inequality

In July 2015, four California state prisons began supplying condoms to prisoners, and more will follow suit in the next next five years. California, however, is only the second state to address infectious diseases in prisons. Prison officials are skeptical of the new law, though its ability to slow the spread of HIV and other sexually transmitted diseases among inmates may prove significant.

Sexual contact amongst U.S. prisoners is a complex issue emanating from societal expectations of sexuality and masculinity. Many of those who are incarcerated are young, unmarried, working-class men who are effectively cut off from the outside world and heterosexual encounters. As a result, many who identify as straight engage in male-to-male sex behind bars. This “institutional homosexuality” separates sexual behavior from sexual orientation.

• Russell K. Robinson. 2011. “Masculinity as Prison: Sexual Identity, Race, and Incarceration.” California Law Review 99(5):1309-1408.

Preventing the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in prison populations is a complicated matter. In the past, condom distribution was refused for two main reasons: the denial that male-to-male sex occurred in prison, and the illegal status of such encounters. To slow the spread of sexually transmitted diseases in prison and when inmates are released, both facts must be acknowledged.

• Trevor Hoppe. 2013. “Controlling Sex in the Name of ‘Public Health’: Social Control and Michigan HIV Law.” Social Problems 60(1):27-49.
• Cindy Struckman-Johnson, David Struckman-Johnson, Lila Rucker, Kurt Bumby, and Stephen Donaldson. 1996. “Sexual Coercion Reported by Men and Women in Prison.” The Journal of Sex Research 33(1):67-76.

U.S. prisoners are guaranteed access to health care. Unfortunately, rather than receiving cost effective, preventive measures to combat STIs, inmates usually only receive treatment after contracting one—and that’s costly in terms of money and health.

Sara Anderson will graduate from University of the Pacific in May 2016 with a degree in social sciences. She will attend law school in the fall.

To cut costs, the city of Flint, Michigan moved its residents from the Detroit city water system to water sourced from the Flint River. It was a temporary fix until Flint could access Great Lakes water directly. Now, as the world knows, there’s something in the water: lead. In Flint, more than 40% of residents live below the poverty line, and the high lead levels (10 times higher than originally estimated) have caused skin lesions, hair loss, vision loss, memory loss, depression and anxiety, and Legionnaires’ disease. According to sociologists, it’s no fluke that a disenfranchised community pays the ultimate price for environmental damage.According to sociologists, it’s no fluke when a disenfranchised community pays the ultimate price for environmental damage.

Nature is a battleground where the privileges of wealth and whiteness prevail. Race and class inequalities perpetuate practices that harm the environment, and the poor, immigrants, and minorities are most likely to live in areas with environmental damage (some 60% of African Americans and Latino/a people live in in places with uncontrolled toxic waste sites). This is largely due to the ways that bureaucracies and the state exercise power over resources in a capitalist economy. Flint, MI is just one of many examples of wealthy governments and corporations exporting hazardous material to poor communities of color.  

• David Naguib Pellow. 2007. Resisting Global Toxics: Transnational Movements for Environmental Justice. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
• Murray Bookchin. 2005 The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy. Oakland, CA: AK Press.
• Greta Gaard. 2004. “Toward a Queer Ecofeminism.” In New Perspectives on Environmental Justice: Gender, Sexuality, and Activism, ed. R. Stein, pp.21-44. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Univ. Press.
• James William Gibson. 2009. A Reenchanted World: The Quest for a New Kinship with Nature. New York: Henry Holt.
• Riley E. Dunlap and William R. Catton, Jr. 1979. “Environmental Sociology,” Annual Review of Sociology (5): 243-273.

Poor communities of color also receive lower government response and assistance in environmental emergencies. From Hurricane Katrina to the Flint water crisis, African Americans tend to lack the economic resources and transportation necessary to evacuate an environmental danger zone, exacerbating its impacts on minority communities.

• Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright. 2012. The Wrong Complexion for Protection: How the Government Response to Disaster Endangers African American Communities. New York: NYU Press.

Conservative and liberal legislators alike are calling for criminal justice reform. Last November, President Obama proposed a “ban the box” initiative that prevents federal agencies from inquiring about an applicant’s criminal history during the initial stages of the hiring process. The plan mirrors similar policies in over 100 U.S. cities that seek to reduce employment discrimination against people with criminal records and alleviate the socioeconomic burdens they often face as they reenter the job market. Social science highlights the scope of this problem and how ban the box policies may help.

Employers often dismiss applicants with criminal records, which disproportionately affects black men. A Milwaukee study revealed employers contacted only 5% of black men who disclosed a record; even black men without a criminal record were less likely to receive a callback than their white male peers with a criminal record. Thus, even in the absence of criminal background checks, employers may use racial indicators, education levels, and gaps in employment to evaluate potential criminality among job applicants.

• Devah Pager. 2007. MARKED: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
• Harry Holzer, Steven Raphael, and Michael Stoll. 2006. “Perceived Criminality, Criminal Background Checks, and the Racial Hiring Practices of Employers,” Journal of Law and Economics 451-480.

Among candidates with a record, employers may consider the severity of the crime, the time since the crime was committed, and the outcome of the crime. Felony crimes and convictions appear to create the most barriers, while job applicants with misdemeanor arrests face lower hurdles. Since interviews with employers show that making personal contact with job applicants can help overcome the negative effects of a criminal record, “ban the box” measures that delay consideration of the criminal record until the interview process could make a real difference in individuals’ job prospects.

• Chris Uggen, Mike Vuolo, Sarah Lageson, Ebony Rhuland, and Hilary K. Whitham. 2014. “,The Edge of Stigma: An Experimental Audit of the Effects of Low-Level Criminal Records on Employment.” Criminology 52(4): 627-654.

Netflix made a big splash in “true crime” with its series Making a Murderer, chronicling the investigations and trials of Wisconsin man Steven Avery. Exonerated after 18 years in prison for sexual assault in 2003, Avery was arrested for a new crime—murder—in 2007. Public debate about the documentary revolves around whether Avery’s innocent, potential misconduct in the justice system, and the ethics and consequences of documentary “vigilante justice,” but there is little doubt Avery was wrongfully convicted the first time around, in 1985. Social science helps us understand the more systematic consequences of incarceration and exoneration that cultural phenomena like Making a Murderer, the Serial podcast, and even the upcoming miniseries “The People v. O.J. Simpson: American Crime Story” bring to our attention.

Pop culture tends to focus on errors, like witness misidentification and shoddy forensics, but those are not the only things that lead to wrongful convictions. Sociological research shows blacks and Hispanics are at a higher risk, and these groups are, in fact, overrepresented in samples of exonerees. Black exonerees suffer longer periods of incarceration between their conviction and exoneration than other groups. And exonerations often raise questions about the criminal justice system’s authority and legitimacy in the eyes of the public.

• Brandon Garrett. 2011. Convicting the Innocent. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Marvin Zalman, Matthew J. Larson, and Brad Smith. 2012. “Citizens’ Attitudes Toward Wrongful Convictions,” Criminal Justice Review 37(1): 51-69.
• Maeve Olney, and Scott Bonn. 2015. “An Exploratory Study of the Legal and Non-Legal Factors Associated With Exoneration for Wrongful Conviction: The Power of DNA Evidence,” Criminal Justice Policy Review 26(4): 400-420.

Exonerees, even those who aren’t in a media spotlight, face practical problems after they are released from prison. The stigma of having served time diminishes chances in the employment and housing markets, even for those who are exonerated. Like others experiencing reentry after incarceration, exonerees also face unmet needs with regard to physical, dental, and mental healthcare, as well as the myriad challenges of rebuilding social networks and reintegrating to everyday life.

• Devah Pager. 2003. “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology 108(5): 937-975.
• Adina M. Thompson, Oscar R. Molina, and Lora M. Levett. 2011. “After Exoneration: An Investigation of Stigma and Wrongfully Convicted Persons,” Albany Law Review 75(3): 1373-1413.
• Kimberley A. Clow, and Amy-May Leach. 2015. “Stigma and Wrongful Conviction: All Exonerees are Not Perceived Equal,” Psychology, Crime & Law 21(2): 172-185.
• Saundra D. Westervelt and Kimberly J. Cook. 2012. Life after Death Row: Exonerees’ Search for Community and Identity. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Many more men are incarcerated than women, but from 1980 to 2014, the number of women in state and federal prisons rose from just over 13,000 to more than 106,000, making women the fastest growing prison population in the U.S. This drastic increase is due in part to the War on Drugs and the shift to a “tough-on-crime” logic in the 1970s and ‘80s. For women, the mass incarceration era doesn’t just exert tougher penalties; it also carries over an earlier, paternalistic way of disciplining women.

Before mass incarceration, women’s prisons operated under rehabilitative models. These viewed women’s criminal behavior as a result of their vulnerability or dependency, rather than dangerousness. Inmates were sometimes called “girls” and referred to the warden as “daddy.” Later tough-on-crime policies increased security, abolished mandatory counseling, and emphasized order and control in women’s prisons. Still, some contemporary prisons maintain a paternalistic attitude by offering women “treatment” that focuses exclusively their perceived inability to make good choices in the face of challenges from men, drugs, or a history of abuse.For women, the mass incarceration era doesn’t just exert tougher penalties; it also carries over an earlier, paternalistic way of disciplining women.

In other words, incarcerated women are hit with a double bind. Strict sentencing policies ignore social context and drastically increase the number of women in prison, while the paternalism of the past shapes how the criminal justice system interprets and judges their behavior and prospects for rehabilitation.

• Jill McCorkel. 2013. Breaking Women: Gender, Race, and the New Politics of Imprisonment. New York: New York University Press.
• Candace Kruttschnitt and Rosemary Gartner. 2005. Marking Time in the Golden State: Women’s Imprisonment in California. New York: Cambridge University Press.

A recent working paper from Harvard found that hosts of the room/house renting service Airbnb discriminate against renters with Black-sounding names. The study revealed that “requests from guests with distinctly African-American names are roughly 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively White names.”

Unfortunately, racial discrimination based on names is nothing new.

• Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan. 2004. “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal? A Field Experiment on Labor Market Discrimination,” The American Economic Review 94(4): 991-1013.

Racialized housing discrimination also has a long history. Once overt, such as in the outright denial of mortgages, housing discrimination has shifted toward micro-aggressions that are harder to spot, such as the private decision not to offer an Airbnb to people of color.

• Devah Pager and Hana Shepherd. 2008. “The Sociology of Discrimination: Racial Discrimination in Employment, Housing, Credit, and Consumer Markets,” Annual Review of Sociology 34: 181–209.
• Vincent J. Roscigno, Diana L. Karafin, and Griff Tester. 2009.“The Complexities and Processes of Racial Housing Discrimination,” Social Problems 56(1): 49-69.
• Douglas S. Massey. 2015. “ The Legacy of the 1968 Fair Housing Act,” Sociological Forum 30(1): 571-588.

The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) is a contested space for queer folks. Persecution is common in Egypt, where gay men are continuously subjected to mass arrests, and queer Palestinians are often blackmailed. In contrast, Lebanon has led the LGBT*Q movement with a recent court ruling that homosexuality is not “unnatural or a crime. Celebrities like Hamed Sinno, the gay lead singer of Mashrou’ Leila, can even use music to address gender expression and gay love there. Research on the origins of queerness and homophobia in the region and why governments repress queer communities can help us understand such conflicting trends.

Contrary to beliefs that queerness is un-MENA, un-Islamic, or un-African, Abu Nawas (756-814) wrote uninhibited erotic poetry about men and, in the 18^th and 19^th centuries in Egypt, homosexual and homosocial relations were quite common. Lesbianism is documented in the 9^th century throughout the region.

• Samar Habib. 2007. Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: History and Representations. New York: Routledge.
• Mervat Hatem. 1986. “The Politics of Sexuality and Gender in Segregated Patriarchal Systems: The Case of Eighteenth- and Nineteenth- Century Egypt,” Feminist Studies. 12(2):250-274

Contemporary state repression often involves torture, surveillance, and harassment of gays and lesbians by state actors. After the Arab Spring revolutions, social science sheds light on how such politically unstable governments attempt to maintain and enforce social stability and societal moral. This larger sense of a need for control could fuel queer community repression.

• Jennifer Earl. 2011. “Political Repression: Iron Fists, Velvet Gloves, and Diffuse Control,” Annual Review of Sociology 37:261-284.
• Mark Ungar. 2000. “State Violence and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (lgbt) Rights,” New Political Science 22(1):61-75.
• Christian Davenport. 1995. “Multi-Dimensional Threat Perception and State Repression: An Inquiry, into Why States Apply Negative Sanctions.” American Journal of Political Science 39(3):683-713.

For more on sexuality in the MENA, see lectures from the ““Sexualities and Queer Imaginaries in the Middle East/North Africa’ conference at Brown University.

The recent physical altercation between a police officer and a young black female student at Spring Valley High School in South Carolina raised questions about the role of disciplinary sanctions and law enforcement in schools. Since the 1990s, schools, particularly inner-city schools, have become increasingly criminalized, as school officials view students as suspects.

The criminalization of students includes the formalization of punishment through “zero tolerance” policies, the transfer of disciplinary discretion among teachers and school officials to disciplinary codes, and the integration of criminal justice technologies and personnel. Schools often replace traditional modes of school punishment with arrests and court referrals, and control students through security measures like metal detectors and on-campus police officers.

• Paul J. Hirschfield. 2008. “Preparing for Prison: The Criminalization of School Discipline in the USA,” Theoretical Criminology 12(1):79-101.
• Aaron Kupchik. 2010. Homeroom Security: School Discipline in an Age of Fear. New York: New York University Press.

School Resource Officers (SROs), law enforcement officers stationed in a particular school or school district, are a central part of this trend. The number of SROs has increased over the past 12 years, but systematic studies offer no evidence that schools with SROs have better safety records. On the contrary, long-term studies show that more crimes involving drugs and weapons are recorded after schools add SROs. SROs are also associated with higher levels of student arrests for lower-level delinquent acts (e.g., disorderly conduct), suggesting that SROs may bring behavior that was once dealt with by the school (“in house”) into the criminal justice system. This “SRO effect” is exacerbated in schools characterized by higher levels of economic disadvantage.

• Matthew Theriot. 2009. “School Resource Officers and the Criminalization of Student Behavior,” Journal of Criminal Justice 37:280-287.
• Chongmin Na and Denise C. Gottfredson. 2013. “Police Officers in Schools: Effects on School Crime and the Processing of Offending Behaviors,” Justice Quarterly 30(4):619-650.

African Americans and other minority students are affected disproportionately, both because SROs and other criminal justice tools are concentrated in urban schools and because minority students, even when controlling for differential behavior, are punished at higher rates than their white peers. Current research suggests that schools’ rising criminal justice apparatus does little to quell violence, but may unintentionally result in more black students experiencing the “school-to-prison pipeline.”

• Michael Rocque and Raymond Paternoster. 2011. “Understanding the Antecedents of the ‘School-to-Jail’ Link: The Relationship between Race and School Discipline,” The Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology 101(2):633-665.
• Kelly Welch and Allison Payne. 2010. “Racial Threat and Punitive School Discipline,” Social Problems 57(1):25-48.

In The Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Black Family in the Age of Mass Incarceration” details the historical development of the carceral state, its consequences on current and formerly imprisoned black Americans, and the unique challenges families face during their absences and returns. Coates cites and interviews several prominent sociologists for their insight into the carceral state’s repercussions for black Americans specifically. We rounded up some of their best work on the topic.

The 1970s saw increasing unemployment and concentrated poverty. Legislators developed “tough on crime” policies that resulted in the start of a massive increase in the number of incarcerated individuals in jails and prisons. Increases in incarceration, however, do not appear to have had a significant effect on decreasing crime rates.

• Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson. 1995. “Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality.” In Shaun L. Gabbidon and Helen Taylor Greene (eds.), Race, Crime, and Justice: A Reader. London: Routledge. pp. 177-190.
• Bruce Western and Christopher Muller. 2013. “Mass Incarceration, Macrosociology, and the Poor,” The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 647(1):166-189.
• Bruce Western. 2006. Punishment and Inequality in America. New York: Russell Sage.

Mass imprisonment has a wide range of collateral consequences. Those who serve time face health risks, familial struggles, and barriers to employment before and after they are released.

• Christopher Wildeman and Christopher Muller. 2012. “Mass Imprisonment and Inequality in Health and Family Life,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 8:11-30.
• Sara Wakefield and Christopher Wildeman. 2013. Children of the Prison Boom: Mass Incarceration and the Future of American Inequality. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Devah Pager. 2003. “The Mark of a Criminal Record,” American Journal of Sociology 108(5):937-975.
• Devah Pager. 2007. Marked: Race, Crime, and Finding Work in an Era of Mass Incarceration. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Since his election in March 2013, Pope Francis has gained attention for his efforts to refocus the Catholic Church on issues of social justice. His recent visit to the U.S. was met with acclaim from religious leaders and political liberals, but also sparked consternation among cultural and political conservatives. U.S. Rep. Paul Gosar (R-AZ), a Catholic himself, boycotted Francis’s address to Congress and accused him of adopting “socialist talking points presented to guilt people into leftist politics.”

The cultural divisions within American Catholicism exposed by Pope Francis’s visit are not new. While Gosar may be more vocal than most conservative Catholics, his protest reveals a split between interpretations of the Catholic faith that have been simmering for generations.

• Andrew Greeley. 1979. “The Sociology of American Catholics.” Annual Review of Sociology 5:91–111.

Mary Ellen Konieczny shows that the narratives American Catholics use to construct their religious identities have profound political consequences. Some congregations use the language of community to structure their worship, while others structure their activities around the concept of family. In parishes where community talk is dominant, social justice is usually the focus of ministry, but in congregations where family is the main narrative, concerns about personal and sexual morality get more attention. Neither model is more Catholic than the other: both types of congregations draw upon doctrines and use ritual practices central to the Catholic tradition. Hence, the variation Konieczny observes has less to do with texts or doctrines than with the ways people interact in group settings.

• Mary Ellen Konieczny. 2013. The Spirit’s Tether: Family, Work, and Religion among American Catholics. Oxford University Press.

The ideological divide in Catholicism also has historical roots in the relationships between the papacy and states. Gene Burns argues that as European states liberalized in the 19^th century, Popes struggled to retain political influence for the church. Attempts to engage questions of poverty were seen as intrusions into government affairs, but through discussions of personal morality, the Church could carve out a space where its authority still dominated. As a result, the Church’s ideological emphases turned toward sexual morality and family issues, while sociopolitical concerns grew peripheral.

• Gene Burns. 1990. “The Politics of Ideology: The Papal Struggle with Liberalism.” American Journal of Sociology 95(5):1123–52.

The postwar period saw a revitalization of Catholic religious activity in the politics of economic justice. Jose Casanova shows how the Solidarity movement in Poland and letter-writing campaigns among American nuns after Vatican II helped to steer church activity back toward social justice work, and John O’Brien charts the influence of labor activist-priest George G. Higgins on Catholic social thought in the 20^th century.

• Jose Casanova. 1994. Public Religions in the Modern World. Chicago, IL: University Of Chicago Press.
• John O’Brien. 2004. George G. Higgins and the Quest for Worker Justice: The Evolution of Catholic Social Thought in America. Lanham, MD: Sheed & Ward.

Pope Francis’s return to social justice issues does not necessarily make him a “liberal” pope. We might better view him as interested in returning the Catholic church to a language of social justice, firmly rooted in Church history, despite being obscured by previous Popes’ focus on other issues.