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."

Race and Prosecution: A Review of the Evidence

The Vera Institute just released a report reviewing the evidence from over 30 published, peer-reviewed studies examining the relationship between race/ethnicity and prosecution.


From the website:
Vera’s Prosecution and Racial Justice Program (PRJ) conducted a review of 34 empirical studies on the relationship of race and ethnicity to prosecutorial decision making published between 1990 and 2011 in peer-reviewed journals. The literature review distills the research and provides a reference resource for a diverse audience—including academics, practitioners, and interested generalists—about the current state of the debate on these subjects. The aim of the literature review is to encourage additional empirical research on the relationship between race and prosecution by identifying areas that need further study; provide prosecutors and other criminal justice practitioners with a frame of reference in which to assess their own practices; and strengthen the general public’s understanding of the criminal justice system.


From the Press Release:
“No other actor in the criminal justice system drives case outcomes as profoundly as the prosecutor,” PRJ director Whitney Tymas writes in her introductory note. “Nevertheless, empirical research analyzing racial impacts of prosecutors’ routine choices on the thousands of defendants and victims with whom they interact daily has been scarce.” 

Among the review’s key findings: 

• Defendants’ and victims’ race appear to affect prosecutorial decisions. Most of the 34 studies reviewed found influences on case outcomes, even when other legal and extra-legal factors are taken into account.
• The effect of race and ethnicity on prosecutorial decision making is inconsistent.
• As compared to whites, it is not always blacks or Latinos and Latinas who receive more punitive treatment.

Alt-Fuel Vehicles Star in Louisiana's Latest Political Drama

From TalkingPointsMemo.

By RICHARD READ

There’s a storm a-brewin’ in Louisiana over alternative vehicle tax credits. (There’s a sentence that didn’t end like you’d expect.)

In 2009, the state legislature passed Act 469 (PDF), which offers a tax credit of up to $3,000 to anyone who purchases a low-emissions vehicle that runs on alternative fuel, “including but not limited to compressed natural gas, liquefied natural gas, liquefied petroleum gas, biofuel, biodiesel, methanol, ethanol, and electricity.”

Which is fine. Many states have such laws on the books, so Louisiana wasn’t breaking new ground here. And in the grand scheme of things, Act 469 was cheap: estimators expected it to cost the state just $900,000 over five years.

All went smoothly until April 30, 2012, when Louisiana’s Revenue Secretary Cynthia Bridges made an “emergency” ruling, which expanded the type of vehicles that qualified for the tax credit. Specifically, she added flex-fuel vehicles to the list, which seems reasonable, since “ethanol” was mentioned in the original bill.

As the always-astute Clancy Dubos at Gambit Weekly points out, this might not have been a problem, except for three curious things:

Changes at The Times-Picayune lay bare the roots of a national trend

From The Lens, a report on the role of media deregulation at the FCC and it's implications for the Times-Picayune.

Changes at The Times-Picayune lay bare the roots of a national trend:

The recent changes at the Times-Picayune to stop publishing a daily paper and instead publish three days a week are unfortunate for the residents of the city and surrounding areas.  However, it was only a matter of time before this or something similar happened given what’s been happening to newspapers across the country for the past couple decades.  Lots of people claim that this is a result of the growing popularity of online news and the glut of information in general available on the internet, or of not enough people subscribing to the paper and paying for content.  While this is partly true, it’s important to see this change in its broader context. There are two other, very important things to note that help explain what happened to the TP: changes in policies relaxing media ownership regulations and the cost of producing and distributing news.  Once we take these into consideration, we can better understand the role of consumption patterns and the internet in the changing news industry and the likely consequences of current policy decisions.

Louisiana and School Privatization

From Reuters:
(Reuters) - Louisiana is embarking on the nation's boldest experiment in privatizing public education, with the state preparing to shift tens of millions in tax dollars out of the public schools to pay private industry, businesses owners and church pastors to educate children.

Stanford Project on Income and Inequality

A group of sociologists at Stanford and Harvard (and on from U. Mich) recently finished an impressive and sizable project on inequality in the US called Inequality in the United States: Understanding Inequality with Data (click here for the entire, 89 page report, complete with multiple tables and charts).  They don't just focus on income inequality, but also include debt, education, employment, family, gender, health, immigration, mobility, politics, poverty, race, violent crime and wealth, and they offer many specific analyses within each category (e.g., changes in union membership, or changes in US industry as part of the employment section).  Many of the tables show changes over time so you can get a sense of today's rates compared to those of years before.  Further, you can see at what point in time significant changes in trajectories occurred (click here to see a select number of slides individually). This is really an impressive assembly of data put together into an easily understandable format.  This would be perfect for journalists, researchers, students, and other bloggers who write about these topics.  Some of the data is even broken down by state so you can compare across states (e.g., violent crime) and others allow you to see how the US compares with other countries.  More about the project and other material can be found on the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality website. Here you can test you poverty and inequality IQ and learn the 20 facts about poverty and inequality that everyone should know.

To address these issues through policy, the Center posted a short chapter from a popular book called "Inequality by Design" which uses sociological data to critique the popular Bell Curve viewpoint and explain inequality as a consequence of they way our social institutes are designed and function.  They also offer a short (5-page) report on aspiring for income equality in a 2007 issue of Contexts, which is a publication of the American Sociological Association.

Below I posted their May, 2012 press release (after the break).