Supporting the Message,Not the Messenger: The Correlates of Attitudes towards Black Lives Matter

American Journal of Criminal Justice - Since the Black Lives Matter movement’s rise to prominence, there has been significant opposition from both media and political figures who believe that...     

Publisher Correction: Supporting the Message,Not the Messenger: The Correlates of Attitudes towards Black Lives Matter

American Journal of Criminal Justice - Due to typesetting mistake, the last two rows of Table 6 were misaligned.     

The Price of Civil Rights: Black Lives,White Funding,and Movement Capture

What influence do funders have on the development of civil rights legal mobilization? Fundraising is critical to the creation, operation, and survival of rights organizations. Yet, despite the importance of funding, there is little systematic attention in the law and social movements and cause lawyering literatures on the relationship between funders and grantees. This article recovers a forgotten history of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's (NAACP) campaign to protect black lives from lynchings and mob violence in the early twentieth century. I argue that funders engaged in a process of movement capture whereby they used their financial leverage to redirect the NAACP's agenda away from the issue of racial violence to a focus on education at a critical juncture in the civil rights movement. The findings in this article suggest that activists tread carefully as the interaction between funders and social movement organizations often creates gaps between what activists want and what funders think movements should do.     

Fractured Lives,Splintered Knowledge: Making Criminological Sense of the January, 2015 Terrorist Attacks in Paris

Cottee (Br J Criminol 54(6):981–1001, 2014) makes the case that criminology has much to contribute to an understanding of theistic violence. However the ‘hubris of positivism’ (Young in The criminological imagination, Polity, Cambridge, 2011) curtails the criminological imagination and this is particularly evident in the debates that permeate contemporary understandings of religious extremism and radicalisation. Using the terrorist attacks in France 2015 as a touchstone, this paper explores the current state of criminological engagement with these issues. First a synopsis of orthodox current criminological talk about religious extremism and violent crime is considered. Next a critical analysis of the events in Paris based around what is ‘known’ about them is offered in the light of this knowledge. Finally, drawing on the work of Young (2011) the implications of this analysis for criminology are considered resulting in a refinement of the biases identified by Cottee (2014).     

Statistical Societies of Interchangeable Lives

This article proposes an understanding of the structure of the social bond based on statistics and risk calculations about death and disease rates. These calculations predict with almost mathematical certainty that a specified impersonal portion of a given population will develop a mortal disease, such as cancer, or suffer a fatal accident, such as car or plane accidents. Consequently, every individual member of that population who actually dies of those causes, dies in the place of all the other members of the same population who could have probably died in her place but actually did not; thus, she offers to all of them the gift of death. All members of a population/society (statistical populations are the societies of modernity) are, therefore, tied together within a sacrificial bond of health and disease, life and death. This revised version was published online in November 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Death Qualification in Black and White: Racialized Decision Making and Death‐Qualified Juries

Death qualification has been shown to have a number of biasing effects that appear to undermine a capital defendant's Sixth Amendment right to a fair jury. Attitudes toward the death penalty have shifted modestly but consistently over the last several decades in ways that may have changed the overall impact of death qualification. Specifically, the very large gap between black and white Americans' current support for capital punishment raises the question of whether death qualification procedures disproportionately exclude African Americans from capital jury participation. In order to examine this possibility, we conducted two countywide death penalty attitude surveys in the California county that has the highest percentage of African American residents in the state. Results show that death qualification continues to have a number of serious biasing effects—including disproportionately excluding death penalty opponents—which result in the significant underrepresentation of African Americans. This creates a death‐qualified jury pool with the potential to be significantly more likely to ignore and even misuse mitigating factors and to rely more heavily on aggravating factors in their death penalty decision making. The implications of these findings for the fair administration of capital punishment are discussed.     

Race and Officer Decision Making: Examining Differences in Arrest Outcomes between Black and White Officers

Since the 1960s, one of the major reform efforts in law enforcement has been to increase the number of Black Americans within police agencies and on patrol in the streets. The general premise behind these efforts has been that increased diversity will improve police–community relations and will decrease biased police behavior, particularly against Black citizens. Policies seeking to reform policing through increasing the numbers of African American officers have been implemented with little empirical evidence that an officer's race (or ethnicity) is actually related to their behavior towards citizens, in particular arrest decisions. Using data from systematic social observations of police–citizen encounters in Cincinnati, OH, this study examines the influence of officer race on arrest outcomes, focusing on the behavior of Black officers. Findings suggest that officer race has direct influence on arrest outcomes and there are substantive differences between White and Black officers in the decision to arrest. In general, White officers in our study were more likely to arrest suspects than Black officers, but Black suspects were more likely to be arrested when the decision maker was a Black officer.     

失志以后的歌哭－－曹植、阮籍诗歌比较

曹植之失志,是被“夺志”;阮籍之失志,则是“弃志”。失志原因的不同导致了他们在心境、安顿身心的方法和诗歌的抒情方式的差异。曹植因失意而痛苦,却无法忘怀已被剥夺的志向,在现实生活中无法安顿身心;阮籍孤独而苦闷,怀疑甚至否定一切传统的价值观念。曹植采用比兴的手法,抒情中带有“缘事而发”的乐府精神;阮籍则意欲摆脱具体事实,注重更为纯粹的情感抒发。     

失志以后的歌哭——曹植、阮籍诗歌比较

曹植之失志 ,是被“夺志”;阮籍之失志 ,则是“弃志”。失志原因的不同导致了他们在心境、安顿身心的方法和诗歌的抒情方式的差异。曹植因失意而痛苦 ,却无法忘怀已被剥夺的志向 ,在现实生活中无法安顿身心 ;阮籍孤独而苦闷 ,怀疑甚至否定一切传统的价值观念。曹植采用比兴的手法 ,抒情中带有“缘事而发”的乐府精神 ;阮籍则意欲摆脱具体事实 ,注重更为纯粹的情感抒发     

Lies Matter

Law and Philosophy -     

When Tokens Matter

Tokens, or low levels of minority or female representatives in state legislatures, have been studied with respect to their perceptions of self‐efficacy and political attitudes but not with respect to their actual influence on the passage of public policy. This paper uses state‐level data from the child support program between the years 1976–84 to measure the influence of women tokens on the policy process. Using ordered probit models, I explore policy adoption under three configurations: (1) a test of the independent impact of tokens, (2) a dynamic test of the differential impact of tokens and nontokens to analyze potential backlash effects and the potential diffusion of policy preferences, and (3) an interactive test on the potential for tokens to form coalitions. My analysis strongly suggests that tokens make a policy difference independently and to a greater extent than when they are on the cusp of becoming nontokens, but I found less support for the idea that tokens successfully form coalitions to achieve specific policy goals.