crime/law

Like the segregation laws characteristic of Jim Crow, soon after Hitler came to power in the U.S. Germany (oops) he began establishing legal segregation of Jews from Aryan Germans.  The writing on the bench in this photo, taken in 1934, reads: “For Jews Only”:

The source explains that benches were segregated, with others reading “For Germans Only.”

See our other posts on Nazi Germany: comparing German remembrance of the Holocaust and U.S. remembrance of slavery, Nazi symbolism, Nazi celebration of motherhood, the racialization of the Jews, and this sympathetic memorabilia website.

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.

The figure below, borrowed from Good via Graphic Sociology, is a great example of the way that social problems are not given or automatic, but must be made.  It shows that, in 1998, gay marriage was not largely a social issue that needed to be addressed at the state level. Only Alaska had taken a stand on gay marriage.

Somehow gay marriage became a threat. And, by 2004, many states had passed resolutions making it illegal. Note that they needed to do so specifically because the possibility of legal gay marriage had gained support for the first time in (recent?) U.S. history. This was, essentially, a backlash against gay marriage that proved that pro-gay marriage initiatives were gaining ground, even as states moved to counter them.

The backlash continues through 2009, with a handful of states saying “yes” to gay marriage, creating a conflict that simply did not exist in 1998.

This is a great example of how social “problems” are socially constructed. Social processes, like activism and media attention, affect what issues gain the attention of the day, whether that be homelessness, nuclear power, teen pregnancy, global warming, or same-sex commitment.

The figure also reminds us that all of those anti-gay marriage laws can be interpreted as progress for the pro-gay marriage effort.  The laws prove that gay marriage is on the agenda.

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.

Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight posted some graphs that show a clear decrease in passenger deaths as a result of Violent Passenger Incidents (hijackings, sabotage/bombings, pilot shootings) since the 1980s:

Of course, the vast majority of people killed on 9/11 weren’t in the planes, but on the ground; if you include those, then 2001 has a much higher fatality level than any other year:

Silver’s point is that because of 9/11 and attempted bombings since then, many people are under the impression that the danger of violent incidents on planes is increasing. But it clearly isn’t–the number of passengers killed per decade as a result of such incidents has gone down even as plane travel has become more widespread and the number of people in the air each year has increased.

He also suggests,

…the loss of life that occurred on the ground on 9/11 would be very hard for Al Qaeda or any other terrorist group to replicate. The reason is that the last line of defense against the terrorists has also proven to be the best, and that is the passengers. Brave passengers thwarted the hijacking attempts aboard United 93 and Qantas 173, and sabotage attempts aboard NWA 253 and AA 63 (the Shoe Bomber incident).

This isn’t, obviously, meant to say that we shouldn’t worry about airline security or that the loss of life on 9/11 is unimportant. It’s just a good example of how it can be difficult to judge whether the risk of things is increasing or decreasing, particularly when they’re scary, and incidents that are actually quite rare can seem to be happening “all the time” once we’re thinking about, and noticing reports of, them.

Chris Uggen, fellow sociologist and editor of Contexts magazine, put together a graphic for Public Criminology comparing the current age of death row inmates in the US with their age at arrest (in the title, I assumed they were mostly men, but I don’t know):

So the median age at arrest is 27 and the median current age is 43.  This illustrates the lag time between arrest, conviction, sentencing, and  execution.  It also creates the conditions for what Uggen calls the “graying of prison populations.”   We are executing mostly middle-aged men and older, even as the young are disproportionately convicted for committing violent crimes.

I suppose whether or not we support executing a 50-year-old man for a crime he committed half a lifetime ago depends on what you think the death penalty is for.   Is it to satisfy the family of the victims?  Is it for revenge?  Is it for deterrence?  Is it to make the world outside the prison a safer place?

Executing people in their 40s, 50s, and beyond makes more sense if your goal is something like revenge, less sense if your goal is a safer world with less violent crime.  So, how we frame the death penalty (that is, how we answer the questions “what is it?” and “what is it for?”) shapes whether the graph above looks like social justice or social tragedy.

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.

As you are most likely aware, last week director Roman Polanski was arrested in Switzerland on an outstanding warrant for his arrest in the U.S. He fled to Europe in the 1970s after being charged with giving prescription drugs and liquor to a 13-year-old girl, then raping her. He plead guilty to a lesser charge of improper sexual conduct with a minor (and said he wasn’t aware she was 13 Reader Lucy pointed out that while he at times claimed not to have known her age, he later acknowledged that he did), then left the country and generally avoided countries with an extradition agreement with the U.S. (and skipped the Academy Awards when “The Pianist” was nominated).

Anyway, the reaction from Hollywood has been generally supportive of Polanski. Many film industry notables signed petitions last week opposing his extradition and asking that the charges be dropped. Melissa at Women & Hollywood suggests that this might be, in part, because:

…the issue touches close to home for many a director who has probably employed the “casting couch” and may have committed an action similar to Polanski’s sometime in his career. Plus, I’m sure there is pressure being applied to people to get on board and support the artist.

In an example of how many in Hollywood are defending Polanski, Whoopi Goldberg explained on The View that it wasn’t “‘rape’ rape”:

Notice that part of her defense (about about 0:30) is that they’d had sex before, which seems to preclude the possibility that he could have raped her (and assumes that those previous times were consensual and that sex with a 13-year-old is okay as long as it was consensual).

At about 2:05 she appears to make a sort of cultural relativist argument, saying that we’re a “different kind of society,” while in other places, including “the rest of Europe,” 13- and 14-year-olds are sexualized. That is, of course, entirely true (that girls at 13/14 have been treated as marriageable/sexual, not that this is specifically true “in the rest of Europe”), both historically and now (my great-grandma married a 22-year-old man when she’d just barely turned 15). There are a lot of interesting points there, but Goldberg doesn’t seem to be making a complex argument–she seems to be saying “in some places this would be okay, so we shouldn’t punish him.”

At 3:15 they discuss the responsibility of the mother, asking what kind of mom would let a young girl go alone with an older man. It’s a very appropriate question to ask. And my guess is: lots of parents in Hollywood, if the older man was an influential director who said he had set up a photo shoot for a major fashion magazine for your daughter. That, of course, is horrid; at the very least it’s extreme denial (“oh, he’s so nice, he just wants to help her get her big chance because he sees something special in her”), at worst it’s actively offering sexual access to your child for a chance at stardom.

I can’t see, however, that it in any way changes the situation regarding Polanski. And the use of excuses like “they’d had sex before, so it couldn’t be rape” is stunning to me.

Melissa at Women & Hollywood adds:

The thing about the Polanski case and why it is resonating across the country and the world is that lots of people don’t like the double standard that Hollywood is showing here. Hollywood is liberal when it feels like it like with the environment, but not when it comes to women.

Also check out Jillian York’s discussion of Hollywood’s support of Polanski.

Jezebel has a video of Chris Rock on the Jay Leno show criticizing the support for Polanski, one of the few celebrities to very openly do so.

UPDATE: Here’s the ever-awesome Jay Smooth on the topic:

In a random tangent, when I was searching for the video clip from The View I saw another version posted to YouTube with this description: “Disgusting Obama-type of Morals/Values—Whoopi Goldberg DEFENDS Roman Polanski: It Wasn’t Rape-Rape.” It reminded me of my recent post about Rush Limbaugh’s description of “Obama’s America,” in which Obama has become the symbol moral decay.

One way to study social problems is to take a social constructionist approach.  This approach suggests that the degree to which a social problem is perceived as problematic, as well as the kind of problem it is understood to be, is a function of social interaction.  For example, many Americans consider drunk driving to be a very bad thing and a serious threat.  Drunk driving is not only embarrassing, it is punishable by law, and a conviction could result in social opprobrium.  It wasn’t always that way, and it still isn’t all that stigmatized in some parts of the U.S. and, of course, elsewhere.

So, social problems aren’t immediately obvious, but need to be interpreted and presented to us.  And, of course, some people have more power to deliver a message to the public than others.

Artist Susannah Hertrich developed this graphic (via) designed to bring to consciousness the difference between the likelihood of harm from certain threats and public outrage:

I am unsure as to how she measured both “public outrage” and “actual hazard” but, giving her the benefit of the doubt and assuming that this information is based on some reasonable systematic measurement, the image nicely draws our attention to how some social problems can receive a disproportionate amount of outrage, contributing to their social construction as significant or insignificant social problems (or, alternatively, their social construction as public problems for which outrage is appropriate and useful, versus private problems that have no public policy dimensions).

So, for example, heat is seen as relatively harmless even though, as Eric Klinenberg shows in his book Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago, it kills many, many people every year and is severely exacerbated by social policies both directly and indirectly related to weather.  But the people who die from heat, and those who love them, tend to be relatively powerless members of our society: usually the elderly poor.

Conversely, the threat of terrorism attracts a great deal of public outrage, but is not a significant threat to our individual well-being.  Still, certain members of our society with an ease of access to the media and authoritative roles in our society (mostly politicians and pundits) can raise our fears of terrorism to disproportionate levels.

Similarly, bird flu makes for a fun story (as all gruesome health scandals can) and gun crime feeds “mainstream” fears of the “underclasses” (often perceived as black and brown men).  Both make for good media stories.  Less so, perhaps, pedestrian accidents.

—————————

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

In the Bible (book of Genesis), God sends two angels to the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah. These angels were charged with the task of evaluating the rate of sin within the walls. If the people were completely overridden by sin, God would destroy them.

What if those angels were statisticians, with access to GIS and geomapping software? How would the story have been different?

Some geographers at Kansas State University recently did an analysis of the spacial distribution of EVIL in the United States. Which part of the country is most afflicted by sloth? Lust? Greed? Envy? Wrath? Gluttony? Pride?

That’s right, folks – these geographers have operationalized sin, quantified it, then measured and mapped it. Pride is the aggregate distribution of all other sins, since it is supposedly the root of all evil (though one could also make a good case for apathy). Here’s how the sins are measured (and here’s a good view of the maps):

• Greed: Average incomes versus total inhabitants below the poverty line
• Envy: Total number of thefts (robbery, burglary, larceny, and stolen cars)
• Wrath: Total number of violent crimes (murder, assault and rape) per capita
• Lust: Sexually transmitted diseases per capita
• Gluttony: Number of fast-foot restaurants per capita
• Sloth: Expenditures on arts, entertainment and recreation versus rate of employment
• Pride: An aggregate of the six other sins

By looking at sin at the aggregate level, what they’re doing here is examining sin as a social fact, as opposed to an individual trait. This would be a good extension of a lesson on Durkheim and suicide as a social fact. This study really shows why we really can’t truly measure concepts such as this across space and time, since the meaning of these individual acts will vary. Are the same acts categorized and labeled as rape in Montana as they are in New York? How violent does a person need to be before they are arrested for assault, and does that differ by region? Are we really measuring rates of STDs, or rates at which people get treatment for them? If my measure of gluttony is different than yours, can I apply my measure to your actions and call you gluttonous? Or should I be using your measures to evaluate your actions? Is this aggregate data showing different rates of sin, or is it just an effect of different meanings attached to the concepts?

This would also be useful in showing how we can’t extrapolate individual characteristics from aggregate data. For example, I live in Indiana (but teach in Kentucky). This region is low in envy, lust, wrath, and pride; average in gluttony, sloth, and greed; and not particularly high in any of the sins. Apparently I live in one of the more virtuous parts of the country.

I guess I can cancel that fire and brimstone insurance.

But does this aggregate data also indicate that I, Anomie, have greater odds of being virtuous? NO. The fact that I am virtuous in every way is merely a coincidence. You see, their data is not measuring individual sinful behavior. Rather, it’s measuring social facts, and structural conditions, that they hypothesize to be correlated with individual sinful behavior (but I take issue with some of the measures). For example:

• I don’t have any STDS. CLEARLY I am not lustful. CLEARLY.
• If you have more fast food restaurants within a five mile radius of your house than I do, are you more gluttonous than me? No. But at the aggregate level, this may be a good quick and dirty device. At least they didn’t use obesity rates as their measure.
• And if I make $100k (one can dream) in Indiana, then move elsewhere to a job with the same salary, does that mean my greediness has changed along with my place of residence?

Now, excuse me while I get back to my slothful appreciation of art.

——————————

Angie Andriot, also known as Wicked Anomie, maintains the (mostly) sociology blog Wicked Anomie: Sociology Run Amok. On occasion, she likes to toss off her cape, hop offline, and play the role of Angie Andriot: Grad Student Extraordinaire – deftly juggling the writing of her dazzling dissertation at Purdue University with the imparting of wisdom to her lovely students at University of Louisville. She is particularly fond of symbolic interactionism. And cheese.

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

I found this graph of public support for the death penalty over time at the Gallup Poll website:

I’m not sure what the “2828” and “3030” are at the right-hand side of the “% Against” line–perhaps they didn’t round off the %s? I looked at the specific %s given in a table and that seems to fit–that they were supposed to be 28% and 30% and somehow weren’t entered correctly.

Some other questions that were asked:

Generally speaking, do you believe the death penalty is applied fairly or unfairly in this country today?

Asked about if the person believes an innocent person has been executed in the past 5 years:

Do you feel that the death penalty acts as a deterrent to the commitment of murder, that it lowers the murder rate, or not?

The answer to that last question is interesting in that it indicates people do not, in general, support the death penalty because they believe it reduces the likelihood of more murders. The most common response to why people support it is based on a retaliation/”eye for an eye” principle, not deterrance: