Race and Women’s Imprisonment: Poverty, African American Presence, and Social Welfare

Female imprisonment rates have increased proportionately more than male imprisonment rates over recent decades. There are substantial race differences in women’s rates, as is the case for men. Yet, there has been little quantitative research on the correlates of women’s imprisonment using data over time, or on potential race differences in those correlates. The present research analyzes data on black and nonblack female imprisonment rates in the 50 states for the period 1981–2003. The analyses are guided substantively by existing research on race, social threat and criminal punishment, and theory and research on the penal-welfare hypothesis. The study uses bivariate-response multilevel modeling to simultaneously examine the factors associated with black and nonblack women’s imprisonment rates. The results show that black female imprisonment rates increase when the concentration of African Americans in metropolitan areas and poverty rates grow, whereas nonblack female imprisonment rates are unaffected by poverty rates and actually decrease when African American populations become more concentrated in metro areas. Both black and nonblack women’s imprisonment rates increase when welfare spending declines. The results are consistent with social threat perspectives and the penal-welfare hypotheses.     

Race,Immigration, and Policing: Chinese Immigrants’ Satisfaction with Police

A considerable body of research focuses on racial and ethnic minorities’ perceptions of police, yet non-Black, non-Hispanic minority groups, Asians in particular, are largely overlooked. Meanwhile, despite a fast growing immigrant population and the increasing demand on local police to enforce immigration law, research on police–immigrant relations remains limited. Using data from over 400 Chinese immigrants, this study examines the issues of race/ethnicity, immigration, and policing with a focal concern on Chinese immigrants’ attitudes toward police. Results indicate that the majority of Chinese immigrants rate police positively in overall performance and specific areas of effectiveness, integrity, and demeanor. Both universal and immigrant-specific factors are important predictors of immigrants’ attitudes. Chinese immigrants’ evaluations of police are not only affected by exposure to media coverage of police misconduct, neighborhood conditions, and city context, but also are intertwined with their opinions of their home country police and perceptions of US immigration authorities.     

Race,economy and punishment: inequity and racial disparity in imprisonment, 1972–2002

Guided by the Rusche and Kirchheimer thesis, this study examines variation in incarceration rates across states. Time-series regression analysis is applied to 30?years of state-level data to examine how economic factors interact with aggregate measures of race/ethnicity in predicting rates of incarceration. The analysis indicates that income inequality, not unemployment, is the most salient predictor of incarceration rates. That is, state-level measures of income inequality exert a strong, positive effect on state-level incarceration rates, and this effect is particularly salient in the presence of higher percentages of African-Americans.     

Norms,law and social change: Nigeria’s anti-corruption struggle, 1999–2017

Corruption is notoriously persistent in Nigeria notwithstanding the panoply of laws deployed over the years against it. This article argues that the factors constraining the effectiveness of laws in the fight against corruption are to be found not in the laws, but in the larger societal matrix of resilient social norms and institutions, which constitute the environment of corruption in the country. The environment thus constituted is either conducive to, or largely tolerant of, corruption. The article then suggests that the anti-corruption effort, to be successful, must engage broadly with the environment by instigating social change.     

Coase’s world and Coase’s blackboard

In this contribution I focus on a particular characteristic of Ronald Coase’s work, as exhibited in “The Problem of Social Cost”: his ability to force upon his audience a clearer grasp of reality than they previously held. More specifically, I aim to consider to what extent the “blackboard economics” that Coase himself derided have been avoided in a Coasean world, taking that expression to refer in some sense to a world where Coasean insights can flourish, and as such to be a world not simply of Coase’s own making but a world that has been developed by others in applying the Coase Theorem. My strategy is to interrogate the nature of a Coasean world through developing a framework that can look more closely at different approaches to theoretical modelling, the different worlds involved in these models, and the different positive and normative applications that can be derived from them. I shall further consider whether the understanding of the law that inhabits a Coasean world reflects a “real-world” legal environment. Finally, I shall seek to assess the impact of Coase’s work on our understanding of the relationship between law and economics, in our world.     

Saṅghabhadra’s and Śubhagupta’s Defence of Atomism,Their Similarities and Differences

Journal of Indian Philosophy - As Buddhist externalists, both Sa?ghabhadra and ?ubhagupta claim the existence of an external object on the basis of atomism. In this paper, I will show...     

Bridal pregnancy and women’s educational attainment in South Korea, 1970–2009

We examine the link between marriage and fertility in South Korea by focusing on the historic trend of bridal pregnancy (marriage preceded by pregnancy) over the four decadal marriage cohorts since the 1970s. We first demonstrate how the rate of bridal pregnancy changes over the observed period and then investigate the educational differentials in the trend. These inquiries are examined by analyzing a sample of 29,213 ever-married Korean women from recently pooled data from the National Survey of Fertility and Family Health (NSFFH). The results show that bridal pregnancy has increased from 16% in the 1970s marriage cohort to 20% in the 2000s marriage cohort. In response to class differentials, while bridal pregnancy has been more prevalent among less-educated women than among their counterparts, bridal pregnancy has increased across all education groups over time. In addition, the magnitudes of increase are more noticeable among highly educated women of recent marriage cohorts. We contextualize our findings and provide speculations about subsequent family changes in South Korea.     

Looking for the Nature of Law: On Shapiro’s Challenge

This article critically focuses on the methodological aspects of Scott Shapiro??s book Legality. Indeed Shapiro??s book sets out several original theses about not only the nature of law and the main problems of jurisprudence, but also about how the nature of law can be discovered by jurisprudence. In this sense, the method of inquiry adopted by Shapiro can be considered as one of the most challenging outcomes of his research. The article is divided into two parts. In the first two sections I shall analyze Shapiro??s jurisprudential approach by focusing on its resort to metaphysical vocabulary, conceptual analysis, constructive reasoning, and institutional explanation of law. In the following sections I will consider some of the problems that this approach gives rise to, and outline an alternative view on the nature of law stimulated by the discussion of Shapiro??s work.     

‘She’s White and She’s Hot,So She Can’t Be Guilty’: Female Criminality,Penal Spectatorship,and White Protectionism

Despite mainstream criminology’s burgeoning interest in issues of race, class, and gender, very little scholarship has examined whiteness and its attendant privileges in understanding public discourse on criminal offenders. This paper examines the role of penal spectatorship as a discursive mechanism by which white, female offenders are protected in public spaces by virtue of their racial and gender identity. Using a content analysis of comments posted on the mug shot images of white women on a popular ‘mug shot website,’ we find that these women are viewed as victims of circumstance deserving of empathy and redemption rather than as criminals. We offer ‘white protectionism’ as a means by which whites extend privilege and protection to other whites who transverse the boundaries of whiteness through criminality to guard against ‘deviant’ or ‘criminal’ designations. These findings add to our understandings of penal spectatorship as yet another tool of white supremacy operating in the Post-Civil Rights era of mass incarceration.     

Crime, Freedom and Civic Bonds: Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom: Kant’s Legal and Political Philosophy

There is no question Arthur Ripstein’s Force and Freedom is an engaging and powerful book which will inform legal philosophy, particularly Kantian theories, for years to come. The text explores with care Kant’s legal and political philosophy, distinguishing it from his better known moral theory. Nor is Ripstein’s book simply a recounting of Kant’s legal and political theory. Ripstein develops Kant’s views in his own unique vision illustrating fresh ways of viewing the entire Kantian project. But the same strength and coherence which ties the book to Kant’s important values of independence blinds the work to our shared moral ties grounded in other political values. Ripstein’s thoughts on punishment are novel in that he embeds criminal law, both in its retributivist and consequentialist facets, into Kant’s overarching political philosophy to show how criminal law can be seen as one aspect of the supremacy of public law. But a criminal law solely focused on the preservation of freedom takes little notice of the ways criminal law need expand its view to account for how a polity can restore the victim of a crime back to civic equality, reincorporate offenders after they have been punished and cannot leave past offenders isolated and likely to reoffend, resulting in the rotating door prison system and communities of innocents who remain preyed upon by career criminals. Lastly, a political theory that does not prize our civic bonds will ignore the startling balkanization of our criminal punishment practices, where policing, arresting and imprisonment become tools of racial and social oppression. In illustrating the benefits in viewing criminal law as a coherent part of Kant’s political theory of freedom, Ripstein also highlights what is absent. It then becomes clear that though Kant presents one important facet of punishment, only a republican political theory can meet the most pressing moral demands of punishment by reminding us that criminal law must be used to preserve and strengthen civic society.     

Kentuckian’s Attitudes on Capital Punishment, 1989–2016

Citizens’ attitudes toward the death penalty have been effected by the availability of life without parole (LWOP). Our analysis focuses upon data from a representative sample of Kentuckians on death penalty attitudes. The factors influencing and related to death penalty support and compared to support for LWOP are considered along with a review of Kentucky survey findings from 1989–2016. The results reveal consistent support for LWOP over the death penalty. Male Kentucky residents with a college education were most likely to support life without parole over capital punishment while male conservatives did not.     

Masculinities,Money, and Mosques in Algeria’s Civil War

To what extent did economic marginalization and political crisis activate prejudice, violence, and religious faith in Algeria’s civil war during the 1990s? The Algerian novel Les Agneaux du Seigneur (In the Name of God), by Yasmina Khadra offers a glimpse. The novel shows how political and economic disparities intertwined with an increasingly strict interpretation of Islam. In turn, Islam’s political applications and its militarized enforcement soon drew the country into a veritable civil war. The resulting breakdown of the cultural order simultaneously increased the pressure on men to fulfill a socially prescribed gender role and made the fulfillment of that role more difficult.     

The threat of ‘woolly-haired grandchildren’: Race,the colonial family and German nationalism

The German colonial world was marked by an ostensibly self-evident boundary between the white ruler and the black ruled that situated Europeans and indigenous peoples as diametrically opposed and socially discrete. This situation, however, was problematised by the gendered and sexualised interactions between European and indigenous society. The result was often a slippage between the administrative attempts to create recognisably ‘German’ families (perceived in racial terms), and the antinomian realities of human relationships that transgressed racial lines. This in turn gave rise to reproductive anxieties in the face of a new liminal population of ‘half-castes’ (Mischlinge) that refused the white–black, master–slave dialectic of the colonial ideal. Many historians have recently attempted to link the troubled history of race relations in German Southwest Africa to the later history of Nazi anti-Semitism and genocide, by focusing on the apparent continuities between the Holocaust and the Herero–Nama wars. However, an alternative genealogy for the Holocaust that refutes this genocidal continuity thesis is possible through an investigation of the origins and contents of the debates about the nature of the German colonial family and its relationship to German citizenship between 1904 and 1914.     

Responsibility and Control: Fischer’s and Ravizza’s Theory of Moral Responsibility

Law and Philosophy -