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I’ll admit: I got sucked in to some sensationalist coverage about changes to school discipline. Alarmist “journalists” described the new policies as imposing racially based quotas on school discipline. I didn’t read carefully – it was just a passing skim on my smartphone – and not everything that shows up in the google news reader […]
July 24, 2012 by CrimeCents
Michelle Alexander’s book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, has been a phenomenal success in a way that few academic works ever achieve. It has had a steady presence on the arbiter of successful books – the New York Times bestseller list. Why is it so popular? Because it tells the […]
June 22, 2012 by CrimeCents
Darnell Hawkins spoke at the National Institute of Justice Annual Conference held this week. On a panel titled “The Relationships Between Neighborhoods, Race and Crime,” Hawkins discussed his perspective on the study of race and crime as a an academic with a long and respected career. While he described himself self-deprecatingly as “grumpy” about our […]
May 16, 2012 by CrimeCents
Gangs are notoriously difficult study. How do you define them? Ask people to self-identify and trust their answers? Ask cops? Social scientists? Prison officials? All of these methods have serious flaws, but there’s no great alternative. So how does the National Gang Center conduct the National Youth Gang Survey? Since 1996, the National Gang Center, […]
April 24, 2012 by CrimeCents
I say “crime victim.” Without thinking, what popped into your mind? If you had a mental image, what was it? Chances are, the person that you immediately thought of is female, white, middle class, maybe a little girl, maybe a soccer mom. Yet the data don’t support that image, which is created by media and […]
April 13, 2012 by CrimeCents
The Department of Justice does not exactly have a rep on the interwebs for hosting awesome video content. Not surprisingly, this public service announcement was not actually created by DOJ. Good thing, too, because if DOJ ever creates a video I actually like, it’s gonna seriously mess with my current paradigm. Tribal justice remains hard […]
March 21, 2012 by CrimeCents
Trayvon Martin’s death is inextricably bound up in his age, his hoodie, and his race. An older white woman, even in a hoodie, would not have been a likely target for George Zimmerman. But Trayvon, in his youth, his masculinity, and his racial identity as an African-American, fulfilled the stereotype of the unknown criminal offender. […]
August 1, 2012 by CrimeCents
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