crime/law

In the wake of the shootings in a Colorado theater last week, Sean D. sent in a BBC video clip commenting on media coverage of mass murders.  It criticizes the typical response, which usually involves intense coverage dissecting every piece of the story, focusing closely on the killer and his motivations.  This can go on for days.

The narrator argues that this is exploitative — the media is using gruesome events to drive ratings (often for days at a time) — and it feeds into the public’s tendency towards voyeurism.  He also includes an interview with a forensic psychiatrist, Dr. Park Dietz, who specializes in such cases; he says that this type of coverage is the exact opposite of what the media should do… if it is interested in saving lives.  The attention, especially to the criminal himself, encourages other “anti-heros” to contemplate and execute mass murders themselves.

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.

A while back I was summoned for jury duty and found myself being considered for a case against a young Latina with a court translator.  She was accused of selling counterfeit Gucci and Chanel purses on the street in L.A.  After introducing the case, the judge asked: “Is any reason why you could not objectively apply the law?” My hand shot up.

I said:

I have to admit, I’m kind of disgusted that state resources are being used to protect the corporate interests of Chanel and Gucci.

Then I gave a spiel about corruption in the criminal justice system and finished up with:

I think that society should be protecting its weakest members, not penalizing them for trivial infractions. There is no way in good conscience I could give that girl a criminal record, I don’t care if she’s guilty. Some things are more important than the rules.

I was summarily dismissed.

Criminal prosecutions are one way to decrease counterfeiting and, yes, protect corporate interests and Shaynah H. sent in another: shame.  This National Crime Prevention Council/Bureau of Justice Assistance ad, spotted in a mall in Portland, tells you that if you buy knock-offs, you are “a phony.”

Yikes.  I would have preferred “savvy” or “cost-conscious.”  But, no, the message is clear.  You are a fake person, a liar, a hypocrite.  You are insincere and pretentious.  You are an impostor.  (All language borrowed from the word’s definition.)  And these are not something that anyone wants to be.

But, honestly, why does anyone care?

I suspect that counterfeits don’t really cut into Chanel’s profits directly.  The people who buy bags that costs thousands of dollars are not going to try to save some pennies by buying a knock-off.  Or, to put it the inverse way, the people who are buying the counterfeits wouldn’t suddenly be buying the originals if their supply ran out.

Instead, policing the counterfeiters is a response to a much more intangible concern, something Pierre Bourdieu called “cultural capital.”  You see, a main reason why people spend that kind of money on handbags is to be seen as the kind of person who does.  The handbags are a signal to others that they are “that kind” of person, the kind that can afford a real Gucci.  The products, then, are ways that people put boundaries between themselves and lesser others.

But, when lesser others can buy knock-offs on the street in L.A. and just parade around as if they can buy Gucci too!  Well, then the whole point of buying Gucci is lost!  If the phony masses can do it, it no longer serves to distinguish the elites from the rest of us.

In this sense, Chanel and Gucci are very interested in reducing counterfeiting; the rich people who buy their products will only do so if buying them proves that they’re special.

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.

During college I spent a season selling fireworks at a roadside stand in South Dakota.  As you can see on the map below, posted at Buzzfeed, South Dakota is one of the few states where you can buy serious fireworks.  We sold some pretty hard-core stuff, but I mostly liked working there because the packages were so pretty.

In any case, if you haven’t lived in any of the dark blue states, you may not have seen the roadside stands that pop up this time of year.  Some are elaborate seasonal operations, but others are rather ramshackle.  Fireworks for sale end up getting crammed into all manner of places.  Lucky for us, in 2010 photographer Bill Vaccaro drove across the country snapping shots of these retailers.

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.

Cross-posted at Global Policy TV.

Title IX, an amendment to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, stated that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance…”  Passed on this day in 1972, this policy meant that schools and colleges receiving federal funding could not legally give preference to men.  Instead, they had to allocate their resources to men and women in proportion to their interest and enrollment.

The intention of the policy was to change the norms that gave preference to men in all sorts of fields, from medical schools to sports teams.  Because most schools and colleges have extensive athletics departments, sports was included among the resources that the schools were required to dole out fairly.

Accordingly, even grudging and partial compliance with the requirements of Title IX dramatically increased the opportunity for women to play sports.  In the next 35 years, women’s participation in high school and college sports would increase by 904% and 456% respectively (source).  Today, 42% of high school athletes and 45% of college athletes are women (source).

Title IX is often mistakenly accused of forcing schools to cut funding for men’s athletics.  In fact, funding for men’s athletics, as well as the number of men who play sports in school, has increased since Title IX.  The chart above also shows that men’s participation has increased by 15% in high school and 31% in college.  It’s not true, then, that Title IX has led to fewer male athletes (especially because some colleges count men as women).  Still, there is great resistance to the Amendment, with a particular emphasis on sports.  Many schools are only marginally compliant, and then only because (tireless) Title IX Officers keep pressure on institutions to follow the law.

It will be fascinating to see how changing college demographics affect the politics around Title IX.  After all, forty years later, people still argue that it’s not right that women’s sports get (almost) as much funding men’s.  Now there are more women on college campuses than men, so proportional funding may mean spending more money on women’s sports than men’s.  Fire and brimstone upon us.

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.

Cross-posted at Montclair SocioBlog.

Air pollution is what economists call an “externality.”  It is not an intrinsic part of the economic bargaining between producers and consumers.  The usual market forces — buyers and sellers pursuing their own individual interests — won’t help.  The market may bring us more goods at lower prices, for example, but it can harm the air that everyone, in or out of that market, has to breathe. To create or protect a public good, the free market has to be a little less free.  That’s where government steps in.  Or not.

Case in point: My son and his girlfriend arrived in Beijing ten days ago.  The got-here-safely e-mail ended with this:

…was blown away by the pollution! I know people talk about it all the time, but it really is crazy.

And it is.  Here’s a photo I grabbed from the Internet:

At about the same time, I came upon a this link to photos of my home town Pittsburgh in 1940.  Here are two of them:
Today in downtown Pittsburgh, the streetcars and overhead trolleys are gone.  So are the fedoras.  And so is the smoke.

The air became cleaner in the years following the end of the War.  It didn’t become clean all by itself, and it didn’t become clean because of free-market forces.  It got clean because of government — legislation and regulation, including an individual mandate.

The smoke was caused by the burning of coal, and while the steel mills accounted for some of the smoke, much of the it came from coal-burning furnaces in Pittsburghers’ houses.  If the city was to have cleaner air, the government would have to force people change the way they heated their homes.  And that is exactly what the law did. To create a public good — clean air — the law required individuals to purchase something — either non-polluting fuel (oil, gas, or smokeless coal) or smokeless equipment.*

Initially, not everyone favored smoke control, but as Pittsburgh became cleaner and lost its “Smoky City” label, approval of the regulations increased, and there was a fairly rapid transition to gas heating.  By the 1950s, nobody longed for the unregulated air of 1940.  Smoke control was a great success.**  Of course, it may have helped that Pittsburgh did not have a major opposition party railing against this government takeover of home heating or claiming that smoke control was a jobs-killing assault on freedom.

————————

* Enforcement focused not on individuals but distributors.  Truckers were forbidden from delivering the wrong kind of coal.

** For a fuller account of smoke control in Pittsburgh, see Joel A. Tarr and Bill C. Lamperes, Changing Fuel Use Behavior and Energy Transitions: The Pittsburgh Smoke Control Movement, 1940-1950: A Case Study in Historical Analogy. Journal of Social History , Vol. 14, No. 4, Special Issue on Applied History (Summer, 1981), pp. 561-588.

Jay Livingston is the chair of the Sociology Department at Montclair State University. You can follow him at Montclair SocioBlog or on Twitter.

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.”

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.

Several times we have posted images that reflect the realities of life within the U.S. prison system — for instance, photos of the impacts of overcrowding, life in juvenile detention centers, prison cemeteries, and the fate of prisoners during Hurricane Katrina. Alexander A. sent in a link to another striking collection of images of the corrections system. Josh Begley, a master’s student at NYU, collected aerial views of correctional facilities available from Google. His resulting project, Prison Map, makes visible an element of our society that most people rarely think about as actual, physical locations existing on the landscape. I’ve picked a few examples here, but I highly recommend going to the Prison Map website and looking at it in its entirely, which allows you to pick up on common patterns in the design of prisons.

Also check out the article about the Prison Map project at The Atlantic.

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.

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.