Counterproductive punishment: How prison gangs undermine state authority

2017 ◽  
Vol 29 (3) ◽  
pp. 257-297 ◽  
Author(s):  
Benjamin Lessing
Keyword(s):  
Formal Model ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Crime Reduction ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Organize Criminal ◽  
Terror Attacks ◽  
Prison Gangs ◽  
State Authority ◽  
Do So

State efforts to provide law and order can be counterproductive: mass-incarceration policies, while incapacitating and deterring individual criminals, can simultaneously strengthen collective criminal networks. Sophisticated prison gangs use promises of protection or punishment inside prison to influence and organize criminal activity on the street. Typical crime-reduction policies that make incarceration likelier and sentences harsher can increase prison gangs’ power over street-level members and affiliates, a formal model shows. Leading cases from the Americas corroborate these predictions: periods of sharply rising incarceration, driven partly by anti-gang laws, preceded qualitative leaps in prison-gang power on the street. Critically, prison gangs use this capacity not only to govern and tax criminal markets but also to win leverage over state officials by orchestrating terror attacks, intentionally curtailing quotidian violence, or both. Thus, even if increased incarceration leads to reduced crime, it may do so by strengthening prison-gang power at the expense of state authority.

The Post–Civil Rights Borderland

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrisia Macías-Rojas
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Homeland Security ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Immigration Enforcement ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Department Of Homeland Security ◽  
Immigrant Rights ◽  
Economic Context ◽  
Immigration Politics ◽  
Post Civil Rights

Arizona has played a historic role in national “law and order” policymaking and immigration politics. Today it has some of the highest levels of criminal arrest, prosecution, and sentencing for immigration offenses. Yet it is also home to one of the most dynamic border- and immigrant-rights movements in the country. This chapter explores linkages among civil rights, mass incarceration, and immigration enforcement to better explain the local political and economic context in which the Department of Homeland Security has diffused federal criminal enforcement priorities and institutionalized “prosecutorial” approaches to migration that aggressively punish while safeguarding “victims’ rights.”

The Criminalization of Late Sixties Militancy in Television Police Procedurals

2018 ◽  
pp. 157-186
Author(s):  
Kristen Hoerl
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Black Liberation ◽  
Violent Criminal ◽  
Life On Mars ◽  
Weather Underground ◽  
Radical Ideology ◽  
Black Liberation Army

This chapter analyses episodes from three television police dramas that were inspired by the publicity surrounding radical militant groups including the Weather Underground, the Black Liberation Army, and the Symbionese Liberation Army. Episodes of Law and Order, Life on Mars, and The Chicago Code integrated political rhetoric and journalism coverage of radical militants with the generic conventions of the television police procedural. The chapter argues that these programs conflate radical ideology with violent criminal activity. This conflation cultivates norms of democratic citizenship that call for uncritical assent to law enforcement and suspicion toward dissidents and has troubling implications for contemporary protest movements.

scholarly journals A Cloud-Based Crime Reporting System with Identity Protection

Symmetry ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 255 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tzay-Farn Shih ◽  
Chin-Ling Chen ◽  
Bo-Yan Syu ◽  
Yong-Yuan Deng
Keyword(s):  
Reporting System ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Community Members ◽  
Reporting Scheme ◽  
Event Reporting ◽  
The People ◽  
Digital Certificates ◽  
Identity Protection ◽  
Do So

Criminal activities have always been a part of human society, and even today, in a world of extremely advanced surveillance and policing capabilities, many different kinds of crimes are still committed in almost every social environment. However, since those who commit crimes are not representative of the majority of their community, members of these communities tend to wish to report crime when they see it; however, they are often reluctant to do so for fear of their own safety should the people they report identify them. Thus, a great deal of crime goes unreported, and investigations fail to gain key evidence from witnesses, which serves only to foster an environment in which criminal activity is more likely to occur. In order to address this problem, this paper proposes an online illegal event reporting scheme based on cloud technology, which combines digital certificates, symmetric keys, asymmetric keys, and digital signatures. The proposed scheme can process illegal activity reports from the reporting event to the issuing of a reward. The scheme not only ensures informers’ safety, anonymity and non-repudiation, but also prevents cases and reports being erased, and ensures data integrity. Furthermore, the proposed scheme is designed to be robust against abusive use, and is able to preclude false reports. Therefore, it provides a convenient and secure platform for reporting and fighting crime.

Revolutionary Suicide

2020 ◽  
pp. 125-142
Author(s):  
Lisa M. Corrigan
Keyword(s):  
Black Power ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Political Rhetoric ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Specific Focus ◽  
Rhetorical Form ◽  
Black Agency

Chapter 6 examines how the absence of hope and the collapse into black pessimism were driven by the exposure of white liberalism’s collaborations with anti-black political rhetoric through the language of “law and order,” through the expansion of the FBI’s harassment and surveillance of Black Power activists, and through the expansion of mass incarceration. Using Huey Newton’s writings, this chapter charts how revolutionary suicide operates both as a Black Power meme as a well as a repository of feelings about black Being in a colonial state where blacks have been denied both thinking and feeling as avenues of expression. With specific focus on the rhetorical form of the eulogy, this chapter describes how Newton’s revolutionary suicide is an attempt to reconcile assassination and repression with possibilities for black agency through what Corrigan calls “necromimesis,” but it demonstrates how little room there was for black activists to politically maneuver by 1971 as the nation consolidated racial feelings around law and order politics and new conservatism.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Social Contexts ◽  
Processes Of Change ◽  
The Past ◽  
Psychosocial Processes ◽  
Desistance From Crime ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Crime Causation ◽  
Do So

Criminology has pursued a long-standing interest in crime causation and what leads individuals into committing crime. It is striking, though, considering the extent to which state machineries are marshalled into efforts to control and reduce crime, that criminologists have only relatively recently turned their attention to the question of what prompts offenders to cease criminal activity and how they do so. Consequently, and perhaps making up for lost time, the past two decades have seen a proliferation of literature exploring the psychosocial processes of change. Recent research has also opened questions about the impact of social contexts and criminal justice interventions on desistance from crime, examining the way that individuals transform aspects of identity and social relationships as they move away from offending (for example, ...

scholarly journals Revising Probabilities and Full Beliefs

2020 ◽  
Vol 49 (5) ◽  
pp. 1005-1039 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sven Ove Hansson
Keyword(s):  
Formal Model ◽  
Belief Change ◽  
Learning From Experience ◽  
Epistemic Agent ◽  
Set Operations ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Formal Properties ◽  
Belief States ◽  
Do So ◽  
Belief Set

Abstract A new formal model of belief dynamics is proposed, in which the epistemic agent has both probabilistic beliefs and full beliefs. The agent has full belief in a proposition if and only if she considers the probability that it is false to be so close to zero that she chooses to disregard that probability. She treats such a proposition as having the probability 1, but, importantly, she is still willing and able to revise that probability assignment if she receives information that gives her sufficient reasons to do so. Such a proposition is (presently) undoubted, but not undoubtable (incorrigible). In the formal model it is assigned a probability 1 − δ, where δ is an infinitesimal number. The proposed model employs probabilistic belief states that contain several underlying probability functions representing alternative probabilistic states of the world. Furthermore, a distinction is made between update and revision, in the same way as in the literature on (dichotomous) belief change. The formal properties of the model are investigated, including properties relevant for learning from experience. The set of propositions whose probabilities are infinitesimally close to 1 forms a (logically closed) belief set. Operations that change the probabilistic belief state give rise to changes in this belief set, which have much in common with traditional operations of belief change.

Crime and Social Control in Provincial Massachusetts

1981 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 339-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
David H. Flaherty
Keyword(s):  
Social Control ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
American Revolution ◽  
Criminal Activity ◽  
Modern Society ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Homogeneous Population ◽  
The Family ◽  
Effective System

The first object of this article is to present some findings from an analysis of criminal activity in an early modern society, as measured primarily through various records of the Massachusetts Superior Court of Judicature, Court of Assize, and General Jail Delivery (the Assizes) from its creation in 1692 to the eve of the American Revolution. Since the amount of serious criminal behaviour revealed by this evidence seems small, the article will then seek to identify the most important components of the system of social control over criminality evidently at work in provincial Massachusetts. These include a conscious effort to maintain a homogeneous population, a pattern of collective settlement in townships, an effective system of prosecuting serious breaches of the criminal law, the commitment of elite groups in town, church, county, and province to law and order, and the role of the family in teaching and assuring appropriate behaviour.

scholarly journals Middle income trap and factors affecting the risk of growth slowdown in upper middle income countries

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 350-360
Author(s):  
Uğur Ursavaş ◽  
Hakan Sarıbaş
Keyword(s):  
Trade Openness ◽  
The United States ◽  
Institutional Factors ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Probit Regression ◽  
Middle Income ◽  
Factors Affecting ◽  
Middle Income Countries ◽  
Inflation Variability ◽  
Do So

In this paper, we investigate the macroeconomic, demographic and institutional factors affecting the probability of growth slowdown in upper-middle-income countries within the framework of the growth slowdown methodology developed by Eichengreen et al. (2011). To do so, we use probit regression, and the dataset covers the period 1980-2015. The results show that growth slowdown occurs when per capita income reaches 22 percent of that in the United States. Besides, an increase in the relative income, gross capital formation, trade openness, years of total schooling, old dependency ratio and law and order index increases the risk of growth slowdown, whereas an increase in public debt, inflation variability and years of secondary and higher schooling decreases the risk of growth slowdown.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Anne E. Parsons
Keyword(s):  
Mental Health ◽  
Mental Health Policy ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
First Century ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Carceral State ◽  
Mental Hospitals ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Key Terms

The introduction reviews the relevant histories of prisons, mental health policy, and the social welfare state. It highlights how recent scholarship has not connected the history of mental hospitals to the broader history of imprisonment. From Asylum to Prison frames historic mental hospitals as part of a broader carceral state and charts how the rise of mass incarceration shaped the closure of mental hospitals. Law and order politics served to criminalize mental health conditions and substance abuse. New prison construction in the 1980s took money away from mental health services and prisons absorbed many functions of the former mental health system. Finally, this history of deinstitutionalization offers lesson for people working to reduce mass incarceration in the twenty-first century United States. The introduction closes with a discussion of people-centered language and key terms such as institutions, carceral state, and mental illness.

A Second Occupation

2020 ◽  
pp. 305-334
Author(s):  
Johanna Fernández
Keyword(s):  
Structural Violence ◽  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
Law And Order ◽  
Legal Process ◽  
State Repression ◽  
Urban Centers ◽  
Detention Center ◽  
Young Lords ◽  
Legal Defense

In Fall 1970, the Young Lords again occupied the FSUMC church, in response to the shocking death of one of their own, Julio Roldan, who after a false arrest was found hanged in the Tombs, NYC’s notorious detention center. The occupation happened against the backdrop of a prisoner uprising in the Tombs, a precursor to the Attica Rebellion. At the occupied church, the Young Lords mounted a precursor to contemporary movements against mass incarceration and for abolition. They launched a legal defense center to aid poor Black and Latino prisoners; challenged the politics of bail; denounced state repression of the left; the politics of law and order, and the hyper imprisonment of people of color. They identified structural violence, poverty, and racism as root causes of social problems and supported the redistribution of resources and wealth through the revolutionary overthrown of capitalism. The group’s radical actions led to the first official investigation of the death of a single prisoner, Julio Roldan. Roldan’s arrest and arraignment offered a window into the botched legal process that, beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, exponentially increased the arrest and jailing of people of color living in urban centers.

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