crime/law

From the Pew Center on the States report, One in 31: The Long Reach of American Corrections, “Adding up all probationers and parolees, prisoners and jail inmates, you’ll find America now has more than 7.3 million adults under some form of correctional control. That whopping figure is more than the populations of Chicago, Philadelphia, San Diego and Dallas put together, and larger than the populations of 38 states and the District of Columbia. During Ronald Reagan’s first term as president, 1 in every 77 adults was under the control of the correctional system in the United States. Now, 25 years later, it is 1 in 31, or 3.2 percent of all adults.”

See the press release for a quick summary and the full report for much more data.

Chris Uggen put together a pie chart of U.S. arrests (FBI statistics 2007) in order to show that “only a small proportion of arrests involve violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault” (see it here):

In 2007, only 4% of arrests were for violent crimes; another 12% were for crimes like burglary, theft, and arson; drug offenses (including drunkenness and DUIs) accounted for 31% of arrests.

Uggen mentions that he shows this data, in part, to talk about the way in which arrests for drug offenses disrupt families and neighborhoods.  Low income neighborhoods are devastated by the transfer (to put it nicely) of huge numbers of adult males to jails and prisons.  Those men are not overwhelmingly committing violent crimes (as stereotype suggest), but are imprisoned because of the intensive policing of drug crimes in those neighborhoods.  In another post, we put up a table that showed how the “drug war” that started in the 1980s disproportionately affected blacks.

For more on crime and imprisonment, see this post on the ineffectiveness of racial profiling, this table on the percentage of children with parents in prison by race, and this table that compares incarceration rates across countries.

On Feb. 13th, 2008, a Texas federal appeals court ruled that the prohibition against selling dildos and fake vaginas violated the 14th Amendment.

That’s right. Such sex toys were illegal in Texas until early last year. According to a Slate article, they are still illegal in three other states: Virginia, Mississippi, and Alabama.

But don’t congratulate or castigate Texas just yet.  The state Attorney General wants the court to reconsider.

Here is an entertaining 11-minute discussion of the dildo debates in Texas (it’s a must watch):

At one point in U.S. history, sodomy was illegal in every state. In the penal codes (no pun intended), sodomy was sometimes defined as anal sex, sometimes as oral sex, and sometimes both. In some cases, the laws applied only to same sex partners, in other cases to any two partners (even husband and wife).

This map (found here) shows when each state repealed its law:

In 2003, the Supreme Court made all such laws unconstitutional. This image (found here) shows which states had sodomy laws that applied to same sex couples and those that had laws that applied to all couples:

Muriel M.M. brought my attention to the catalog for Galls, a company that makes equipment and uniforms for public safety officers (military, police, firefighting, etc.). Muriel, an EMT, says,

The thing about their products is they don’t change much. Over the ten years I’ve received the catalog I can pretty much tell you what’s going to be in it: guns, batons, handcuffs, clothing such as boots, coats, uniforms, etc. Medical equipment and fire equipment are sold such as sirens, lights, latex gloves, breathing equipment. The list goes on and on.

But the newest version of the catalog Muriel received has something new: handcuffs now come in colors, not just silver. The options are blue, brown, gray, orange, yellow, and pink (light and bright!):

There are a couple of interesting things here. For one, it’s an attempt to provide a little (very limited) individualization to people who have to wear standard uniforms. Of course, it’s a superficial type of customization, similar to getting a cell phone of a particular color, but it provides at least some sense that the product reflects the personality or tastes of the user…something companies figured out long ago could boost sales (how many colors do cell phones come in these days?). Given that, I wonder how many police departments would allow officers to use brightly-colored handcuffs. Officers are allowed to buy customized items, but they can’t just go buy a different color of uniform; it may be that little personalized “touches” like this are allowed, though.

It’s also interesting to think about what the reaction might be to an officer who showed up at work with pink handcuffs. I wonder how many female officers would want to bring attention to their gender by using a product marked by the stereotypical feminine color. It also made me think of this post about cops in Thailand being punished by being forced to wear pink Hello Kitty armbands. I’m assuming a person would buy pink handcuffs to express their taste, but after looking at the old post, it made me wonder if anyone would ever put pink cuffs on male suspects just to try to annoy them. I bet one of my relatives who is a police officer would totally do that, except that it would require him to carry pink cuffs around all the time, which he would never, under any circumstances, do. He flipped out because his son liked a pink ball once.

NEW! Ben O. sent us a link to a similar product, Petals Workwear for Women.  The company makes pink products for female construction workers.

Hard hat:

Tool belt:

Protective ear wear:

Protective eye wear:

NEW (Aug. ’10)! Garland Walton sent along these pink boxing accessories: gloves, tape, and a mouth guard.  All in pink!

See also our post with a cartoon riffing on how people seem to think that pinkification is the answer to gender inequality.

This Halloween, in Maryland, sex offenders who had been released from prison were required to put this sticker in a front window (news story here).

I can’t say it better than Gwen, so I quote her from this post:

I find the intense stigmatization of child sexual abuse, compared to other crimes, fascinating. With other crimes, once you finish the terms of probation, you’re pretty much done with the criminal justice system. Only with sex crimes (and generally only if they were against children) is there a requirement that the ex-felon register with law enforcement every time s/he moves even once probation is over, sometimes for a certain number of years, sometimes forever, depending on the state. I mean, you don’t have to do this if you murder someone, or even lots of people (or even if the victims were kids). Our culture currently defines child sexual abusers as unique, particularly horrific criminal who can never really be rehabilitated or reintegrated into society.

I wonder, though, to what degree this law makes children safer. It seems like a false sense of security–if you just know who the convicted sex abusers in your neighborhood are, you can protect your kids. Yet most child sexual abuse is committed by people known to the child and his/her family, not a stranger who just moved in to the neighborhood, and very often they have no criminal record, so these types of programs would be useless.

Shoshannah F. sent in this clip (originally found here) from Bill Maher’s show, in which he makes fun of many stereotypes of African Americans by applying them to Whites and imploring viewers to not let their prejudice against Whites keep them from voting for John McCain:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0iM0mUfATJk[/youtube]

It would make a great clip for discussing differences in how behaviors are attributed to race. Negative behaviors committed by African Americans (say, engaging in crime or being lazy) is often seen as an inherent trait of Blacks. When a White person does the same thing, his or her Whiteness is rarely brought up as a reason for the behavior. Whites are evaluated as individuals, while non-Whites find they are often evaluated as group members. Thus, the fact that the vast majority of the individuals involved in the financial meltdown is White is unlikely to lead to a stereotype that Whites are incompetent, bad with money, or inclined to engage in crime. Yet negative behaviors of non-Whites are often believed to provide evidence of what non-Whites are essentially like. For instance, I once had a conversation with a woman who told me about a coworker quitting without giving notice and then expressed her belief that it was because the woman was Black, and Blacks don’t have a good work ethic. Yet when I quit a crappy job at a college bookstore without giving notice back in college, I doubt it was attributed to Whites just not having a good work ethic.

This clip from “The Daily Show” also plays on some stereotypes about Blacks and Whites, as well as the idea that Obama isn’t “really” Black:

Thanks, Shoshannah!

Gwen Sharp is an associate professor of sociology at Nevada State College. You can follow her on Twitter at @gwensharpnv.

The “war on drugs” that began in the 80s led to a dramatic increase in the number of Black, but not so much White americans in prison and jail (see here).  One of the consequences of disproportionately imprisoning Blacks and Latinos, of course, is disproportionately separating Black and Latino children from their parents. 

Source: Bureau of Justice statistics via Chris Uggen’s Weblog.