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Crime, Inequality, and Power
Abstract
Crime, Inequality and Power challenges the dominant definitions of crime and the criminal through its uniquely comparative approach. In this book Eileen Leonard analyzes multiple forms of criminal behavior in the United States, including violence, sexual assault, theft, and drug law violations, whilst also asking readers to consider the parallels between crimes that are rarely thought comparable. Leonards juxtaposition of familiar street crimes, such as car theft, alongside large-scale corporate theft, vividly exposes profound inequalities in the way crime is defined, and the treatment it receives within the criminal justice system. Leonards analysis also reveals the underlying inequalities of race, class, and gender which enable the perpetuation of such crimes, as well as calling into question the reality of fundamental American ideals of fairness and equal justice. Moreover, the book questions whether current policies that punish street crime excessively while minimizing the crimes of the powerful, fail to keep the public safe. A broader consideration of crime, and the inequalities that underlie it, offers a fresh opportunity to rethink public policies and enduring issues of crime and criminal justice. Challenging the many persistent inequalities in the perception of and response to crime, this critique of American crime and punishment will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as scholars, in the fields of criminology, sociology and law.
... In combination, these feelings can be reconciled with evidence of deteriorating mental and physical health (of which growing obesity rates are just one example), expanding social ills such as drug use, violence, imprisonment, teenage pregnancies, poor educational performance, and, eventually, decreasing life expectancy (Wilkinson & Pickett 2009;Leonard 2015;Bruni and Stanca 2008;Rettenmaier and Wang 2013). ...
This study investigates whether income inequality is related to sprawl and wellbeing in American cities. The results do not provide evidence to support the role of income inequality as a mediator of the link between sprawl and well-being. Instead, the results tell a more nuanced story. Specifically, they indicate that consistent with a priori expectations, lower levels of sprawl are, on average, associated with lower levels of income inequality. Additionally, lower levels of sprawl correspond to higher levels of financial well-being. Supplementary investigation into this finding reveals that this disguises a very different experience among Metropolitan Statistical Areas (MSAs) with higher levels of financial wellbeing, in which lower sprawl corresponds more strongly to higher levels of financial well-being. While the evidence is not unimpeachable, these findings lend some support to conventional anti-sprawl urban planning wisdom for American cities.
Reconceptualising Custody draws on developments for women in prison in Scotland to consider the influence of ‘rights discourse’ in reorganising the penal estate. Locating these developments within an international context, the chapter explores the flexibility of concepts of ‘community’ in the repositioning of custody and in attempts to create ‘benevolent’ spaces within the prison system. The chapter argues that an individual model of rights within institutional spaces cannot address the factors that contribute to imprisonment, sustain processes of criminalisation and that continue to exert impact post-release. The tension between the potential for achieving radical change and the legitimation of the existing system is evident in the creation of apparently benevolent spaces within which women are incompatibly both punished and rehabilitated.
Regardless the specific theoretical perspective, all ethical formulations for criminal justice practice in some way construct the ontological character of the offender, which, in turn, situates both epistemology and method. How this ethical process ultimately constructs the offender will likely help to establish the degree of ethical worth such an individual is deemed worthy to receive. Whether based upon the seriousness of the crime or based upon the specific configuration of the architecture of incarceration, the very possibility of legitimate ethical practice is greatly compromised. Such results can be better avoided when the ethical import of the individual is ontologically situated within the very definition of what it means to be human.¹ By situating this discussion within the context of the analytic psychology of Carl Jung and his concept of the shadow and the originary ethics of Martin Heidegger found in Being and Time, a more ontologically configured possibility for a criminal justice ethics can be recognized.
Public knowledge of crime and justice is largely derived from the media. This paper examines the influence of media consumption on fear of crime, punitive attitudes and perceived police effectiveness. This research contributes to the literature by expanding knowledge on the relationship between fear of crime and media consumption. This study also contributes to limited research on the media's influence on punitive attitudes, while providing a much-needed analysis of the relationship between media consumption and satisfaction with the police. Employing OLS regression, the results indicate that respondents who are regular viewers of crime drama are more likely to fear crime. However, the relationship is weak. Furthermore, the results indicate that gender, education, income, age, perceived neighborhood problems and police effectiveness are statistically related to fear of crime. In addition, fear of crime, income, marital status, race, and education are statistically related to punitive attitudes. Finally, age, fear of crime, race, and perceived neighborhood problems are statistically related to perceived police effectiveness.
Ces articles debattent des reflexions theoriques et empiriques concernant les discours de victimisation des femmes par rapport au viol. Les AA. se penchent ici sur les theories feministes existentes et plus particulierement de l'inluence des theories post-modernes sur la condition feminine
This article reviews the current trends and impact of mass incarceration on communities of color, with a focus on criminal justice policy and practice contributors to racial disparity. The impact of these disproportionate incarceration rates on public safety, offenders, and communities are discussed. Recommendations for criminal justice and other policy reforms to reduce unwarranted racial disparities are offered.
While the pharmaceutical industry arguably has the worst record of serious corporate crime of any industry, international law evasion rather than outright law violation has been the biggest problem in the industry. To understand how these problems can be and are being brought under control, a legal-pluralist analysis is needed that decenters criminal enforcement by the state. Consumer and professional activism and a variety of levels of self-regulation in combination with state, regional, and international regulation are all important to understanding how progress is possible. Creative work within this web of controls can actually transform lowest-common- denominator regulation into highest-common-factor regulation and self-regulation when actors are capable of thinking strategically in world-system terms.
The New American Encounter with International Human Rights Norms: The Road After Abu Ghraib - Volume 100 - Shadi Mokhtari
Focusing on male-on-male rape, this book looks at the common myths surrounding this taboo issue, including the idea that 'men who rape other men must be homosexual' and that 'real men can't be raped'. It also reveals that men are not only raped in prison, as is commonly believed, and that they suffer similar trauma to female survivors of rape.
In its 1963 ruling Gideon v. Wainwright, the Supreme Court declared the right to a lawyer "fundamental and essential" to fairness in the criminal courts and held that lawyers must be provided for people who could not afford them so that every person "stands equal before the law." In later decisions, the Court ruled that a poor person facing any loss of liberty must have a lawyer "so that the accused may know precisely what he is doing, so that he is fully aware of the prospect of going to jail or prison, and so that he is treated fairly by the prosecution." This Essay argues that fifty years later, this right has not been realized. The U.S. criminal system is not truly adversarial because prosecutors possess broad, unchecked power and therefore determine results in criminal cases with little or no input from the defense. Governments have failed to adequately fund defense systems, many judges tolerate or welcome inadequate representation, and the Supreme Court has refused to require competent representation, instead adopting a standard of "effective counsel" that hides and perpetuates deficient representation. In this system, poverty, not justice, dictates outcomes.
5.4 million Americans-one in every forty voting age adults-are denied the right to participate in democratic elections because of a past or current felony conviction. In several American states, one in four black men cannot vote due to a felony conviction. In a country that prides itself on universal suffrage, how did the United States come to deny a voice to such a large percentage of its citizenry? What are the consequences of large-scale disenfranchisement-both for election outcomes, and for public policy more generally? This book exposes one of the most important, yet little known, threats to the health of American democracy today. It reveals the centrality of racial factors in the origins of these laws, and their impact on politics today. Marshalling the first real empirical evidence on the issue to make a case for reform, this analysis informs all future policy and political debates on the laws governing the political rights of criminals.
People without a voice are not people in any meaningful sense of the word. Silenced people cannot express their ideas; they can neither consent nor protest. They are reduced to being pawns in the schemes of the powerful, mendicants who must accept whatever is imposed upon them. In order to keep people in a state of subjugation, silencing their voices is essential. Nowhere is this clearer than in U.S. prisons. This article can also be found at the Monthly Review website, where most recent articles are published in full.
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The disproportionate presence of blacks in American prisons, jails, and Death Rows, and the principal reasons for it—higher rates of commission of violent crimes and racially disparate effects of drug policies and sentencing laws governing violent and drug crimes—are well known. Since the late 1980s, black involvement in violent crime has declined substantially, but racial disproportions have not. Blacks are six to seven times more likely than whites to be in prison. Nearly a third of young black men are under criminal justice system control. A third of black boys born in 2001 are predicted to spend some time in prison. The simplest explanation for these patterns is that drug and sentencing policies that contribute to disparities have not been significantly changed in decades. The question then is, why not? The answer is that the white majority does not empathize with poor black people who wind up in prison. That in turn is because recent punishment policies have replaced the urban ghetto, Jim Crow laws, and slavery as a mechanism for maintaining white dominance over blacks in the United States.
On May 11, 1996, ValuJet flight 592 crashed in the Florida Everglades killing all 105 passengers and five crew members. The technical cause of the crash was a fire that erupted after one or more oxygen generators exploded in a cargo compartment. Governmental investigations have indicated that both ValuJet and SabreTech (an airline maintenance company) failed to comply with a host of regulations concerning the presentation, storage, and transportation of hazardous materials by air. More generally, however, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has been found to be negligent in its oversight of airlines by not adequately monitoring the general safety of commercial aircraft as well as by its refusal to institute safeguards and guidelines that would have protected passengers and crews from crashes like that of flight 592. This paper follows the tradition of state-corporate crime theorizing and research by identifying the organizational and structural forces that contributed to the ValuJet crash. This includes an examination of the FAA's contradictory roles as both regulator and supporter of the airline industry, as well as a discussion of both ValuJet's and SabreTech's violations of federal air safety regulations.
The Prison Rape Elimination Act of 2003 (P.L. 108-79) requires the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) to carry out, for each calendar year, a comprehensive statistical review and analysis of the incidence and effects of prison rape. This report fulfills the requirement under Sec. 4(c)(2)(B)(ii) of the Act to provide a listing of State and Federal prisons ranked according to the incidence of prison rape. Between April and August 2007, BJS completed the first National Inmate Survey (NIS) of 146 State and Federal prisons. The survey, conducted by RTI International (Research Triangle Park, NC), was restricted to adult con-finement facilities, including prisons, penitentiaries, prison hospitals, prison farms, boot camps, and centers for recep-tion, classification, or alcohol and drug treatment. The NIS excluded community-based facilities, such as halfway houses, group homes, and work release centers. The sam-ple was designed in accordance with the requirement that BJS draw a random sample, or other scientifically appropri-ate sample, of not less than 10% of prison facilities. (See Methodology for sample description.) Unlike previous BJS surveys of sexual violence that were based on administrative records, the NIS collected reports of sexual violence directly from inmates. The NIS survey consisted of an Audio Computer-Assisted Self Interview (ACASI) in which inmates, using a touch-screen, interacted with a computer-assisted questionnaire and followed audio instructions delivered via headphones. A small number of inmates (2% of all participants in the survey) completed a short paper form. These were inmates housed primarily in administrative or disciplinary segregation or considered too violent to be interviewed.
The sentencing regime that governs white-collar criminal cases requires reform. The U.S. Sentencing Guidelines recommend sentences that are generally too high and place a grossly disproportionate emphasis on the concept of "loss"—the dollar value of the harm that a court finds a white-collar criminal to have caused. This concept of loss is ill defined, and often artificial to the point of being arbitrary. Moreover, the loss calculation fails to adequately approximate a defendant's culpability, dwarfing traditionally relevant considerations such as the manner in which the defendant committed the crime and the defendant's motive for doing so. Fortunately, the Supreme Court has recently opened the door to systemic reform. In Kimbrough v. United States, the Supreme Court held that—at least in certain circumstances—a sentencing judge may deviate from a Guidelines recommendation based purely on policy disagreement with that guideline. This Note argues that sentencing judges should adopt an aggressive interpretation of the Supreme Court's Kimbrough opinion and exercise their newly rediscovered discretion to deemphasize the loss calculation and restore rationality to the sentencing of white-collar criminals.
The aftermath of September 11th has seen a worrisome rise in invasive surveillance measures. Both adopted by statute and initiated by agencies, these provisions provide unprecedented powers for government agents to investigate suspects and search individuals, whether they are directly involved in terrorism or not. The prevailing wisdom has been that the American people will accept these restrictions as the natural cost of heightened security, and initial evidence suggests the public has been willing to tolerate greater limits on civil liberties. However, over time such support will erode, leaving in place permanent restrictions on civil liberties that not only will concern Americans, but also may turn them against government officials and civic participation. Thus, contrary to many interpretations of September 11th, this article argues that the policy response has only sown the seeds for greater detachment from and dissatisfaction with government as the public becomes increasingly separated from the workings and operations of public policy.
The rhetorical techniques by which governments deny, justify, and qualify alleged instances of torture have been well documented. Sociologists, however, have neglected the social contexts in which officials confront allegations of torture, as well as officials' use of evidence to strengthen their own or weaken competing claims about torture. Relying on findings from a qualitative content analysis of seven Senate Armed Services Committee hearings held in 2004 on “detainee abuse” at Abu Ghraib prison, this article examines the processes by which hearing participants portrayed the violence there as an isolated incident. Building on James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium's (2003) “constructionist analytics,” I examine the textual mediation of claims-making in the hearings, focusing on the interplay between textual realities of detainee abuse and the interpretive uses to which hearing participants put these realities. I show that developments in the textual environment of the hearings, particularly the development of a textually mediated vantage on events that “really occurred” throughout Afghanistan and Iraq, provided hearing participants with rich interpretive materials to downplay and rationalize instances of abuse that occurred in places other than Abu Ghraib prison. These findings suggest that official denial is sustained by diverse claims-making activities, including the production of a textual reality of human rights violations. The findings also extend the purview of social problems theory to account for the role of texts in the construction of social problems.
It is generally assumed that the subcultures experienced by men and women in prison are diametrically opposed. Previous research indicates that incarcerated women create more stable interpersonal relationships. Thirty-five women imprisoned in the Midwest were interviewed, and their comments suggest the subculture found in women's prisons might be changing. While their observations support the notion that prisons for women are generally less violent, involve less gang activity, and do not facilitate the racial tensions evident in men's prisons, the respondents indicated their interpersonal relationships may be less stable and less familial than in the past. Specifically, participants discussed the high degree of mistrust inherent in their friendships with other female inmates. In addition, they reported numerous reasons women engage in sexual relationships; however, they believe the primary motivation involves economic manipulation. Finally, respondents did not report a significant or formal enactment of familial networks. Factors which might influence such changes are considered.
Conventional wisdom holds that white‐collar offenders operate with relative impunity because of widespread public and governmental apathy. The present study, however, examines whether public tolerance and governmental leniency toward white‐collar offenders have endured the series of national white‐collar crime scandals emerging in 2001–2002. This study analyzes sentencing guidelines data from Florida for the period 1994 to 2004, modeling legal and extra-legal factors related to the decision to incarcerate white‐collar and street property offenders. In/out incarceration sentences imposed upon white‐collar offenders are compared with those imposed upon burglars and thieves to determine whether 21st‐century white‐collar offenders are treated more leniently than street‐level property offenders. Additional analyses consider the roles of social status and of recent corporate scandals in influencing sentencing disparities. Findings indicate that, despite operating under sentencing guidelines designed to reduce disparities, white‐collar offenders are afforded greater leniency, though this relationship varies by the type of white‐collar crime considered, the offender's social status, and whether the sentencing occurred before or after the Enron scandal. Conclusions emphasize the salience of the definition of white‐collar crime when discussing punitiveness disparities and the relationship between white‐collar crime scandals and punishment.
In the research presented here, we apply the storyline framework of the criminal event to the secondary narrative of prisoners’ relationships with family members before and during incarceration, and their plans for life upon release from prison. Analyzing 29 in-depth interviews from 13 inmate/family dyads and one inmate/family triad, we examine multiple views of the impact of incarceration and its consequences for the incarcerated individual, the family member, and their connections to each other. We demonstrate that these relationships follow three distinct yet intersecting secondary narratives – disrupted, transforming, and precarious – characterized by different qualities of pre-incarceration relationships, impacts on family members’ lives, and plans for the future. Defining the characteristics of these narratives is important because each narrative has specific implications for the family member's willingness and capacity to support the prisoner and potentially limit future offending behavior.
The news media are a vital part of the process by which individuals' private troubles with crime—as victims or offenders—are transformed into public issues. The social construction of crime problems may be understood as reflecting the types of relationships that link news agencies to their sources, and the organizational constraints that structure the news-gathering process. The ways in which the news media collect, sort, and contextualize crime reports help to shape public consciousness regarding which conditions need to be seen as urgent problems, what kinds of problems they represent, and, by implication, how they should be resolved. While much attention has been focused on the ways in which media attention to crime influences the fear of crime, it is likely that the most significant effects of media reporting are broadly ideological rather than narrowly attitudinal. By restricting the terms of discussion, the news media facilitate the marginalization of competing views regarding crime and its solution.
This study explores the patterns by which women enter into criminal activities by drawing upon in-depth life history interviews with a sample of 20 incarcerated women. The author constructs a conceptual framework for understanding the progression from victim to survivor to offender in the subjects' life histories. This framework shows that the best available options for escape from physical and sexual violence are often survival strategies which are criminal: i.e., running away from home, use of drugs, and the illegal street work required to survive as a runaway. The women's own narratives are used to illustrate their views of themselves as survivors, not as victims, and their commitments to important relationships in their lives which explain their entry into and commitments to criminal activities. Women's responses to victimization and women's relational identities are seen as factors which both motivate and restrain women's criminal activities. The concept of immersion in street crime is offered as a more accurate term than criminal career in describing women's criminal histories.
This article examines violence “in the suites” of corporate America. It argues that the magnitude of corporate violence overshadows aggression, and lawbreaking transactions associated with street crime. Specifically, the paper looks at America's Prison Industrial Complex, and privatization as classic examples of the breadth and intensity of corporate malfeasance and structural violence. Suggestions are made on how to humanize the behavior of corporations.
This paper presents the results from in-depth interviews with 30 crack-using women also working in the sex trade to support their drug use. The gender roles perspective highlights traditional beliefs from past decades about the appeal of cocaine to women. Its effects on their sexuality, and the reasons they become prostitutes. These are contrasted with the harsh realities of the dangers and marginalization faced by female crack users who work the streets in the contemporary sex trade. These women operate at the lowest levels of street drug use and prostitution, experience a considerable amount of violence and sexual exploitation, and are subject to riskier practices in their sex work. Their crack addiction fuels this extreme vulnerability and contributes to their highly deviant and stigmatized social image. We conclude that, similar to findings in other studies, the increase in crack consumption and availability has had serious negative repercussions for poor women who were, or became, involved in the sex trade. Moreover, the powerful appeal of crack to these women poses a challenge for harm reduction alternatives and other services that might improve their health and safety.