crime/law

Jeremiah sent in a fascinating post by Nicola at edible geography about how Prohibition, which outlawed liquor in the U.S. from 1920-1933, changed our culture in a number of ways that aren’t immediately apparent. Nicola draws heavily on historian David Okrent’s book Last Call.

An image from Detroit the day before Prohibition went into effect in 1920:

Although Prohibition made liquor illegal, there were a number of loopholes, including certain alcoholic “fruit juices” (which in effect meant wine and hard ciders were often allowed), medicinal uses of alcohol, and industrial alcohols. Nicola provides an image of a prescription booklet for medicinal alcohol:

These loopholes led to a dramatic rise in the popularity of wine in the U.S.: “American wine consumption increased from 70 million gallons in 1917 to 150 million gallons in 1925,” according to Nicola. That change affected the agriculture of California, in particular, where many acres of other crops were replaced with wine grapes. In another unexpected consequence, Okrent argues that the medicinal use loophole was a central factor in the success of drugstores such as Walgreen’s, since sales of alcohol for medical purposes were very profitable.

Prohibition also affected international maritime laws. At that time nations controlled the areas up to three miles off their shores. Along much of the U.S. coast, “Rum Rows” emerged, strings of generally foreign-owned ships anchored just outside the 3-mile jurisdiction limit, all full of liquor. They would openly advertise prices. This is an image of the Kirk and Sweeney loaded with illegal alcohol in 1924 (via):

The U.S. Coast Guard has a collection of images of its efforts to stop the illegal importation of liquor. This image shows one of the small rum runner boats that would sail from the shore to Rum Row to load up on alcohol, as it approaches a British-owned boat called the Katherine in 1923:

Nicola describes the scene:

…a floating ship-city, thousands of miles in length, bobbing up and down in place along the coast of America, and serviced by a fleet of much smaller, nimble rum runners that slipped to and from the mainland under cover of night.

The U.S. government began to push for an extension of the area of the ocean over which governments have jurisdiction, from 3 miles to 12, which would make it much more difficult, time-consuming, and dangerous to run liquor in from the larger ships. The U.S. eventually succeeded in pushing its national borders outward, expanding national sovereignty over oceans, another unexpected consequence of our anti-alcohol policies. Rum Row dutifully relocated farther offshore.

Apparently Prohibition also fueled the popularity of mixed drinks (the mixers helped mask the smell and often unpleasant taste of bootleg liquor) and dinner parties (since you couldn’t buy liquor openly at restaurants but were relatively safe serving it in your home).  According to a set of Life photos about Prohibition, sales of Coca Cola tripled, since soda served as both a substitute and mixer for alcohol:

From the Life photoessay:

“People don’t realize,” Okrent told LIFE.com, “how much drinking there was in this country before Prohibition. We were awash in booze. In 1830, for example, the per capita consumption of alcohol was three times what it is today — 90 bottles of booze per year per person over the age of 15. By 1933, drinking was around 70 percent of pre-Prohibition levels, and with some fluctuations has stayed well below pre-Prohibition levels ever since.

Okrent says that contrary to what we often see in movies, where speakeasies are built to be easily dismantled or disguised as legal businesses in case the cops raided, by the late 1920s, many speakeasies were set up as permanent structures that were clearly serving liquor, and customers felt fairly secure going to them:

As soon as liquor became legal again, Americans enthusiastically returned to openly buying and selling it, though, as Okrent said, not at pre-Prohibition levels (photo from a different Life photoessay):

The Budweiser company decided to deliver beer to several high-profile locations by horse-drawn cart as a marketing stunt, giving us the iconic Budweiser Clydesdales. Here they are on their way to the Empire State Building:

And if you buy Okert’s argument, Prohibition even gave us NASCAR; he says it emerged in the South after Prohibition ended, when all the former runners of liquor needed new uses for their driving skills and fast cars now that they could no longer make a profit smuggling booze.

So there you have it: some of the unintended consequences of Prohibition, and example of the way public policy can have implications for areas of social life that seem far removed from the topic at hand.

Flavia Dzodan, of Red Light Politics, sent in a link to the Global Media Monitoring Project’s new report, Who Makes the News? The document looks at the gender imbalance in news production, based on an analysis of 1,281 newspapers, TV, and radio stations in 108 countries on November 10, 2009.The results indicate that women are still under-represented as news subjects, and that stories about women often reinforce stereotypes (focusing on women in family roles, using women for “ordinary person” quotes rather than experts, emphasizing women in stories about criminal victimization, birth control, and so on but not economic policy or politics, etc.).

A note on the methodology:

The research covered 16,734 news items, 20769 news personnel (announcers, presenters and reporters), and 35,543 total news subjects, that is people interviewed in the news and those who the news is about.

Internet sources were analyzed separately.

Overall, the analysis shows that both local and international news show a world in which men are highly over-represented as subjects, though women are more likely to be represented as victims, to have their family status mentioned, or to be in newspaper photos:

Interestingly, those reporting the news are more gender balanced, indicating that having more women producing the news doesn’t lead to an automatic reduction in under-representation of women in the news:

The representation of women as news subjects differs widely by category of news, from 12% of subjects in stories about agriculture to 58% in stories about family relations or single parenting (and 69% in a category they called the “girl-child,” stories about cultural practices impinging on or harming specifically female children, as opposed to children in general):

I’ll put the rest after the jump since there are quite a few images.

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We know that U.S. stereotypes associate black people, especially black men, with criminality (for examples, see our posts on who looks suspicious, racial profiling, and race-sensitive trigger fingers).  But a new study by sociologists Aliya Saperstein and Andrew Penner shows that being convicted of a crime sometimes shifts people’s racial self-perceptions in related directions.  Saperstein and Penner compared the self-identification of people in 1979 and 2002.  Reflecting the social construction of race, it is typical for there to be some mis-matches between people’s reported race at different times; but the researchers discovered that the experience of being incarcerated shaped if and how one’s racial identification changed.

The Table below compares the self-reported race in 1979 (far left column) with the self reported race in 2002 (next left column).  The third and fourth columns show the reported race of people in 2002 who were not incarcerated and incarcerated, respectively.  We see that, among people who were not incarcerated, 5% of the people who identified as “European” in 1979 identified as “Black” or some other race in 2002.  Among people who were incarcerated, however, we see a much greater defection from whiteness; only 81% of those who identified as white in 1979 still did so in 2002.

Saperstein and Penner argue that this shows that “…penal institutions play an important role in racializing Americans…”  The experience of being incarcerated somehow makes people, even people who feel white, feel somehow less white.

Via Contexts Discoveries.  For great examples of the social construction of race, start with this simple lesson, then see these great posts: black and white twins! wha’!?, Obama looks just like his white grandfather, history and race in the U.S. census, claiming whiteness in court, judging racial phenotypes in China, and figuring out “Creole”.

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.

One in every 31 American adults is under control of the correctional system.   The U.S. imprisonment rate is astronomical; it is six times that of many European countries.  This rather new reality is directly the product of the American war on drugs initiated by Reagan in the ’80s.

The Pew Center on the United States reports that the 1.4 million strong state prison population dropped in 2009, the first decrease since 1972.

Professor Chris Uggen, at Public Criminology, summarizes the causes identified by the report:

Pew attributes the drop to greater diversion of low-level offenders and probation and parole violators from prison; stronger community supervision and re-entry programs; and, a quicker release of low-risk inmates who complete risk reduction programs. State budget problems have likely played an important role in accelerating each of these trends.

The decrease is certainly better than an increase, but Uggen notes that it is quite small.  The prison population dropped by only 0.4%, or 5,739 inmates.  Further, the decrease in the state prison population was outpaced by the increase in the federal prison population, which went up by 6, 838 inmates.  Even so, Uggen argues, this is significant: “…any change in direction is meaningful after four decades of unabated growth.”

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.

My friend Captain Crab (happy late birthday!) pointed out a graphic at Portfolio that displays the results of their metropolitan “stress test,” in which they use ten measures such as poverty level, unemployment rate, commute, mortgage affordability, etc., to quantify how stressful different metro areas are to live in currently. Obviously it’s a rough measure — they usually use the rates of central cities rather than the larger metro area, people may interpret the same seemingly objective levels of negative or positive factors very differently in terms of how stressed they feel, only the 50 largest metro areas are included, and I don’t know if there’s clear evidence linking less-sunny places to less stress (anyone know?) — but it does provide a snapshot of how different cities compare.

You can hover over a city to get info on its ranking; since I live in Vegas, I checked it out, which has the highest unemployment rate of the 50 metro areas studied, but hey, we get lots of sun!

Just to clarify, the mortgage indicator isn’t the average mortgage, it’s the “affordability” of the mortgage “expressed as median house value per $1,000 of median household income”. The most unaffordable city? New York, followed by L.A.

The overall most stressful city is Detroit; the least is Salt Lake City. If you want to waste more time comparing the rankings on each of the ten measures, they have tables listing the results.

Trigger warning: racial violence and racist language.

A disturbing picture of racial slaughter emerges in the days following Katrina, at the hands of private residents and police officers. Racially-motivated murders were carried out in Algiers Point, a predominately white enclave nestled in mostly black Algiers, not far from Gretna. This part of the city is connected to the rest of New Orleans by bridge and ferry only, and it did not experience flooding. After the storm, a band of 15 to 30 white men formed a loose militia targeting anyone whom they deemed “didn’t belong” in their predominately white neighborhood (source). They blocked off streets with downed trees, stockpiled weapons, and ran patrols.

At least eleven black men were shot, although some locals expect that the actual number is much higher. On July 16, 2010, Roland Bourgeois was charged with shooting three black men in Algiers in the days following Katrina (source). He allegedly came back to the militia home base with a bloody baseball cap from Ronald Herrington, a man he shot, and told a witness that “Anything coming up this street darker than a paper bag is getting shot.”

To date, this is the only arrest of militia members, but the FBI is investigating the situation and will likely make more arrests given that two Danish filmmakers interviewed multiple residents who admitted shooting black people. In “Welcome to New Orleans,” militia member Wayne Janak smiles at the camera: “It was great! It was like pheasant season in South Dakota. If it moved, you shot it.” A woman nearby adds “He understands the N-word now… In this neighborhood, we take care of our own.” Many of the victims reported that militia members called them racial epithets during attacks, and a family member of militia members reports that her uncle and cousins considered it a “free-for-all—white against black,” and her cousin was happy they were “shooting niggers.”

Malik Rahim, a long-time Algiers resident and activist who co-founded Common Ground Relief after the storm, took me on a tour of bodies in his neighborhood a week or so after the storm. I only made it through one viewing – a bloated body of a man under a piece of cardboard with a gunshot wound to his back. I assumed that this death was being investigated, but should have known otherwise given that the state had essentially sanctioned these actions with a “shoot to kill” order that allowed civilians to make their own assessments of who should live or die.

One of Many New Orleans Vigilante T-Shirts Slogans:

Cross-posted at Caroline Heldman’s blog.

Caroline Heldman is a professor of politics at Occidental College. You can follow her at her blog and on Twitter and Facebook.

An article at Colorlines, and the accompanying video interview below, illustrates the way that employment policy virtually ensures that some people will remain excluded from the above-ground economy.  Fourteen months ago, the interviewee, Vincent, lost his job as a maintenance technician, just days before he would be eligible for unemployment, when his boss ran a criminal background check and discovered that Vincent had a 25-year-old record for breaking and entering.

Since then, he’s been unemployed.  When he applies for jobs, he’s frequently told that his application can’t be accepted because of  his criminal background. Accordingly, he is having a terribly difficult time finding a job.  “It’s real hurtful,” he says, “to know that your chances are so broke down to zero.”

Seventy-five percent of people who have left prison are currently unemployed.  When we see criminal recidivism, or the return to crime after release from prison, we should consider the possibility that we are essentially forcing people to turn to the “underground economy” by shutting them out of the “above ground” one.

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.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Courtesy of Talking Points Memo (via Comics with Problems), I have for you a link to the entire graphic novel (comic book? I’m not sure what to call this thing) Dignity & Respect: A Training Guide on Homosexual Conduct Policy. Here’s the cover:

If the cover hasn’t clued you in yet, this is a book meant to educate soldiers about the U.S. Army’s 1993 Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy (which applies to other branches of the military as well). It covers what the policy means, what to do if you have “credible evidence” that someone is engaging in homosexual activities (being gay is ok, you just can’t do anything), the Army’s anti-harassment policy (you know, you can turn someone in for being gay and ruin their military career, but you can’t be rude), and provides scenarios of situations that might occur and how a soldier should react.

Among other things you can learn that it’s not ok to imply a male soldier would go on a date with another man, but apparently it’s ok to say that no man on earth would ever go out with a female soldier in your unit:

I’m not going to put up every page here, since you can easily get them all at the links above, but it’s worth at least skimming. It’s…something. I cannot imagine that any soldier, even ones who cared about the issue a lot one way or the other, took this book seriously.

I will give them credit, though: the characters are extremely diverse in terms of race/ethnicity and gender.