crime/law

Crossposted at Racialicious.

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After presenting lots of statistics about racial disparities in criminal justice, I showed my class the videos from ABC News What Would You Do? in which first White and than Black youths vandalize a car in a public parking lot. [See the videos at ABC: Part I and Part II.]

There is only one 911 call on the White boys, but ten on the Black boys. Plus, while the White boys are vandalizing, someone calls 911 to report people who are suspected of planning a robbery — Black kids asleep in a nearby car! Well, most of the class, as expected, saw this the way I did, as evidence of a racial problem. I was trying to emphasize that not arresting Whites when they commit crimes is just as important in racial disparities as arresting Blacks. Some students pointed out (correctly) that it was a demonstration, not a controlled experiment and wondered (fairly) whether the producers selected cases for their strong differences. But a few very vocally insisted that the difference was not about race at all, but that the Black kids were wearing “gang clothing.” They got somewhat offended when I said, “yeah, Black styles” and then cut off that line of argument, saying “OK we disagree on that, but I don’t want to spend the rest of the class arguing about clothing.”

Today I went back to the video and took screen shots of the kids. They are all wearing hooded sweatshirts and jeans, as I said. (One student had insisted that the White kids wore tucked in shirts! Not so.)

There are subtle differences in how they wear the clothes, though. The Black kids’ clothes are bigger on them (and the kids themselves appear to me to be smaller). The White kids’ shirts have words on them which I assume are school names (the resolution isn’t good enough for me to read them) while one Black kid has some sort of design on it that you could construe as edgy — it is definitely not preppy. One Black kid is wearing a cap which (as can be seen elsewhere in the video) is a gold weave thing that I cannot imagine a White kid wearing, but he’s wearing it in the same way as lots of White kids wear baseball caps. In my view the only difference between the clothing was subtle differences in style sensibilities between Blacks and Whites, and that calling the Black kids’ clothing “gang attire” is ridiculous. These few students think that if the Black kids had been in “non-gang” (i.e. “White”) clothing, the result would have been different. (They did not even suggest dressing the White kids in “gang” styles.) I think they are just exhibiting extreme resistance to the obvious. (The same students criticized me for failing to show examples of Black crime.) Opinions?

Edit: I decided to add shots of the kid with the most distinctively Black hat. In these shots you can see that he’s also wearing a do-rag. Just to be fair. I can find no evidence that this is “gang attire.” But it is certainly distinctively Black.

Do you think it’s the do-rag and not the skin color that matters here?

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This Anonymous Guest Post is borrowed from Sociological Confessions. The blogger is a Sociology professor who teaches courses on race relations and does public sociology work on racial disparities in criminal justice. In this post, she poses a question based on an interaction with students who questioned her interpretation of an incident as racial.

Jayna T. and V. sent in a number of commercials for home security systems. They point out that in all the commercials they’d seen (there are many, many, many more than what I have here), the intruders are men (White men, from what I can tell) and the person endangered is a White woman, either alone or with her daughter:

So they’re selling home security systems by playing on the idea of the vulnerable middle-class White woman, easily victimized in her home. Luckily, home intruders are easily frightened away by an alarm system and run for the hills.

Saturday Night Live recently parodied these commercials, and I think the skit sums them up nicely:

UPDATE: A commenter pointed out this Target: Women segment on the same topic:

Boy, you can’t open the paper these days without seeing something about how irrevocably fucked California’s finances are. With a budget deficit approaching a staggering $40 billion dollars, it’s worth noting that not only is their deficit the biggest in the country in absolute terms but also as a proportion of state GDP. That’s pretty impressive given that California’s economy is bigger than all but a handful of countries.

In my line of work, “Raiding the UCs” is a very real phenomenon. Faculty have seen salaries slashed by 20% (with talk of more cuts to come) while students have experienced dramatic tuition hikes – although it’s fair to note that in-state tuition before the hikes was far lower than in most states. The recent cuts come on the tail end of a 15 year trend that has seen the university system’s share of the state budget halved. With too many obligations and not enough money, it would make sense that cuts to a vital sector like education would be indicative of cuts across the board.

Oh.

Lost in the budget debate is the fact that California spends nearly 10% of its annual budget on the Department of Corrections. Eight billion dollars. Let’s see that with the zeroes: $8,000,000,000. This is, of course, in addition to other money spent on law enforcement and the criminal justice system. Such figures look reasonable only in comparison to a trainwreck like Michigan, where a mind-blowing 22% of the state budget is spent on warehousing the poor in prisons.

We can re-hash all the usual, obvious, and valid culprits – “guideline” sentencing, mandatory minimums, three strikes, a vast social underclass deriving minimal benefit from the state’s aggregate wealth – but we’d say nothing new. The more important questions is how prison systems, and California’s in particular, can absorb the coming increase in crime concomitant with an extended period of double digit unemployment. At a time when every agency needs to get cheaper, the CDC must continue to get bigger (and inevitably costlier) to provide a convenient dumping ground for society’s expendables.

This problem is fascinating because like the Federal budget there is no reasonable move that doesn’t make the situation worse. California can start paroling more people. With no jobs available even for Californians with clean criminal backgrounds, we can imagine how few ex-inmates will find an “honest” living and how high the rate of recidivism will be. It can adopt different sentencing guidelines, which is politically unlikely and will provide only gradual long-term relief. They can simply stop arresting and/or charging so many people, but that too is politically infeasible and may ultimately lead to increased crime levels. They can, as publications as mainstream as Time have noted, formally surrender in the War on Drugs and legalize weed. I will believe that when I see it (although I don’t entirely discount it as the budget situation gets progressively more desperate). They could simply slash the budget, which may not be realistic given the high fixed costs of the system and the current levels of overcrowding/understaffing.

Spending twice as much on prisons as higher education should prompt some soul searching. I won’t hold my breath; in all likelihood the status quo will be maintained and the share of the budget devoted to corrections will continue to increase. Devoting one of every ten tax dollars to locking up the poor is understood as the cost of doing business in a state and society that choose to solve the problem of a persistent underclass the same way it deals with trash; that is, by collecting it in cities and shipping it out to the middle of nowhere to be buried under a mountain of other garbage, never to be seen or thought of again.

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Ed is a Political Scientist who claims to finds “the spatial and geographic context of political behavior — partisanship, turnout, and public opinion” — particularly thrilling.  You can learn more, vaguely inappropriate, things about Ed here.  In the meantime, we’re thrilled to feature his post questioning California’s questionable budget priorities. He blogs at Gin and Tacos.

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

If you’re interested, I wrote a piece for The Daily Mirror about my recent trip to the LAPD’s “Behind the Scenes” exhibit here in Vegas (which got a lot of media attention when the Kennedy family protested the inclusion of bloody clothing from Robert Kennedy’s shooting). My friend Larry was interested in the politics involved–whose personal tragedy gets put on public display? Were the displays as sensationalistic as he suspected they would be? He was particularly interested in how the case of the Black Dahlia (aka Elizabeth Short) would be presented, and what the LAPD would think was appropriate to display for public consumption.

So I agreed to go take a look. And I was horrified in so many ways. Absolutely stunned. You can find the piece here.

Michelle DuB. sent in some data from the Toronto Star, showing that blacks are more likely than whites to be stopped by police in every single patrol zone except for one.  The disproportion was even high in mostly white areas; they were stopped up to 17 times as often (darker red is most disproportion):

Click here for a video showing what some citizens and a bunch of Toronto police have to say.

See also our posts showing how the stopping of people on the street usually results in… nothing (other than people feeling harassed) and how racial profiling turns out to be ineffective anyway.

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.

Katrin sent along links to visual portrayals of how much money goes, or could go, to various causes.  While sometimes it’s hard to comprehend what a billion, or 300 billion, dollars amounts to, these images give us perspective on just where our priorities lie.  The segments below are clipped from the visuals for the U.K. and the U.S. at Information is Beautiful.

The British example nicely illustrates how little social services like education, police, and welfare cost in the big scheme of things.

It also reveals how easy it would be to wave all of the African countries’ debt to Western countries. Just £128 spread out over the West.  Shoot, that’s the money for just a couple of corporate bailouts.

The U.S. example reveals how costly (just) the Iraq war has been.  All of our spending pales in comparison to that expenditure., with the exception of what we have spent bailing out the U.S. economy.

It also reveals that the U.S.’s regular defense budget is almot enough to feed and educate every child on earth for five years, and/or about the same as the revenues of Walmart and Nintendo combined.

If we diverted the money spent on porn, we could save the Amazon… almost five times over.  For that matter, if we gave our yoga money to the Amazon, that would just about do it.

Bill Gates could have paid for the Beijing Olympics and had money left over.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in an interactive breakdown of the US Budget for 2011.  In the figures below, the sizes of the squares represent the proportion of the budget, but the colors refer to changes from 2010 (dark and light pink = less funding, dark and light green = more).  These figures will give you an idea, but the graphic is interactive and there’s lots more to learn at the site.

See also our posts on how many starving children could be fed by celebrity’s engagement rings and where U.S. tax dollars go.

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.

Carl G. alerted us to a controversy starring photographer, Umida Akhmedova.  Akhmedova’s pictures of her native Uzbekistan have incited the country to try her for defamation.  If found guilty, she could be sentenced to six months in prison or three years of forced labor.  Here are some of her photographs.

The state argues that Akhmedova has defamed and slandered Uzbekistan, making it seem as if the country is impoverished and backward. Photographers are defending Akhmedova, arguing that if anything makes Uzbekistan look backward, it’s their desire to censor artists. Frankly, I can see both points.

First, I do think that Akhmedova should be able to capture what she likes and disseminate her images.  The problem is not her representation.  The problem is that Akhmedova’s photographs may be the only representations of Uzbekistan that some people ever see.  That is, the problem isn’t Akhmedova’s pictures, it’s that there aren’t more photographs, of varying parts of Uzbek life, by more photographers noticed outside of the state.

Whenever there is a limited number of representations (or when those that are available converge), those that are disseminated tend to overdetermine perceptions of that place or those peoples.  That is, that one representation comes to stand for the whole.  We in the U.S. would likely not image a similar controversy over one photographers images of say, celebrities (to take an extreme example), because there are thousands of counter-representations.  Uzbekistan, however, does not have the luxury of not caring how the state is represented in Akhmedova’s photos.

So, to conclude, I don’t think Akhmedova should be in trouble, but I do understand why Uzbekistan might be so sensitive.

We’ve seen the same phenomenon with photos of the Middle East, Appalachia, American Indian art, Africa (see both here and here) and, I’ve argued, the TV show Jersey Shore.  We could make the same argument about the preponderance of images of just one type of beauty.

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 week the Supreme Court overturned a ban that “prevented corporations [and unions] from using their profits to buy political campaign ads” (source).  The ruling enhances the ability of these organizations to throw money behind candidates, potentially increasing their ability to influence political decision-making by shaping who ends up in, and out of, office.  The majority argued that the decision honored the First Amendment right to free speech.  And, since corporations, according to U.S. law, are persons, they have the same right to free speech as any of us.

They also, of course, happen to have a lot more money.

So much money, Senator Charles Schumer (D – New York) said, that “…the winners of next November’s election. It won’t be the Republican or the Democrats and it won’t be the American people; it will be corporate America” (source).

Matthew Yglesias puts this in perspective (source):

Bank of America, for example, dedicates $2.3 billion to marketing in 2008 so it’s clear that they’ve got the budget to mount a $100 million series of scathing attacks on a Senator who pisses them off and basically laugh that off (and note that in 2004 total spending on Senate campaigns was just $400 million). And if you can have it be the case that just one Senator goes down to defeat for having pissed off BofA then everyone else will learn the lesson and avoid pissing them off in the future. You don’t need to actually sustain that volume of campaign spending.

Others argue that the ruling doesn’t so much change the political landscape as make it more honest, since corporations have always found ways around the rules anyway (source):

“Whether there’s a vast increase in the amount of resources spent, it’s hard to say,” said Joseph Sandler, a former lawyer for the Democratic National Committee. “There’s already so much they can do.”

…

Republican consultants, in particular, argued that the decision would simply shift spending by political action committees and issue-based “front groups” to the corporations themselves.

“I don’t believe that the ruling will fundamentally change the outcome of the elections given the obscene amounts of money that was spent independently in the last two years by everyone,” said Jim Innocenzi, a GOP strategist in Alexandria, Va. “You could argue that since everyone has figured out a way to get around the rules, we’d be better off with full disclosures of who is really paying for this stuff and let everyone just promote whatever cause they want.”

The decision left unaddressed the question of whether this meant that multinational corporations, with non-U.S. roots and branches, were allowed to throw money to candidates (source).  Right now, the answer appears to be “yes.”  This, then, allows for an unprecedented “foreign” influence on U.S. elections.

So, with all  that said:  How do unions and corporations spend their money in elections?  What can we expect?

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a link to the Center for Responsive Politics listing the 100 corporations with the largest contributions to political campaigns between 1989 and 2009, as well as the direction of their donations (to the left or right).  Donations include:

Direct “soft money” contributions from the organization’s treasury. Under federal law, contributions from the treasuries of corporations, unions or other organizations may only be given to the parties’ “non-federal” (soft money) committees.

Contributions from the organization’s political action committee, or PAC. The money for these comes from individuals who work for or are connected with the organization, and it’s given on behalf of the organization.

Contributions by individuals connected with the organization. This includes employees, officers, and members of their immediate families.

Here are the results:

At last as far as these top 100 are concerned, it doesn’t appear that there is an overwhelming preference for Republicans, as one might expect.  Then again, a lot of these are unions.

But what does it mean when corporations and unions are sitting “on the fence”?  Basically it means that they’re covering their bases.  They win influence whether Republicans or Democrats end up in office.  Interestingly, 46 of the 100 are on the fence.  This doesn’t mean that things are somehow more fair or balanced, it means that, no matter who wins, corporations and unions win.

For another look at this type of information, see our post on partisan political contributions by U.S. companies.

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.