Psychic investment in cruelty: three parables on race and imprisoning the mentally ill

Drawing on ethnographic and activist work in New York, I analyze three contemporary cases of mentally ill people charged violent crimes. State violence against them can be characterized as a differential and differentiated set of racial and gendered practices. The case studies offer something between a parable, a field report, and a cautionary tale of the dystopian tendencies already embedded within the criminal justice system in the United States. Based on these cases, I will argue that despite recent liberal reform, scant evidence suggests any deep shift in the web of agencies that pipe people, especially the mentally ill, into prison and jail, or a shift in the cruel and humiliating practices these agencies embody. For the society to achieve what Du Bois called an abolition democracy, the affective infrastructure and psychic investment in debasing subordinated others would have to be abolished.     

Confronting catastrophe: norms,efficiency and the evolution of the AIDS battle in the UN

Social environments played a powerful role in the institutional adaptations of the AIDS fighting agencies within the United Nations system. Since its AIDS apparatus has become operational, the UN has undertaken two major strategic shifts. The first shift saw the dissolution of the GPA, a small subunit of the WHO in favour of UNAIDS, a dedicated agency engaged in global advocacy. This shift involved a controversial bureaucratic process that led, finally, to a more human rights-based approach to the disease. The second shift saw an increased emphasis on ground-level efficiency. What caused these changes? Contributions in the rationalist tradition expect the UN to act as a multilateral goal-seeker looking to optimally address a major gap in global governance. A sociological framework sees normative changes within the UN as catalysts for change in its goals and structure. A synthesis of these traditions conceptualizes the UN's strategic shifts more clearly, capturing the interactive process between the organization and its strategic environment. UN agencies were forced to rationally adapt to changing conditions in prevailing AIDS norms.     

Evidence on the Effectiveness of Juvenile Court Sanctions

Purpose

The past decade has been witness to a proliferation of calls for evidence-based juvenile court sanctions—including various programs, interventions, services, and strategies or approaches—that reduce recidivism and improve mental health, drug dependency, and education outcomes. At the same time, an emerging body of work has identified “proven,” “evidence-based,” “best practice,” or, more generally, “effective” efforts to achieve these outcomes. Even so, grounds for concern exist regarding the evidence-base for these and other sanctions.

Methods

This paper describes the heterogeneity of sanctioning within juvenile justice and argues that, despite substantial advances in research, the heterogeneity severely delimits the generalizability of evaluations to date. It also raises questions about how much is in fact known about the effectiveness of many juvenile justice sanctions.

Conclusion

Extant research offers grounds for optimism. Even so, explicit articulation of the limitations of this research and the need for studies that examine external validity is important for developing evidence about “what works” in juvenile justice. Implications for research and policy are discussed.     

Religion and the Practices of Popular Constitutionalism: Sarah Gordon's The Spirit of the Law

Sarah Gordon's The Spirit of the Law: Religious Voices and the Constitution in Modern America (2010) details the advent, beginning in the 1940s, of a “new constitutional world” pertaining to the religion clauses. By focusing on case studies, Gordon's narrative history shows the emergence, maturation, and waning of a rich historical moment in which religiously motivated popular constitutionalists had a profound impact on how the Constitution was technically interpreted by the courts. Shifting perspectives from history to ethnography, the essay synthesizes Gordon's stories to yield an anatomy of “religious” popular constitutionalism as it appears in Gordon's book and conjectures at what it might look like if we left court records behind.     

Court Sentencing Patterns for Environmental Crimes: Is There a “Green” Gap in Punishment?

Objectives

This study examines sentencing patterns for environmental crimes and tests the assumption that “green” offenders receive more lenient treatment from criminal courts than non-environmental offenders.

Methods

We present two sets of analyses. First, we present an empirical portrait of environmental felony offenses convicted in a single state (Florida) over a fifteen-year period and the resulting criminal sanctions. Second, we use a precision matching analysis to assess whether environmental offenders receive more lenient treatment when compared to non-environmental offenders with the same characteristics and offense severity scores.

Results

Findings indicate that an overall small percentage of felony convictions in state courts stem from environmental crimes. We also find that punishments for environmental crimes are more lenient than sanctions assigned to comparable non-environmental offenses when the environmental crime is ecological, but that punishments are sometimes harsher when the environmental crime involves animals.

Conclusions

The findings provide general support for the argument that courts and other formal institutions of social control treat environmental crimes more leniently than non-environmental crimes. This paper also raises important questions about citizen and state actors’ perceptions of crimes against the environment and, more generally, about the ways in which theories of court sentencing behaviors apply to environmental crime sanctioning decisions.

     

Solitary Confinement as Punishment: Examining In-Prison Sanctioning Disparities

Drawing on prior sentencing and prison scholarship, this study examines the use of solitary confinement as a form of punishment. Specifically, it assesses whether, given a prison infraction, minority inmates—and young, male, minority inmates in particular—are more likely to be placed in solitary and to be placed in it for longer durations. Multilevel regression analyses of state prison data suggest little support for the hypothesis that minority males, or young minority, males, are sanctioned more harshly than other inmates. The analyses identify, however, that males are more likely than females to be placed in solitary as a form of disciplinary punishment and that younger females are more likely to be placed in it than older females. The findings highlight that age and sex may interact to influence punishment decisions and raise questions about the precise roles of race and ethnicity in affecting punishment decisions. Implications of the findings for theory, research, and policy are discussed.     

Total and Marginal Cost Analysis for a High School Based Bystander Intervention

Costs of providing the Green Dot bystander-based intervention, shown to be effective in the reduction of sexual violence among Kentucky high school students, were estimated based on data from a large cluster-randomized clinical trial. Rape Crisis Center Educators were trained to provide Green Dot curriculum to students. Implementing Green Dot in schools (N = 13) randomized to the intervention, over five years, cost $1.6 M and included start-up ($58 K) and ongoing implementation ($1.55 M). Costs for adding a school ($25,510) were calculated based on the final year, where no start-up costs were incurred. Knowing the $25,510 cost estimate for adding Green Dot may be particularly useful for high school administrators or school boards when they were making economic decisions based on strong evidence of program effectiveness to reduce violence.     

Further Validation of the Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM) Trial 1 Performance Validity Index: Examination of False Positives and Convergent Validity

Assessment of performance validity is an essential part of a neuropsychological evaluation, with the inclusion of two or more performance validity tests (PVTs) becoming routine practice. Considering the time to administer multiple tests, there has been some support for use of the Test of Memory Malingering (TOMM) Trial 1 (T1) as an independent, “one and done” PVT. Notably, cutoffs for TOMM T1 need further validation, with an emphasis on minimizing false-positive classifications among those with bona fide cognitive impairment. In a clinically referred sample of 127 veterans, this study examined the role of cognitive impairment in TOMM performance and the utility of a TOMM T1 as an independent PVT. Examinees were administered the TOMM and three additional PVTs as part of a comprehensive neuropsychological battery. Sixty-eight percent of examinees were classified valid (35% of valid examinees were cognitively impaired). TOMM T1?≤?40 had excellent observed sensitivity (83%) and specificity (93%) overall, with minimal false-positive classification. TOMM T1 was also significantly correlated and concordant with other memory-based PVTs. Given score ranges and failure rates for TOMM T1?≤?40 among those with neurological/neurocognitive conditions, scores in the 37–40 range may merit administration of additional TOMM trials to maximize accuracy in identifying valid-cognitively impaired versus noncredible performance. Otherwise, an abbreviated TOMM administration (i.e., only T1) using a cutoff of ≤?40—in conjunction with one or more additional PVTs—may be sufficient for detecting noncredible/invalid test performance in the absence of known or suspected neurological/neurocognitive disorders.     

Crime in the 2016 Presidential Election: a new era?

Issues pertaining to crime and criminal justice have long been part of presidential campaigns. Voters want to know how candidates plan to solve the problem of crime and keep them safe. In turn, candidates respond to voters’ concerns and describe their crime control ideas in hopes of increasing voter support. In doing so, they often rely on symbolic statements that provide little detail but make people “feel good”. This study analyzes the criminal justice rhetoric used by the three major presidential candidates in the 2016 election cycle to determine what issues they discussed and how often. The analysis also examines if candidates relied on symbolic statements, and how the issues were debated between the candidates. The findings show that the issues discussed were somewhat different than in previous years, and that the candidates relied on symbolic statements about crime – a change from the previous election cycle. Additionally, the candidates used crime control as a way to reach out to voters in their own political party, suggesting an interesting shift in how issues of criminal justice are being approached within elections.     

Economic Conditions and the Vote for Incumbent Parties in Russia,Poland, Hungary,Slovakia, and the Czech Republic from 1990 to 1996

An American political scientist employs regional electoral, economic, and demographic data across several transition countries—Hungary, Slovakia, Poland, Czech Republic, and Russia—to examine the effects of economic conditions on the electoral fortunes of thirty-two incumbent political parties in ten parliamentary elections. “Primary Incumbents” and “Other Incumbents” are distinguished in order to analyze how the “Degree of Incumbency” affects the relationship between economic conditions and election results for these two different types of incumbents in post-communist countries. The article points to new questions and methods for examining multiparty elections as well as for the relationship between economic conditions and voting outcomes.