Rising Tide 7...Register now!!!

I yanked this off of Zombie's blog.

Rising Tide 7...Register now!!!

Renegade Raging Grannies take on Todd Akin

Radical grannies are the best!
Complements of Crooks & Liars.

Mental Health and Criminal Justice: Identifying Needs

The Vera Institute of Justice recently released a report examining the mental health needs of those in the Washington DC criminal justice system. Given the lack of mental health services in New Orleans, the relationship between mental health and homelessness, crime and repeat offending, and a growing interest in establishing a mental health municipal court (based on personal communication I know Judge Sens is interested), this report might have something useful to offer this city. I pasted some of the key findings from the report below, and a podcast with one of the key researchers (Richard G. Dudley).  I also created a link to the full report and summary fact sheet.  This might also interest some other local bloggers.  I know my pal Noitsjustme will find this interesting.

Here's a link to the full report: Closing the Gap: Using Criminal Justice and Public Health Data to Improve the Identification of Mental Illness

Here's a link to the summary Fact Sheet.

Some of the basic findings are below the fold.

Bill Maher on Racist Voter ID Laws

Courtesy of Crooks & Liars:

Crime Prevention in New Orleans: The Value of Community Input

The Rev. Tom Watson's claims are spot on.  I couldn't come up with better solutions myself and I'm a criminologist who knows about the research on crime and violence prevention.  Goes to show you the importance of community input in dealing with violence. After all, who would know better than those on the ground? I'd like to see a lot more of this type of reporting from the big stations, as this is where the real value of the news lies.

From The Louisiana Weekly:

By Mason Harrison
Contributing Writer

Officials at City Hall are facing tough criticism of their plans to fight crime from one of the city’s most ardent backers of community involvement in turning the tide of violence in New Orleans. The Rev. Tom Watson, who recently pulled together a citywide summit on Black-on-Black violence and issued several recommendations to curb crime, says the city’s crime czar and other officials have dropped the ball on incorporating community input into policing strategies.

Watson’s chief complaint pertains to the positive, community-centered “rhetoric” that he says emanates from the office of Mayor Mitch Landrieu, but that is “not meeting the [city’s] action on the ground.” Specifically, Watson says, Landrieu and New Orleans Criminal Justice Commissioner James Carter are willing to provide access to city officials working on crime interdiction to area stakeholders, but are slow to take up recommendations from local leaders.

Duke Ellington: Rhapsody in Blue

I love this song and this version.

Robert J. Sampson: "The Social Order of the American City: Lessons for Crime and Justice"

Robert Sampson is a sociologist whose research examines the social organization of city life.  He's worked and published in a number of substantive areas, including social movements, civic engagement, and crime.  In criminology he's best know for his work on social disorganization, which looks at the city as a living social system and questions how the different "parts" (e.g., institutions, organizations, formal and informal social groups, and patterns) interact and operate within this system.  Much of his work focuses on the neighborhood level and one of his big arguments is about the power of the collective efficacy of a neighborhood [or other group] in social change.  Collective efficacy refers to a group's ability to realize common concerns and work together to address them (think neighborhoods working together to deal with blight and abandoned homes).

Sampson's research on community life revealed a lack of criminological research on social processes and their relationship with collectivities and collective efficacy. Social processes focus on motivations (values, rationalizations, emotions) and meanings, and how they're expressed by those who actually live in the community. Social processes tell us why people consider themselves members of various groups and what their actions mean to them.  They tell us how collective identity and collective efficacy happen.  This requires qualitative research, which is much less common in criminology.  There are some good ethnographies out there now that touch on violence, police and prison, and they shed some light on these social processes (see Code of the Streets and When a Heart Turns Rock Solid), but it's a very underdeveloped area of research. Yet, it's necessary because understanding social processes will go a long way in understanding the motivations behind crime and finding realistic and effective solutions.

His latest book, "Great American City: Chicago and the Enduring Neighborhood Effect" is considered his magnum opus (for a 2-page review click here).  He's been studying Chicago for years, he knows it inside and out. It should be very insightful for understanding not only the city of Chicago, but in thinking more clearly about the social organization of our own cities, including "the limit of investing in individuals without attempting to change the social and spatial systems within which they are embedded."