

Unfortunately the image may ultimately harm the cause it represents.  The relationship between media and activists is a fraught one.  Activists need media attention, but far too often media attention can warp and undermine activist projects.  It remains to be seen whether the cover will be a net good or bad for lactivists.

*A few people wondered about why TIME didn’t feature Grumet’s older, adopted child, who she also breastfeeds. One guess is that bold as the cover image is, even TIME‘s editors were afraid to take on the implications of a white woman nursing a black child. 

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Elline Lipkin, PhD, is a Research Scholar with UCLA’s Center for the Study of Women.  She is the author of Girls’ Studies and The Errant Thread, recipient of the Kore Press First Book Award for Poetry.  She lives in Los Angeles and has written for the Ms. magazine blog, Salon.com and Girl w/Pen, as well as other contemporary publications.  She tweets at @girlsstudies.