Search results for katrina

Wired has posted a set of photos by Richard Ross highlighting the  harsh reality of life in juvenile detention centers  — locations where about 60,000 kids reside each night throughout the U.S. According to the article,

The U.S. locks up children at more than six times the rate of all other developed nations. The over 60,000 average daily juvenile lockups, a figure estimated by the Annie E. Casey Foundation (AECF), are also disproportionately young people of color. With an average cost of $80,000 per year to lock up a child, the U.S. spends more than $5 billion annually on youth detention.

The images are at Wired, and you can read more about the project, Juvenile-in-Justice, including a schedule of shows, at Ross’s website. His photos also appear in the Annie E. Casey Foundation report No Place for Kids.

You might also want to check out our previous posts on treatment of prisoners during Hurricane Katrina and overcrowding in California prisons.

And thanks to Karl for the tip about the article!

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

A blogger named Aluation posted this graphic showing how the New York Times changed the first line of a story about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations.  The change subtly shifted the blame for the mass arrest on the Brooklyn Bridge from the police to the protesters.  In the first version of the story, police allowed them onto the bridge and then “cut off and arrested” them.  In the second, there was a “showdown” in which demonstrators “marched onto the bridge.”

Adding interest, the author of the piece was changed from “Colin Moynihan” to “Al Baker and Colin Moynihan.”  Who is Al Baker?  He is the guy in charge of the police bureau at the Times.

This is a great example of how important language is in framing events.  The difference isn’t dramatic, but a close look at the wording reveals a clear difference.

It’s also a great example of the power of certain individuals and institutions to shape how the rest of us understand reality.  We should be especially suspicious of the change in the authorship of the story.  When reporters have “beats,” they have to maintain good relationships with important sources on those beats. They rely on the same sources, over and over, to provide inside scoops.  If they alienate important sources, they have a much more difficult time doing their job.

What I’m trying to say is… there is good sociological theory, based on strong evidence, to suggest that an important person in the New York police department saw this story, called Baker, and told him to change the wording.  In which case, Baker might have done so to avoid alienating a source on which his job depends.  I’m not saying that’s what happened, I’m just saying that these kinds of things do happen.

Thanks to Jay Livingston for the tip.

For another example of framing, see the captions on a slideshow covering survivors of Hurricane Katrina.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

This Course Guide is in progress and will be updated as I have time.

Disclaimer: If you’re thinking about writing a course guide.  I totally overdid it on this one!  It doesn’t have to be nearly this extensive.

Course Guide for
INTRODUCTION TO SOCIOLOGY
(last updated 5/2012)

Developed by Gwen Sharp
Nevada State College

C. Wright Mills and the Sociological Imagination

Intersection of biography and history as illustrated by:

• Year of birth and life success
• Kids’ exposure to technology
• Baby naming practices and media trends
• Other historical trends in baby names

“the capacity for astonishment is made lively again”

• The background of “Scotch” tape
• Applying the anthropological lens to “dark, mysterious Austria”

Karl Marx/Marxist analysis

• Marxist analysis of current economic crisis
• Invisibility of workers

Emile Durkheim

• The dangers of the ecological fallacy: measuring “sin” statistically

[Because the course guide has gotten to be so long, I’m putting the rest of it after the jump.]

more...

HAPPY SEPTEMBER!

News, Publications, and Appearances:

We are super grateful to Karen McCormack for her positive and insightful review of SocImages in Visual Sociology.  Thanks so much Karen!

We’re pleased to report that our short essay on Banal Nationalism was published in Contexts magazine this month.

Guest Blogger Christina Barmon made a big splash this month with her post, To Sit or Not to Sit: Gendering How We Pee.  Maybe we can get it up to 500 Facebook likes today!  If you’d like to be a part of our Guest Blogger Team, with access to the best reader submissions, send us a note at socimages@thesocietypages.org.

Contributor Caroline Heldman made nine appearances on Fox and the Fox Business channel this month, in addition to writing a fantastic series marking the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina and kicking off our Election 2012 Sexism Watch.

Lisa was also quoted in an Inside Higher Ed article about the American Sociological Association’s annual conference in Las Vegas.  And she chatted for a few minutes about the sexualization of girls with sexologist Logan Levkoff on CKNW’s Bill Good Show.

Course Guides:

Classes are in full swing for the SocImages team!  Gwen is getting started on a Course Guide for Introduction to Sociology, a list of topic-specific quality SocImages material arranged in a way that we hope instructors will find familiar and convenient.  We’d love to see more!  If you are teaching this semester and would like to be forever inscribed on our pages as a generous soul, check out our Instructors Page for more information.

Featured Reader!

This is a shout out to our long-time reader and prolific idea submitter, Katrin.  Katrin is at the University of Cambridge in Politics, Psychology, Sociology, and International Studies, researching climate change. She stumbled across the blog while searching some OECD statistics… and says she then spent the entire rest of the day flicking through ALL the other posts.  She’s also a Shakesville superfan, as we are.

Social Media ‘n’ Stuff:

Finally, this is your monthly reminder that SocImages is on Twitter and Facebook.  Learn more about your editors at Lisa’s and Gwen’s websites.  And a bunch of us are having fun on twitter: @lisadwade, @gwensharpnv, @familyunequal, @carolineheldman, and @jaylivingston.

Presidential hopeful and U.S. Congressman Ron Paul (R-TX) made the news over the weekend arguing, among other things, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) is unnecessary or, even worse, creates a kind of moral hazard in populations who come to depend on Federal relief efforts. In remarks reported Friday, Rep. Paul said that Hurricane Irene should be handled “like 1900,” the year that a large storm killed approximately 8,000 individuals in Galveston and a few thousand more onshore, when it struck the low-lying island and nearby small communities on the Texas coast.

It is certainly true that the Federal response to the destruction of Galveston was relatively minor. Systematic Federal management and provision of aid to individuals in disaster crystallized in response to the Mississippi River’s catastrophic flooding in 1927.  In 1900, it was limited for the most part to President McKinley sending surplus Army tents to house the newly homeless residents of Galveston, and loaning some ships to transport relief goods.

The nation as a whole, on the other hand, quickly mobilized relief donation efforts through newspapers, state and city governments, and the dense network of fraternal organizations that characterized American civil society in 1900. The nation’s response was along the lines of the civic and political institutions of the time, with all that entailed.

[Credit: Rosenberg Library’s Galveston and Texas History Center archives]

So, for instance, some of the citizens of Galveston who survived the storm were given liquor for their nerves and pressed into service at gunpoint by local authorities to clear dead and putrefying bodies from the wreckage; some were later partially compensated for their time with a small sum of money. Property owners, however, were exempted from mandatory clearing of debris and corpses.

Voluntary associations – often segregated by gender, race, ethnicity, and class – took care of their own members as best they could, but the broader distribution of relief supplies arriving from other areas was handled by committees of Galveston’s social and economic elites, based on their knowledge of their city’s political districts. Distribution efforts throughout the Texas coast were controversial enough that hearings were held by the Texas State Senate to investigate reports of improper relief distribution, some of which were borne out by testimony but none of which were pursued.  Survivors’ letters suggest that in some cases the nicer relief goods – the distribution of which was handled by committees of Galveston’s social and economic elites on the basis of what they knew about their city’s political districts – went to the wealthier victims’ districts, when they weren’t re-routed by less wealthy and somewhat disgruntled Galvestonians tasked with actually lugging the supplies around the city.  And Galveston’s African-American community was wholly shut out of the rebuilding process and denied a seat on the Central Relief Committee, despite efforts to secure a place in helping shape the collective destiny of the city. This is hardly surprising: poorer Americans tend to suffer disproportionately in most disasters, and are often left out of planning and rebuilding efforts.

There is much to be said for the response of Galveston’s Central Relief Committee. Under their leadership the city built the seawall that helps protect the city to this day and they initiated a series of successful municipal reforms that became widespread during the Progressive era. But we should not let unexamined nostalgia blind us to the realities of the situation in Galveston in the months after the 1900 storm.

Nor should we forget that the techniques that might have been more or less appropriate in 1900 were attuned to a society that has since changed quite a bit. It would be hard to imagine contemporary Americans pressed into service to clear bodies, barring a truly exceptional event. And despite its shortcomings, American culture is on the whole more egalitarian in 2005 than it was in 1900.

But the dense network of associations through which much assistance flowed to the city simply does not exist in the contemporary U.S. for a variety of reasons, none of which are reducible to the growth of the Federal government.  Instead, Americans support each other in crises by way of donations to highly professionalized and technically adept disaster relief organizations like the Red Cross, and by maintaining government organizations charged with preparing for the worst disasters and catastrophes with their tax dollars.

This makes sense in part because contemporary cities and the economic arrangements which undergird them are much more complex beasts than they were in 1900. The following chart property damage and deaths caused by major disasters over the 20th century:

[Source: The Federal Response to Hurricane Katrina: Lessons Learned, p. 6.]

The overall trend is toward less lethal but much costlier disasters, which in turn causes significant disruptions to the ordinary functioning of local businesses and municipal governments that depend on tax revenues from those businesses. This necessitates more Federal involvement, as cities and state governments struggle to get their own houses in order, and to pay for the resources and technical know-how needed to rebuild infrastructure, modern dwellings, and businesses. As Lawrence Powell, a historian at Tulane University in New Orleans, asked of the influx of well-meaning volunteers in response to Katrina, “Can the methods of a nineteenth-century barn raising drag a twenty-first-century disaster area from the mud and the muck?”.

The 20th century history of Federal disaster policy can be described as a cycle of expansion and contraction. Increasingly complex disasters draw forth ad hoc solutions, which are then formalized and later institutionalized until they grow unwieldy and are periodically consolidated in efforts to provide more efficient, systematic, and effective services that are less prone to fraud or waste.

Small and big business, social movement organizations, academics, professionals, voluntary associations and NGOs have all helped shape the trajectory of that cycle, as when civil rights organizations successfully lobbied Congress and the Red Cross after Hurricane Camille in 1969 to provide a baseline of minimum assistance to hurricane victims, rather than the older policy that granted aid on the basis of pre-disaster assets (and which thus tended to favor wealthier victims on the basis that they had lost more than had the poor).

In recent decades, this has tended toward deregulation of coastal development in deference to free market ideals and a Congressional movement in the mid 1990s that sought to pay for disaster relief by, in large part, cutting social service programs that serve the poor. (See Ted Steinberg’s Acts of God for one good historical and political economic critique of U.S. disaster policy.)

How Federal disaster mitigation efforts can be more efficient, just, or effective is certainly a worthy conversation to hold. How best to arrange – and pay for – social relationships around economic, ecological, and technological risk is also an excellent topic for deliberation and debate. But to seriously argue that we should strive to make our disaster response regime more like that enjoyed by Americans in the early half of the twentieth century is, for lack of a better word, silly.

(For that matter, it’s hard to understand what Rep. Paul means by his call for more control by the States; the decision to request the involvement of the Federal government and FEMA already rests with the State governors, as per the Stafford Act.)

Former generations of Americans saw a patchwork of state government solutions as inadequate to managing modern disasters, particularly those that overwhelm municipal or State governments. They built Civil Defense agencies, the Office of Emergency Preparedness, and later FEMA in an effort to combine accountability and economies of scale and expertise, and to ensure that in times of disaster Americans could count on their Federal government to marshal tools and talent when local and State governments are overwhelmed and help is asked.

And as my own research shows, the efforts of these state organizations have long been understood by victims and outside observers alike as expressing and relying on bonds of fellow citizenship and civil solidarity. That in recent decades this legacy has been tarnished with cronyism and mismanagement from above says more about those political actors and the institutions of American electoral politics than it does about the inherent worth of Federal disaster management organizations.

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Brady Potts is a lecturer in the Department of Sociology at the University of Southern California. His current research focuses on the history of public discourse and narratives around risk and hurricane disasters, and the role of civic culture in American disaster response.

If you would like to write a post for Sociological Images, please see our Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s blog.

News media are comparing Hurricane Irene to Hurricane Katrina in ways that allow us to forget that Hurricane Katrina was a humanmade disaster, but in one way, these events are similar – prisoner evacuation. New Orleans officials chose not to evacuate 7,000 inmates, some of whom were trapped in flooded cells and later left on a bridge for days without food and water, as detailed in this post.  Officials in New York have made the same decision with Hurricane Irene.

Elizabeth Furth, a former student who has participated in rebuilding efforts in New Orleans, sent in this map showing that Rikers Island is not part of the City’s evacuation plan:

Riker’s Island is the unzoned white blob in this close up:

Mayor Bloomberg announced that Riker’s Island would not be evacuated at a recent press conference, despite the fact that the island is surrounded by areas with the second highest evacuation rating (Zone B).  Other New York islands on the map are in Zone A (mandatory evacuation) or Zone B, but Riker’s has no evacuating rating, perhaps because the Department of Corrections doesn’t have an evacuation plan.  According to the New York Times blog, “no hypothetical evacuation plan for the roughly 12,000 inmates that the facility may house on a given day even exists. Contingencies do exist for smaller-scale relocations from one facility to another.”

Solitary Watch reports that Rikers Island was built on landfill, which is especially vulnerable to disasters. Rikers Island may weather Hurricane Irene without incident, but this disaster has again revealed how prisoners are considered disposable in times of crisis.

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s Blog.

Essence Music Festival, the “party with a purpose,” is a three-day event in New Orleans, featuring speakers during the day and musical performances at night.  It also caters to an almost exclusively black audience, bringing 400,000 people to the Crescent City each year.  Their sheer presence challenges informal systems of segregation in New Orleans.

After the show, I walked through the French Quarter with a few friends and noted how unusual it is to see so many black people in this part of town. Despite losing 118,000 black residents after Katrina, New Orleans is still a majority-black city, but highly segregated and even more so after Katrina.   Formal and informal “policing” generally keeps black locals out of the touristy French Quarter, with the exception of Black residents who work/entertain there.

You can see just how segregated in this map by Eric Fischer (each dot is 25 people; red = White residents, blue = Black residents, and Green = Asian residents):

I first learned about this informal segregation a few years ago when I convinced my reluctant friend, Earl, to go to the Cat’s Meow on Bourbon Street for karaoke. A few blocks from our destination, Earl lagged behind for a moment, distracted by a cat painting, and a group of white locals “warned” me that I was about to “get jumped” by the black guy behind me. Once on Bourbon, we were there for less than a minute before a police officer approached us, questioned Earl’s reason for being there, and told us both to leave.

Policing also occurs in “black neighborhoods” in New Orleans. Working and living in the Seventh, Eighth, and Ninth Wards, my white students and I have been stopped more times than I can count by NOPD, other law enforcement, and “friendly” white people who question why we are in these neighborhoods (or as one member of the National Guard called the Seventh Ward, “Ghettoville USA”).

With the Essence Festival in town, it was refreshing to see many black faces around the French Quarter over the weekend, enjoying the most enriching nightlife in the country. But not everyone saw it this way.

An acquaintance told me her white roommate stayed in all weekend because the Essence Festival was in town and she didn’t want to “get shot.” A white friend who works as a server in the French Quarter told me she was happy when the Essence Festival was over because she wouldn’t have to hear all the racist comments from her fellow servers and her boss. While these white residents live in a majority-black city, they feel threatened when black people come from out of town and don’t follow the rules that keep local blacks in “black neighborhoods.”

Then came the news that a New Orleans Police Department Commander was reassigned pending an investigation of instructions he gave to officers on Friday night when deploying them into areas catering to Essence Festival visitors. He allegedly instructed them to single out young, black men, although the exact language he used has not been released. It’s worth mentioning that Essence has never had an incident of violent crime during its seventeen years, and (now former) Mayor Ray Nagin reported that there is less crime in the city during the festival.

The presence of hundreds of thousands of black people from other parts of the county who don’t know the unspoken rules of racial segregation in New Orleans exposes both these rules and the pernicious racism that undergirds them.

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More maps from Eric Fischer.

Also on residential segregation, see our posts on how it leads to uneven rates of asthma, lead poisoning, and exposure to toxic release facilities.  But we blame poor people anyway.

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Course Guides and Collections

Course Guides collect strong SocImages posts organized in a way that follows standard syllabi for frequently-taught sociology courses or cover particular books, articles, or theorists. Collections are topical and usually inspired by current events. If you’re a sociology professor or graduate student and would like to volunteer – browse our archives, pull out the most compelling posts, and arrange them in ways other instructors would find familiar and convenient — SocImages would love to feature your collection!

Course guides:

• Introduction to Sociology, by Gwen Sharp (Nevada State College)
• Sociology of Gender, by Mary Nell Trautner (University at Buffalo, SUNY)
• Family and Society, by Marcie Hambrick, MSW (Georgia State University)
• Sociology of Sport, by J.A. Carter (University of Cincinnati)
• Sociology of Work, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)
• Sexuality and Society, by Amanda Jungels (Georgia State University)
• Sociological Research Methods, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)

Collections:

• Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, by Calvin N. Ho (UCLA)
• The fight for same-sex marriage, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)
• Police, black Americans, and U.S. society, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)
• White men and their violence, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)
• Women and history, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)
• Hurricane Katrina, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)
• Racist parties at American colleges, by Lisa Wade (Occidental College)

Advice for Students

• Advice for New College Students
• Professors’ Pet Peeves
• Advice for New College Grads

Guest Blogging

I accept guest post ideas. Please see the Guidelines for Guest Bloggers.

Sample Assignments

We’ve been collecting sample assignments from instructors who’ve tried them out. You can peruse them here.