The militarization of police in the U.S.

The link below has an interactive graphic that is searchable by county.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/08/15/us/surplus-military-equipment-map.html

Racial Dot Map, Segregation and Prison

Here is the map from University of Virginia;

This racial dot map is an American snapshot; it provides an accessible visualization of geographic distribution, population density, and racial diversity of the American people in every neighborhood in the entire country. The map displays 308,745,538 dots, one for each person residing in the United States at the location they were counted during the 2010 Census. Each dot is color-coded by the individual’s race and ethnicity. The map is presented in both black and white and full color versions. In the color version, each dot is color-coded by race.

From Patheos blog;

The University of Virginia used the 2010 census to create a map of the U.S. overlaid with different colored dots—one dot for each person. The map uses blue dots for white people, green dots for black people, orange dots for Hispanic people, red dots for Asian people, and brown dots for Native Americans or other racial groups. The map is utterly fascinating, especially when looking at cities, because it demonstrates the level of segregation that exists in most places....

The level of segregation illuminated by these maps is sobering in and of itself. But there’s something even more sobering to be found in the racial dot map.

While browsing through some rural areas, which are mostly made up of open space and blue dots (white people), I began to notice something odd. I kept finding random collections of green dots (black people) in weirdly delineated, concentrated areas.

Deviance: Saints, Roughnecks and Patriots?

Please answer the following:

1. Describe the Saints.
2. Describe the Roughnecks.
3. How does money play a role with the Saints and Roughnecks?
4.  How are they affected in life after high school?
5. Are there Saints and Roughnecks at SHS?  Who (no names, please) and why?



Besides time and place, deviance is also relative to perception. Deviance must be perceived to be real. And in a capitalist society that values money, perceived deviance is related to social class. This is one revelation in William Chambliss's study called "The Saints and the Roughnecks" Chambliss argues that money was a key factor. If you have enough money it helps you cover up the deviance. Do you think this applies to kids at our school (no names please). Who is deviant? How do they hide it? Does money play a role? Is everyone at school a "saint"? Another important revelation in Chambliss's research is that the kids who accept the label of "deviant" then act upon that label. In other words, if I think that everyone expects me to be deviant, I may accept that as the truth and then I act deviant. Once you are labeled as "deviant", that becomes a stigma or a badge of disgrace that you carry with you. Sociologists who study this perspective call it the labeling theory.

Many students were upset about an investigation a while ago  that lead to the suspension of many students. But it might surprise students to learn that this was actually a relatively tame investigation. Here is a podcast from This American Life about a real drug investigation in a high school in Florida. Click on the link below and click on Act Two and play.

Act Two. 21 Chump Street.
Last year at three high schools in Palm Beach County, Florida, several young police officers were sent undercover to pose as students, tasked with making drug arrests. And this, this is the setting for a love story, reported by Robbie Brown. Robbie works for The New York Times in Atlanta. (13 minutes)
After listening can you see how our school handled the investigation the way the Saints were treated in the Chambliss reading instead of how the Florida school handled it (like the roughnecks)? You can read along on the transcript here.

This American Life turned the story into a short broadway act written by Lin Manuel (star and creator of Hamilton).


A second way that we see this relativity in drugs depends on who is getting caught using them. In a landmark study, The Vicious Circle, the Chicago Urban League wrote about how a Chicago Police drug sting operation was handing out felonies to impoverished minorities busted near the projects, but upper middleclass white kids from Naperville who were being caught there (instead of being given a felony) were having their parents called by the cops, or in some cases having their license suspended, but then they were released with no felony on their record. Dr. Paul Street of the Chicago Urban League writes,

Perhaps nothing reveals more dramatically Illinois authorities’ penchant for waging the War on Drugs in…disparate ways than the state’s enforcement of two 1989 bills mandating that a 15 or 16 year-old youth automatically would be prosecuted as an adult if he or she was charged with selling drugs within 1,000 feet of a school or a public housing project. Under the state’s Automatic Transfer laws…youth who have been convicted as adults can be transferred to adult prisons upon their 17th birthday and are automatically transferred on their 18th birthday….Of the 393 young people automatically transferred to adult facilities in Cook County from October 1999 to October 2000, 99.2 percent of them were minorities….
These findings are disturbing in light of evidence that white youth use illicit drugs at the same or higher rates as youth of color. They are doubly troublesome in light of recent reports on how local and state criminal justice authorities have chosen to deal with the rising number of ‘young [white] suburbanites’ purchasing heroin and other illegal narcotics on the city’s predominantly black West Side. In August 2001, The Chicago Tribune reported that city police and DuPage…drug cops… had selected a rather mild sanction for the suburban offenders. ‘Officers,’ the Tribune noted, ‘have seen teens make drug buys, traced the license plates of their cars and notified the registered owner, often a parent, where the vehicle has been.’
Last June…Cook County prosecuters and police had increased the level of punishment for the young suburbanites, threatening to impound their automobiles and suspend their driver’s licenses. William O’Brien, Chief of Narcotics for the State’s Attorney’s Office gave the following rationale for this ‘new crackdown,’ which contrasted sharply with the prison sentences faced by 15-year-old inner city youth caught selling narcotics next to a public housing project; when it comes to young and automobile centered suburban kids, O’Brien explained, ‘driving privileges may resonate more…than the threat of jail.’
The Vicious Circle by Dr. Paul Street, The Chicago Urban League, 2002. (pp.13-14)

Some other examples of how this applies to life beyond high school are the ways in which our society focuses on street crime as opposed to white collar crime.  Most of the news each night is spent on street crime: murders, burglary, robbery and rape.  The popular media likes reporting on these because they are action-oriented, personalized and fearful.  Each crime is presented like a mini-drama story.  However, white collar crime is far more costly and perhaps more dangerous.  White-collar crime includes tax evasion, bribery, embezzling, negligence.  For example, a department store defrauded poor customers of over 100 million dollars;  tire company executives allowed faulty tires to remain on vehicles despite recalling the tires in other countries - 200 people were killed before the tires were removed; an oil company skirted safeguards which resulted in an explosion and environmental disaster killing 12 people and costing billions of dollars.  In each of these cases, there may have been fines imposed on the companies involved, but no one went to prison.  No one received a felony record.  I bet you cannot name an individual person involved in the incident because no one person was labeled as deviant. 

In the criminal justice system, at every stage those with more money and power are able to avoid the system while those who are poor are funneled through it.

Because social class is related to deviance, the criminal justice system is more likely to target the poor.  This article  details how this is happening in Detroit.


Another example of this is Freaks and Geeks episode 13 is an example of Chambliss's thesis. Lindsay is experimenting with pot but she does not get caught, but her freak friends get caught. They are expected to be deviant. They may have even accepted the label of being deviant and they now see themselves as deviant and that influences their actions.

Takeaway:

How is deviance related to social class?

What is labeling theory? What is stigma? Self-fulfilling prophecy?

the relativity of deviance and drugs

HW:  Read Saints and Roughnecks for Tomorrow
HW: Read Just Mercy 7,8,10 for tuesday.

As an example of the relativity of deviance, one can examine drugs as deviance in a few different ways:
First, it is really interesting to see how students classify alcohol and tobacco when they only see the pharmacological description of the drugs.  Based on the effects of the drug, students usually classify both alcohol and tobacco as illegal controlled substances, but the reality in our country is that both are totally legal!  As an adult you can buy and consume as much of these as you'd like.  Why would our country allow such dangerous substances to be consumed by so many people? Because deviance is relative, not only to when and where but also to perception.
 For a more reliable understanding of drugs and their effects, checkout the book Buzzed by Kuhn et al.

Another connection to the relativity of deviance is that for many years, drug use was considered a medical problem. If you are using drugs and harming your body or those around you, you need help. If you are psychologically addicted to drugs, you need help. As detailed in the book Reefer Madness, Eric Schlosser shows how Marijuana went from being a medical/social problem to being a criminal one. This change in the law shows how relative the law can be about marijuana. Furthermore, the laws criminalizing Marijuana are in many cases relative to where you are. Sometimes it depends on how the state handles the crime, sometimes it depends on how the local law enforcement handles the crime. An excerpt from Schlosser's writing:

Some states classify marijuana with drugs like mescaline and heroin, while others give it a separate legal category. In New York state possessing slightly less than an ounce of marijuana brings a $100 fine, rarely collected. In Nevada possessing any amount of marijuana is a felony. In Montana selling a pound of marijuana, first offense, could lead to a life sentence, whereas in New Mexico selling 10,000 pounds of marijuana, first offense, could be punished with a prison term of no more than three years. In some states it is against the law to be in a room where marijuana is being smoked, even if you don't smoke any. In some states you may be subject to criminal charges if someone else uses, distributes, or cultivates marijuana on your property. In Idaho selling water pipes could lead to a prison sentence of nine years. In Kentucky products made of hemp fibers, such as paper and clothing, not only are illegal but carry the same penalties associated with an equivalent weight of marijuana. In Arizona, where marijuana use is forbidden, the crime can be established by the failure of a urine test: a person could theoretically be prosecuted in Phoenix for a joint smoked in Philadelphia more than a week before.

So, what this is showing is that Marijuana laws (and drug laws in general) have changed over time and are still different from place to place; the relativity of deviance.

Another example of the relativity of deviance is how drug crimes are punished.  In another post, I showed how kids from the suburbs were being given a lighter punishment than poor kids from Chicago Housing Projects and in this post, I show how drug arrests are disproportionately given to minorities than to whites.  The sentencing project highlights this as does the ACLU. And another way the relativity of deviance favored those of higher social class was through sentencing laws that unfairly targeted poor drug users much harsher than wealthier ones.  Until 2010, crack cocaine (cheaper and used by poor minorities) was punished 100 times more harshly than pure powder cocaine (more expensive and used by wealthier people).  Here is a quote from the ACLU:

The scientifically unjustifiable 100:1 ratio meant that people faced longer sentences for offenses involving crack cocaine than for offenses involving the same amount of powder cocaine – two forms of the same drug. Most disturbingly, because the majority of people arrested for crack offenses are African American, the 100:1 ratio resulted in vast racial disparities in the average length of sentences for comparable offenses. 

Lastly, another relation of drugs and deviance is the stigma associated with drugs. Chicago Magazine published a story about the rapidly growing heroine problem in St. Charles claiming the lives of dozens of teens but the community was afraid to acknowledge this because of the stigma of drug use. This stigma lead to three teens dumping the body of their friend who had overdosed back into the poor Chicago neighborhood where they had bought the drugs.



Takeaway (For more info see Ferris and Stein 166-171):

What is the relationship between deviance and crime?

How are drug laws an example of this relationship?

Deviance

Deviance is either repeatedly or seriously violating the norms of a society. Deviance is relative to both time and place. In other words, depending on when you are some place or where you are, you might be considered deviant or might not. When I was in the Caribbean on this remote island, I was stunned to see a guy carrying a sack of mangoes on his head. I took his picture because to me, this was deviant. However, what I didn't realize was that taking a stranger's picture was deviant to them. We looked at many other examples of deviance from class:
continuously talking to oneself in public
having a tattoo
doing your homework
holding the hand of a significant other in public
listening to your radio loud enough for everyone around you hear.
dropping out of high school
using illegal drugs
growing your hair really long
cutting your hair really short
a man wearing a dress
a business person wearing jeans
balancing your groceries on your head in public
leaving your parent's home after getting married
driving 100 m.p.h. down Port Clinton Rd.
attacking another person with a weapon
two men kissing
women working in a factory or in construction
woman with shaved armpits
shopping on Sunday
getting divorced
All of these have instances when or where they would or wouldn't be considered deviant. It depends on where you are and when you are there.

Deviance also needs to be perceived. In the following video, think about who is considered deviant and why:

It doesn't matter that Jerry didn't actually picked his nose. If he is perceived as deviant (which he is) then he is considered deviant and he will be treated as such.

Here is my picture of the guy with mangos on his head in Dominica:

Takeaway (For more info see Ferris and Stein 153-155):

What is Deviance?

What is the relativity of deviance?