crime/law

In 2010, as a matter of free speech, the United States Supreme Court decided that there can be no limits on corporate spending on advertisements in favor of a political candidate (Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission).  Open Secrets produced two figures revealing the rise in “outside spending” (i.e., non-party spending) showing the rise.

Total outside spending:

Outside spending for liberals and conservatives:

Open Secrets explains:

…the 2004 election marked a watershed moment in the use of independent expenditures to try to sway voters, with most of that new spending coming from the national party committees.  The 2010 election marks the rise of a new political committee, dubbed “super PACs,” and officially known as “independent-expenditure only committees,” which can raise unlimited sums from corporations, unions and other groups, as well as wealthy individuals.

Hermes’ Journeys editorializes:

You can see that liberals slightly outspent conservatives every election since 1996. Except for this year, when quite suddenly a mysterious flood of funding caused conservative campaign coffers to skyrocket, DOUBLING what liberals could muster. Was this the result of concerned right-leaning citizens becoming active in politics and making individual donations?  Of course not, it was profit-minded corporations…

…enabled, if I may finished HJ’s sentence, by the recent court decision.

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.

Dmitriy T.M. and Jeff H. sent in a link to Mapping the Measure of America, a website by the Social Science Research Council that provides an amazing amount of information about various measures of economic/human development in the U.S. Here’s a map showing median personal (not household) earnings in 2009:

The District of Columbia has the highest, at $40,342; the lowest is Arkansas, at $23,470 (if you go to their website, you can scroll over the bars on the left and it will list each state and its median income, or you can hover over a state).

You can break the data down by race and sex as well. Here’s median personal income for Native American women, specifically (apparently there is only sufficient data to report for a few states):

Native American women’s highest median income, in Washington ($22,181), is  lower than the overall median income in Arkansas, which is the lowest in the U.S. as we saw above.

Here is the percent of children under age 6 who live below the poverty line (for all races):

Life expectancy at birth differs by nearly 7 years between the lowest — 74.81 years in Mississippi — to the highest — 81.48 years in Hawaii:

It’s significantly lower for African American men, however, with a life expectancy of only 66.22 years in D.C. (again, several states had insufficient data):

The site has more information than I could ever fully discuss here (including crime rates, various health indicators, all types of educational attainment measures, commuting time, political participation, sex of elected officials, environmental pollutants, and on and on), and it’s fairly addictive searching different topics, looking data up by zip code to get an overview of a particular area, and so on. Have fun!

Katelyn G. sent in a link to a story at The Economist about a new study that attempted to measure the harmful effects, to both the user and to the U.K. more broadly, of a number of legal and illegal drugs. The methodology:

Members of the Independent Scientific Committee on Drugs, including two invited specialists, met in a 1-day interactive workshop to score 20 drugs on 16 criteria: nine related to the harms that a drug produces in the individual and seven to the harms to others. Drugs were scored out of 100 points, and the criteria were weighted to indicate their relative importance.

Harm to others included factors such as health care costs, family disruptions, social services, and the cost of criminal justice programs to regulate drugs.

The results? Alcohol outranked all illegal substances they considered by a significant margin, particularly in terms of the harm caused to others:

Will this lead to major changes in drug policy in the U.K.? Unlikely. Here’s a tidbit from an NPR story:

…last year in Britain, the government increased its penalties for the possession of marijuana. One of its senior advisers, David Nutt — the lead author on the Lancet study — was fired after he criticized the British decision.

“What governments decide is illegal is not always based on science,” said van den Brink. He said considerations about revenue and taxation, like those garnered from the alcohol and tobacco industries, may influence decisions about which substances to regulate or outlaw.

In City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles, Mike Davis discusses the ways that public space are increasingly regulated to allow the types of activities preferred by the middle class and exclude those of the urban poor. He says that cities operate under “a rhetoric of social welfare that calculates the interests of the urban poor and the middle classes as a zero-sum game” (p. 224). That is, there are various uses groups might have for public space, but over time, activities or behaviors associated with the poor are being pushed out of public places (say, trying to make money or taking a nap), because they are seen as inherently interfering with more middle-class uses. While outlawing certain behavior in public places is often explained as a way to ensure safety, Davis argues, “…’security’ has less to do with personal safety than with the degree of personal insulation, in residential, work, consumption and travel environments, from ‘unsavory’ groups and individuals…” (p. 224).

I thought of Davis’s argument when I saw this photo send in by Dino of a sign in Bryant Park, in Manhattan. The sign welcomes visitors to enjoy the park, but under clear conditions:

It’s a good example of the zero-sum idea of use of public space: the acceptable ways of using the park are those that generally meet middle-class preferences, such as taking amateur photos, looking at flowers, walking your dog. But as Dino says, “the poor are punished: alcohol use in the park is illegal unless you can afford to enter the restaurants, rummaging through the garbage for needed food and supplies is illegal, trying to earn money without a permit (that costs money) is illegal.”

Note the second item you are “welcome” to do: “To spread blankets on the lawn, but not plastic material or tarpaulins.” While the sign doesn’t explicitly say why, Dino suspects this is an attempt to allow people to spread blankets for picnics or sunbathing, but not allow someone without a home to spread a tarpaulin to try to create a dry place to sleep.  Similar behavior — spreading a covering on the ground to sit or lie on — is perceived differently depending on the presumed motivation for doing so (because you are temporarily enjoying the outdoors vs. because you don’t have a home).

The end result is to make public places less welcoming to some groups than others. Regulating these behaviors provides an excuse to arrest and remove the types of individuals likely to be seen as, in Davis’s term, “unsavory,” and ensures the rights of other users to be protected from even seeing evidence of homelessness, hunger, or unemployment.

UPDATE: I don’t think I did the best job of explaining Davis’s argument, and a couple of readers have taken great exception to the idea that regulating behavior in public spaces is problematic. My intention wasn’t to imply that having any type of rules about how you can act in parks is automatically awful, but rather to highlight the types of behaviors we do find acceptable and those we don’t, and how that intersects with the stigmatization of poverty. Saying “You can’t harass others in the park” or “you can’t play music so loudly that others can’t also enjoy the park” is one approach. Saying, “We’re going to make public spaces unpleasant for the homeless, regardless of their individual behavior,” is a very different approach, and Davis argues that it serves to concentrate the very poor in areas like L.A.’s Skid Row, increasing their likelihood of being victimized and exacerbating the problems of the neighborhood, while benefiting those in other neighborhoods who don’t want to see visible evidence of inequality or social problems.

Reader R says,

I think this is a really interesting discussion but I think that the Park sign doesn’t help the discussion but hinders it. We are now focusing on this sign as a representation of the ideas that Davis is presenting but I don’t think that it is.It is illegal to have any alcohol in a public space anywhere in new york city.New York City Administrative Code, section 10-125 That law I don’t believe is intended as a means to keep the homeless from drinking in parks, it does let the police enforce that but it also lets the police stop and arrest college students or any person. Fair or not that is what it is.
Also Bryant Park is a public space owned by a private company. The BPC (Bryant Park Corporation) does not get public funding but instead makes it through the venders in the park (cafes and such). This is why I believe that the sign says no commercial activity. With that I do not think many people would count someone asking for change as commercial activity.

I think this is a very interesting discussion and Davis makes very valid points but I think the imagery example could be better.

I think that’s a fair assessment. The sign got me thinking about Davis’s arguments about the use of social policy regarding public places (and the way they can concentrate poverty, risk, etc.), and then I was thinking more about the overall topic, rather than the specific park or sign.

In this 11-minute video, Dalton Conley interviews Victor Rios about the youth control complex.  He argues the that punishing arm of the state (the prison system) and the nurturing arm of the state (the education system) work together to criminalize, stigmatize, and punish young inner city boys and men.

Rios’ ideas apply very well to the treatment of Latarian Milton, the 7-year-old boy who was charged with grand theft auto for taking his grandmother’s car for a joy ride.

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.

Today Californians vote as to whether to legalize marijuana.  Chris Uggen at Public Criminology explains:

This measure (1) legalizes various marijuana-related activities, (2) allows local governments to regulate these activities, (3) permits local governments to impose and collect marijuana-related fees and taxes, and (4) authorizes various criminal and civil penalties.

There is a chance that the measure will pass; Gallup polls of U.S. opinion show that support for legalization has grown over time:

What will happen if California becomes the first state to legalize marijuana is the stuff of speculation or, more generously, modeling.  Uggen points to the work of scholars employed at the RAND Drug Policy Research Center (Beau Kilmer, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, Robert J. MacCoun, and Peter H. Reuter).  According to their models:

(1) the pretax retail price of marijuana will substantially decline, likely by more than 80 percent. The price the consumers face will depend heavily on taxes, the structure of the regulatory regime, and how taxes and regulations are enforced;

(2) consumption will increase, but it is unclear how much, because we know neither the shape of the demand curve nor the level of tax evasion (which reduces revenues and prices that consumers face);

(3) tax revenues could be dramatically lower or higher than the $1.4 billion estimate provided by the California Board of Equalization (BOE); for example, uncertainty about the federal response to California legalization can swing estimates in either direction;

(4) previous studies find that the annual costs of enforcing marijuana laws in California range from around $200 million to nearly $1.9 billion; our estimates show that the costs are probably less than $300 million; and

(5) there is considerable uncertainty about the impact of legalizing marijuana in California on public budgets and consumption, with even minor changes in assumptions leading to major differences in outcomes.

In other words, it’s really hard to tell what the consequences of legalizing marijuana will be!  Uggen urges caution.

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.

In this video sociologist Devah Pager describes her experimental research on race, criminal records, and employment with Dalton Conley.  Using matched pairs of black and white students posing as job applicants, she finds, stunningly, that black men without a criminal record are as likely to get a call back for a job as white men with one (see the tables here).  Black men with criminal records receive call backs for only about one in 20 completed job applications.

See also our post in which one man explains the “hidden life sentence” he received after a crime 20 years past.

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.

George H.W. Bush’s 1988 “Willie Horton” campaign ad is infamous for racializing fears of crime, encouraging stereotypes of African American men as violent and threatening. The ad is widely believed to have destroyed Michael Dukakis’s chances for winning the presidency, presenting him as soft on crime. It’s a classic example of race-baiting in political campaigns — ads that present racial/ethnic minorities as threatening. Jesse Helms took a different approach with his affirmative action ad, which draws on some Whites’ fears that they are losing out on jobs because of affirmative action.

This election cycle, a number of candidates have produced ads that clearly attempt to stoke and benefit from anti-Hispanic immigrant sentiment. Talking Points Memo posted a mailer sent out by the Yuma County, Arizona, Republican Party as part of its campaign against Democratic state Representative Rae Waters. One side shows a stop sign full of bullet holes and makes a link between immigrants and neighborhood crime:

SB 1070 is the controversial Arizona law that allows law enforcement officials to check the immigration status of people they have stopped for other violations if there is a “reasonable suspicion” they might be undocumented or not carrying the appropriate papers.

To drive the message home, the other side of the mailer contains an image of a blond child, looking a little disturbed, and again links opposition to SB 1070 to “drugs and violence”:

Here in Nevada, Senate candidate Sharon Angle is currently running this commercial that calls Harry Reid the best friend of “illegals,” who are “putting Americans’ safety and jobs at risk.”

The commercial ends with this image:

She has a second commercial that plays on the same themes:

In West Virginia, this ad against Nick Rahall, a Christian Lebanese-American, prominently displays the phrase “Arab Americans” (he chaired Arab Americans for Obama) while scary music plays in the background:

If you have other examples of racialized or anti-immigrant imagery in current campaign ads, let us know.

UPDATE: S. Elle let us know about this ad by Senator David Vitter, of Louisiana, which is very similar to the Angle commercials:

And kantmakm provided a link to this billboard outside Grand Junction, Colorado: