From last year’s attacks in Paris to recent bombings in Ankara, Brussels, and Lahore, transnational terrorism is at the forefront of public concern. The media often gravitates toward focusing on who the perpetrators are and what drove them to commit these heinous acts. There is a wealth of research on the individual and psychological factors that may be at play, but sociological studies highlight the strong influence of social context and institutions in turning people toward terror, challenging easy explanations that focus on individual ideology alone.

Quantitative analysis shows how radical Islamic groups are motivated by many of the same social and political factors as older radical groups. Social and political change, especially international development, urbanization, and western military dependency, is associated with more frequent attacks. Higher foreign investment associates with a lower frequency of attacks, however, and research on terror in Israel shows this kind of conciliatory action may do more to limit terror than repressive strategies alone.

• Laura Dugan and Erica Chenoweth. 2012. “Moving Beyond Deterrence: The Effectiveness of Raising the Expected Utility of Abstaining from Terrorism in Israel,” American Sociological Review 77(4):597-624.
• Kristopher K. Robison, Edward M. Crenshaw and J. Craig Jenkins. 2006. “Ideologies of Violence: The Social Origins of Islamist and Leftist Transnational Terrorism,” Social Forces 84(4):2009-2026.

Research also shows that individual attackers are actually fairly “normal.” They are not more likely to be poor or poorly educated, and, often, they are not psychologically pathological. Instead, scholars look to the social arrangements of the institutions and networks that recruit and empower individuals. These terror groups are rarely centralized, hierarchical organizations that train bombers from on high; attacks stem from struggles for power among fractured organizations, local splinter groups, and state forces. As these conflicts escalate, local groups mobilize network relationships to recruit attackers and build the autonomy to develop their own motivational strategies to spur attacks. These local relationships and networks matter much more than individuals’ beliefs alone.

• Scott Atran. 2003. “Genesis of suicide terrorism,” Science (299):1534-1539.
• Ami Pedahzur and Arie Perliger. 2006. “The Changing Nature of Suicide Attacks—A Social Network Perspective,” Social Forces 84(4):1983-2004.
• Eitan Y. Alimi. 2011. “Relational dynamics in factional adoption of terrorist tactics: a comparative perspective,” Theory and Society 40(1):95-118.

The FBI now says they may not need Apple’s help to break into a terrorist’s iPhone, but for months they have insisted Apple’s programmers must write a program enabling them to bypass security on this and other Apple devices. The demand raised questions about security and surveillance in a time of rapid technological change. Apple’s refusal to comply stemmed from both a philosophical stance on privacy and concerns that such a program could easily be exploited. The company and its programmers further argued that code should be covered by free speech protections—no one can be forced to write code against their will. Sociological research shows how assumptions about the objectivity of computer code work against arguments like Apple’s and how these assumptions are often used to legitimize the policing of already marginalized populations.

Apple’s concerns about controlling how and when a “break-in” program gets used are valid. Not only can it fall into the hands of hackers and the like, technologies like this can be used by law enforcement to maintain social inequalities and reinforce harmful stereotypes. Sociologists show how computer code and surveillance technologies are not value-neutral, but are instead composed of the values and opinions of those who write and use them. The result is that the police often use these presumably objective technologies to justify intrusive policing of the already at-risk.

• Carrie Sanders and Stacey Hannem. 2012. “Policing ‘the Risky’: Technology and Surveillance in Everyday Patrol Work.” Canadian Review of Sociology 49(4):317-451.
• David Lyon. 2003. “Surveillance as Social Sorting: Computer Codes and Mobile Bodies.” Pp. 13-30 in Surveillance as Social Sorting: Privacy, Risk and Digital
  Discrimination, edited by David Lyon. New York: Routledge.

From this perspective, it becomes easier to understand code as speech. Codes are the expression, intentional or otherwise, of the values and beliefs of the programmer. What makes code in some ways more powerful than speech is that it is also highly functional. Jennifer Peterson explains that code is at once the writing of a program as well as the program’s execution—it is both expressive and functional—but the legal system overlooks the functional capacity of code as speech and the ways that it can be used to protest, dissent, and discriminate.

• Jennifer Peterson. 2015. “Is Code Speech? Law and the Expressivity of Machine Language,” New Media & Society 17(3):415-431.

And for a great read on surveilling sociologists, check out Stalking the Sociological Imagination: J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI Surveillance of American Sociology by Mike Forrest Keen.

Late last fall, Experimenter brought classic experimental social science to Hollywood (it’s currently streaming on Netflix). The film depicts Stanley Milgram’s classic experimental obedience studies, where participants were asked by an experimenter to deliver a series of escalating shocks to a “learner” when he/she committed an error on a test. Unbeknownst to the participants, the “learner” was actually a confederate, and no shocks were actually delivered. Milgram found that 65% of the participants escalated to “delivering” the final 450-volt shock—far past dangerous levels. Milgram performed 19 variations of the experiment, including increasing the proximity of the participant and learner (that is, making them better known to each other, which decreased participant compliance) and using only females (which yielded similar results). Apart from the studies’ success at demonstrating the social forces that shape behavior, they have been a cornerstone of ethics in research debates in the social sciences.

Early critics claimed that the participants’ well-being was put at risk, due to the “distress [that] may have resulted from shock at what the experimenter was doing to them as well as from what they thought they were doing to their victims” (Baumrind 423).

• Stanley Milgram. 1963. “Behavioral Study of Obedience,” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67: 371–378.
• Stanley Milgram. 1974. Obedience to Authority: An Experimental View. London: Tavistock Publications.
• Diana Baumrind. 1964. “Some Thoughts on Ethics of Research: After Reading Milgram’s ‘Behavioral Study of Obedience,'”American Psychologist 19(6): 421.

Numerous quasi-replications of the study have tweaked Milgram’s methodology to match contemporary ethical considerations. Milgram’s findings have been corroborated in replications that do not go to high voltage levels and in virtual simulations of the experiment. More recent work has added nuance, as well, finding variance in “obedience” based on the legitimacy of the “teacher” and the personality propensities and beliefs of the participant.

• Jerry M. Burger. 2009. “Replicating Milgram: Would people still obey today?” American Psychologist 64(1): 1.
• Mel Slater, Angus Antley, Adam Davison, David Swapp, Christoph Guger, Chris Barker, Nancy Pistrang, and Maria V. Sanchez-Vives. 2006. “A Virtual Reprise of the Stanley Milgram Obedience Experiments,” PloS One 1(1): e39.
• Thomas Blass. 1991. Understanding Behavior in the Milgram Obedience Experiment: The Role of Personality, Situations, and their Interactions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 60(3): 398.

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.

Nadia Taha, a Yezidi woman, recently spoke to the UN about her horrendous experience as a sex slave for ISIS. The so-called Islamic State has also exploited Christian, Turkmen, and Shia women. Wartime rape is an age-old weapon, seen still in conflicts in Sierra Leone, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Rwanda. Social scientists reveal the power dynamics at play by studying both the victims and perpetrators.

Rape is an individual crime as well as a weapon of war that enforces social power. Social groups use it to help carry out genocide, instilling fear, and force displacement. Rape also alters the racial and ethnic demographics of the targeted group and intimidates groups where women are considered to be bearers and keepers of culture.

• Gabrielle Ferrales and Suzy McElrath. 2014. “Beyond Rape: Reconceptualizing Gender-based Violence during Warfare,” in Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy (eds), The Oxford Handbook on Gender, Sex, and Crime. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Joshua Kaiser and John Hagan. 2015. “Gendered Genocide: The Socially Destructive Process of Genocidal Rape, Killing, and Displacement in Darfur,” Law & Society Review 49(1): 69-107.
• John Hagan, Wenona Rymond-Richmond, and Alberto Palloni. 2009. “Racial Targeting of Sexual Violence in Darfur,” American Journal of Public Health. 99(8): 1386-92.

Women and men are victims of rape during conflict. Women are targeted according to their cultural beliefs, desirability, reproductive ability, and virginity. Rape is used against men to “feminize” them, emasculating and implying homosexuality and weakness.

• Gabrielle Ferrales, Hollie Nyseth Brehm, and Suzy McElrath. Forthcoming 2016. “Gender-Based Violence Against Men and Boys in Darfur: What is Gendered About Genocide?” Gender and Society.

Perpetrators of rape during conflict include agents of the state (military, police, etc.), political groups (paramilitaries, terrorist groups, etc.), and politicized ethnic groups (e.g., Rwanda’s Hutu). As such, the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda decided that perpetrators of rape can be punished as individuals and states would be held responsible for either perpetrating sexual crimes or for failing to protect their citizens from such terror.

• Jennifer Green. 2015. “Uncovering Collective Rape: A Comparative Study of Political Sexual Violence,” International Journal of Sociology 34(1): 97-116.
• John Hagan and Jaimie Morse. 2014. “State Rape and The Crime of Genocide,” in Rosemary Gartner and Bill McCarthy (eds), The Oxford Handbook on Gender, Sex, and Crime. New York: Oxford University 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.

A recent study by the Pew Research Center suggests that “Nones”—people who are unaffiliated with any organized religious institution or belief system—now make up the single largest religious group in the Democratic party. Organizations like the American Atheists launched the #AtheistVoter campaign, and members of this growing voting bloc assembled at the recent Republican presidential debate in Iowa, questioning the candidates’ ability to represent non-religious Americans and demanding they “Keep Your Theocracy out of Our Democracy.” Sociologists of non-religion detail how the Nones are increasingly diverse, and their social and political agendas sometimes conflict.

The history of non-religious and atheist politics in the U.S. is one of constant tension. The non-religious take varying stances on the role of religion in social and political life, and the movement has had to balance “accommodationist” approaches to religion in the public sphere that support religion as a social good and “confrontational” approaches that position religion as a danger to democracy and progress.

• Steven Kettell. 2014. “Divided We Stand: The Politics of the Atheist Movement in the United States,” Journal of Contemporary Religion 29(3): 377-391.
• Stephen LeDrew. 2016. The Evolution of Atheism: The Politics of a Modern Movement. New York: Oxford University Press.

Tensions among the Nones can be a barrier to success as a cohesive political group, but their diversity can also be an advantage. Secular groups often define “the secular” differently depending on the context, which allows for a wider net to be cast over the variety of individual, non-religious identities. This enables more inclusive political agendas.

• Joseph Blankholm. 2014. “The Political Advantages of a Polysemous Secular,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 53(4): 775-790.
• Lois Lee. 2015. “Ambivalent Atheist Identities: Power and Non-religious Culture in Contemporary Britain,” Social Analysis 59(2): 20-39.

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.