Criminology

Labeling theory is developed among proponents of the sociology of deviance, where theorists became interested in understanding the ways in which agents of social control attach stigmatizing stereotypes to particular social groups. Additionally, they looked at the ways in which the stigmatized individuals/groups change their behavior once labeled.

Labeling theorists explored why some people are labeled as deviant/criminal, whereas others were not. They wanted to understand more about the process of how some people came to be defined this way. Labeling theorists are thus concerned about two things: 1) how an act becomes defined as deviant; 2) how society responds to the act.

The theorist most associated with labeling theory is Howard Becker. Becker’s (1963) idea is that deviance is a consequence of external judgments, or labels, that modify the individual’s self-concept and change the way others respond to the labeled person (refer to his groundbreaking work Outsiders, 1963).

Labeling theory recognizes that labels are context specific. That is, the label will vary depending on the culture, time period, and situation. David Rosenhan’s study “On Being Sane in Insane Places” (1973) provides a demonstration of the power of labeling and the importance of context.

Labeling theory is closely related to the school of symbolic interactionism, which is a sociological perspective that holds that an individual’s sense of self (self-concept) is formed by their significant interactions with others and the labels ascribed to them by those other people.

Deviance

During the 1960’s it was popular with criminologists to study what makes some acts and some people deviant or criminal. During this time, scholars tried to shift the focus of criminology towards examining the effects of individuals in power responding to behavior in society; they became known as “labeling theorists” or “social reaction theorists.” They theorized that deviance is not so much the result of what people do, but rather is more about how society reacts to the things people do. In other words, it is not the nature of the act that makes an act inherently deviant, rather, it’s society’s reaction to the act that must be critically examined.

Primary and Secondary Deviance

Primary deviance refers to initial acts of deviance by an individual that have only minor consequences for that individual’s status or relationships in society. The notion behind this concept is that the majority of people violate laws or commit deviant acts in their lifetime; however, these acts are not serious enough and do not result in the individual being classified as a criminal by society or by themselves, as it may even be viewed as “normal” to engage in these types of behaviors. Speeding would be a good example of an act that is technically criminal but does not result in labeling as such. Furthermore, many would view recreational marijuana use as another example.

NFL Players Can Smoke Marijuana Without Discipline Starting 4/20 — Everyday deviance? Deviant for thee but not for me?

Secondary deviance, however, is deviance that occurs as a response to society’s reaction and labeling of the individual engaging in the behavior as deviant. This type of deviance, unlike primary deviance, has major implications for a person’s status and relationships in society and is a direct result of the internalization of the deviant label. This pathway from primary deviance to secondary deviance is illustrated as follows:

primary deviance → others label act as deviant → actor internalizes deviant label → secondary deviance

Self-Fulfilling Prophesy

The central feature of labeling theory is the self-fulfilling prophesy. Being labeled a deviant can provoke a crisis for people. Once a person has effectively been labeled “deviant” (and don’t forget they may have further accepted/internalized the label themselves), it becomes difficult to escape the social consequences. They may even feel pressure to “live up to the label.” Additional societal reaction may cause them to seek out affiliation with deviant sub-groups and cultures – and why not? Everyone thinks they are a deviant, so they might as well be one and find some deviant friends who won’t reject them. At that point, it is safe to say they have may have embarked on what might ultimately become a deviant career.

Criticisms of Labeling Theory

It has been criticized for ignoring the capacity of the individual to resist the labeling and assuming that it is an automatic process. Sociologists sometimes refer to this as having “agential capacity.” If you assume that people lack agency, you are assuming that people are merely “dupes” of the system.

Again, labeling theory prospered throughout the 1960s, bringing about policy changes such as deinstitutionalization of the mentally ill and juvenile diversion programs. However, it came under attack in the mid-1970s as a result of criticism by conflict theorists and positivists for ignoring the concept of deviance; these theorists believed that deviance does exist and that secondary deviance was a useless concept for sociologists. This criticism has survived and continues to haunt labeling theorists because of the recent empirical evidence on the theory.

Discussion

Can you think of a time when you were in school or perhaps among a group of friends, where someone did something that caused them to be labeled in such a way that they were socially outcast? What happened to that person? Do you think they deserved the label?

NIU Urban Communities 2016: Deteriorating Neighborhoods

There are competing theories of what drives crime in cities and neighborhoods. We will review them here briefly because a theoretically informed perspective can help us devise measures and policies to prevent and reduce crime by reducing the gap between perception (what we believe about crime) and reality.

One of the most recognized facts about crime is that it is not randomly distributed across cities and towns. To this end, there are three widely cited theoretical approaches that look at social and structural root factors to explain the dynamic causes of criminality. We have already talked about institutional anomie theories/social strain theories and conflict theories; however, there is another social structural theory that is important to address – social disorganization theory.

So What Exactly is Social Disorganization?

There are a lot of different ways we might express this. Bear in mind, proponents of the theory are trying to come up with a way to explain how social and institutional factors might work together in ways that contribute to the crime problem. That’s because social disorganization theory takes the position that weak societal institutions contribute to a deteriorated social environment, which in turn fosters crime, due in large part to dynamics that place constraints and limitations on individuals.

Social disorganization theory builds on concepts that were conceived during the first half of the 20th century by academic researchers, who were working in Chicago in the 1920’s. Among them, Ernest Burgess was a geographer, who was interested in land use patterns. After studying Chicago, he arrived at his now famous “Concentric Zones” model. Bear in mind now, this is only a model (not reality); it is meant to be a tool to give us a way to visualize different place, where we might make comparisons and see similarities as well as differences.

Park, Burgess, and McKenzie (1925) human ecology theories imagined that cities were spatially divided into zones. The circular zones were arranged around an urban core or “loop.” Each zone was distinguished by a combination of function and social characteristics (i.e. ghetto, zone of workers homes, zone in transition). The highest crime areas were found in what they identified as “transitional” zones. These were place that were typically undergoing change from commercial to residential use.

Urban Planning: An analysis of Concentric Zone Model - RTF | Rethinking The Future — Ecological “Concentric Zones” Model

Later, Shaw and McKay (1942) put these theories to a test. As a result, they discovered that crime tended to be stable over time. This occurred despite the fact that ethnic composition of the population sometimes changed. Given this, they were interested in determining why crime persisted in some places but not others. Upon further study, they posited that three variables associated with social disorganization can explain variations in crime and other problems in communities: poverty, ethnic diversity, and family disruption.

This line of inquiry continues to attract scholarly attention, as researchers remain committed to the study of social disorganization and crime, where it is understood to be the result of dynamic inter-related social processes: invasion, conflict, accommodation, and assimilation (Muncie and McLaughlin,2001).

Burgess concentric circle map in GIS - Bike Lab — Zone Model overlay on Chicago

Social disorganization might thus be described as a state of society characterized by the breakdown of effective institutional social control, where this results in a further lack of functional integration between groups, conflicting social attitudes, and personal maladjustment. In a nod to Durkheim, we might also say that when communities demonstrate weak social ties (where there is a lack of opportunity to build social bonds), and they are inhabited by people who exhibit low levels of social control (due to the lack of ties/bonds), this produces social disorganization that is likely to lead to crime among other problems. Social disorganization is thus both a cause and an effect of crime.

More recently, contemporary criminologists and geographers have likewise shown that the distribution of criminal violence, especially property crime, adheres to spatially identifiable patterns, which emerge in cities. They report crime is highly spatially concentrated (Aselin et al 2000; Ratfliffe, 2003); that the vast majority of criminal violence in urban areas is concentrated within confined areas (Muggah, 2015). For more on this, read about the “Hot Spots” theory of crime.

Taken together, social disorganization theorists, argue that the functional organization of a city is not a random process. In light of this, crime is also not random. And that, furthermore, social life is impacted when individuals are confronted with rapid social change, accompanied by uneven development of culture, such that there is noticeable disharmony, conflict, and lack of consensus (Thomas and Znaniecki). The explanations given for this are that structural factors (i.e. deindustrialization, migration/immigration, and socioeconomic segregation) work together in ways that spatially concentrate people who are disadvantaged (i.e. poor, disabled, mental health issues, drug problems). This tends to weaken the social fabric of communities, makes it difficult for people to create and maintain social ties/bond, and it increases antisocial behavior, especially criminality.

Our peaceful neighborhood has quickly deteriorated': Neighbors fed up with Staten Island zombie home - silive.com — Pittsburgh “Zombie” home

What Can We Do About It?

Moving out the realm of theory into practice, research demonstrates time and again that children who live in impoverished and socially disorganized communities, where they cannot attend pre-school programs (because they cannot afford them or they are not available) that teach basic social skills, are more likely to engage in criminal activity. This ties directly to public policy and intervention action that might be taken to prevent these problems: fund pre-K education programs. Nonetheless, politicians and residents alike, who loudly profess to be “pro-law & order,” are the same ones who repeatedly vote to defund these programs. Why the contradiction?

Discussion

What sort of practical ideas or policies do you think should be put into place to address the risks implied by social disorganization theory?

Do you know of any particular communities in your area that exhibit problems like researchers describe?(leave a comment in the comment section).

How does economic development policy tie into all of this? What happens when almost all of a given area’s economic development consists of “big box” stores and chain stores? What kind of impacts do you think this might have on an area?

Detroit: How JPMorgan Chase Is Rebuilding It | Fortune — Deteriorated business district in Detroit

The term “critical thinking” is probably one of the most cliche terms in higher education today (“rigor” runs a close second). Given this, there’s a pretty good chance that every time you walk into a new classroom, your sage professor will at some point emphasize how one of the goals of their class is to “help students engage in critical thinking”- commence eye rolls. Unfortunately, the meaning of words becomes eroded when they are used as much as this.

No doubt, this is frustrating for students, who I imagine may have buzzword fatigue. School Administrators and Ed Tech companies in particular love to hype critical thinking. And while there is ample evidence that suggests employers find critical thinking skills to be desirable, no similar evidence indicates that colleges and universities are delivering on their promise as such.

But of course, none of this is surprising when you take into account the history and evolution of public education in the United States. As it turns out, public schools continue to excel at what they were originally designed to do — they train obedient workers (not thinkers). The comedian George Carlin has a particularly famous riff one this (albeit it is very explicit), which you can check out on your own time on YouTube.

While education holds out great promise to be be an engine of social mobility in the United States, it remains deeply embedded in what sociologists refer to as the “social reproduction” of class privilege. This is why despite there being much evidence that attests to the ability of education to serve as a great engine to combat social inequality, there is similar competing evidence that suggests it can also reproduce and deepen pre-existing social inequalities.

One development that has contributed to the downfall of education in the U.S. in particular is the emphasis on testing and evaluation. This approach is far more rigidly ingrained in public schools, who have less autonomy than their private school counterparts to determine curriculum. Moreover, when testing does occur, its content and rigor are weighted heavily in favor of the middle classes and their offspring. The result is that the entire system of “objective testing” is essentially rigged against working-class and poor students (for complex reasons that are too lengthy to discuss here).

In the interest of staying on point, let’s just say that middle and upper-class families with resources, who can help prepare their kids for exams in ways that less advantaged families can not. In the case of the former, kids benefit from access to private high schools and they have the money to pay for tutors and extra-curricular activities, all of which supports access and admittance to higher education institutions. They are more likely to benefit from curricula in private schools that are more comprehensive and flexible (they’re not narrowly focused on testing), making it easier to teach those students critical thinking and leadership skills.

As a college professor, I work on the front lines where I am a witness to what our education system produces. I have seen changes occur over the years that trouble me. For one, I notice that an increasing number of high school graduates who enter my classroom exhibit difficulty expressing themselves clearly in speech and in writing. They similarly struggle when they attempt to execute what appear to me to be basic intellectual tasks (i.e. independently read a syllabus). Many of these same students could not pass a basic argument literacy test.

Even more concerning, there are relatively few students who can distinguish the difference between fact vs. opinion; they can’t tell you how science differs from non-science, or how natural science differs from social science, and so on down the line. “Fake News” barely scratches the surface in describing the problems that exist with media and information literacy in our present-day social landscape.

Put it different terms, critical thinking – defined more broadly as abstract reasoned thinking – has become an unfortunate casualty of the era of standardized testing. Testing regimes privilege memorizing facts and learning how to play word analogy games as a way to measure and assess “knowledge.”

What if I were to tell you that real life is not going to present you with options that are consistent with the choices presented on standardized tests? What if you took a class with me and I told you that I wasn’t going to test and grade your memorization skills? The latter should feel liberating, but students often feel intimidated because they haven’t been taught to think in a rational disciplined way.

Some of you, I hope, are nodding your heads in agreement, having already experienced the utter pointlessness of the test-taking trap. I imagine you have always sensed this. You knew something wasn’t right. But what could you have done to resist? Sadly, not too much.

When people are forced to forego more substantive approaches to education in order to play intellectual word games, they will at some point be left out in the cold. Their desire to learn will at some point become blunted and thus their learning potential will not be fully realized; they won’t be able to develop the thinking “muscles” required to engage in abstract reasoning (or they will become easily exhausted when they try).

Absent critical thinking skills, students will be ill-equipped to question and challenge the status quo. They may even give up on the idea of education altogether and quit as soon as they are able to work. Sneaky, yes? This is how obedience and conformity are learned, as resistance appears to be futile.

Rather than engaging in a fully developed critical analysis (which they most likely have not been taught how to make), students compensate by investing time and effort into trying to figure out the “correct” answer to a given problem. This has been, in their experience, the tried and true path to make the grade and to be rewarded and recognized as a “good student.”

Another unfortunate result of the standardized approach to learning is that it encourages people to assign too much importance to their own thinking. Given how critical thinking skills are weakened/not developed, they sometimes cannot (will not) try to see problems objectively, as they prefer instead to rely on their own personal subjective “experiences.”

They trust their “gut” feelings and only that which they’ve seen with their own eyes because their reasoning skills are so poorly developed that they cannot think.

Given this, many students find it difficult to execute advanced learning tasks that require them to perform analysis/synthesis of information, as opposed to performing memorization and recall (they prefer the latter because they know how to do it).

All of this, for obvious reasons, can produce frustration. And as I mentioned already, it causes many young people to become cynical and give up pursuing education. Disinterested and discouraged, they are less likely to pursue advanced learning (like higher education). They might feel they are not smart enough and they may even harbor a residual resentment towards so called “experts.” They may go so far as to cultivate a preference for media sources that tell them not to value expert knowledge.

That being said, I would be remiss if I didn’t call attention to the fact that everything that I just described here remains the students’ problem to solve (which seems unfair right?). In light of this, we have to do some work together to address where we go from here. But first, let’s examine some of the specific pitfalls that get in the way of critical thinking. The path is a bit long and winding. Along the way, we’ll look at some famous sociologists who called attention to these problems and proposed solutions.

Binary Thinking

Binary thinking distinguishes an approach to problem conceptualization that reduces problems to two competing sides in order to arrive at a simple truth (i.e. right vs. wrong, left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, pros vs. cons, good vs. evil). This framework tries to impose order and control on problems that are, more often than not, complex, nuanced, and dynamic.

A derivative of binary thinking is what has come to be known in our contemporary moment as “both sides” journalism. This is the favored thought paradigm of the television era, where the best examples of this can be found on 24-hour cable news programming. The stars of these shows are pundits and talking heads who take two sides of an issue/problem and get into heated arguments with each other. Conflict is the “spice” that enlivens entertainment presented as information.

This development in our media landscape has been exacerbated by the proliferation of online news and political opinion outlets, including social media. As one study put it:

“this raises concerns anew about the vulnerability of democratic societies to fake news and other forms of misinformation. The shift of news consumption to online and social media platforms has disrupted traditional business models of journalism, causing many news outlets to shrink or close, while others struggle to adapt to new market realities. Longstanding media institutions have been weakened. Meanwhile, new channels of distribution have been developing faster than our abilities to understand or stabilize them” (Baum et. al. 2017).

It further calls into question the notion that American journalism should operate on the principle of objectivity. In the contemporary era, we have seen a noticeable shift, where journalists who once endeavored to be dispassionate about the subjects they cover, now operate like neutral referees in a cage fight.

In taking pains not to take sides, they “both sides” every topic, where they contrive a match-up of two distinctly opposed sides of a given issue. But here is where the danger lies: in the process of doing so, they confirm each side has equal weight (false equivalency). That they do this, even in cases where one of those sides represents an extreme or fringe view (or simply a view that has been shown to be nonfactual/disputed by evidence), is plainly absurd. The result is that people with an appetite for conflict, dogma, and ideological thinking are left vulnerable to manipulation.

Illustration:

Do you believe in one or both sides of the flat vs. round earth debate?

Do you believe that there are two sides to every problem?

Do you believe that both sides have their own facts?

Again, while all of this might seem pointless if not ridiculous to many people, there are many in our society for whom this kind of thinking makes perfect sense. A large number of Americans have been ill-served by our corporate media. Their approach to discussing major social issues and problems is either so simplistic that it serves no particular value, or they give up, portraying problems as too difficult to solve.

The “all problems have sides” approach remains particularly problematic, for reasons that it is intellectually dishonest. Even worse, this framing has become normalized in our public discourse. Juxtaposing a liar opposite to an ethical professional, as if the two represent two legitimate sides in a debate, is a farce.

The Baum study authors conclude that the cognitive, social and institutional constructs of misinformation are complex and that we must be vigilant and seek input from a variety of academic disciplines to solve the problem, as the “current social media systems provide a fertile ground for the spread of misinformation that is particularly dangerous for political debate in a democratic society” (Baum et. al. 2017).

Jay Rosen, a journalism professor at New York University, points out: “The whole doctrine of objectivity in journalism has become part of the [media’s] problem” (Sullivan, 2017). When journalists use binary constructs to create structural and moral false equivalency, they become complicit agents, who undermine truth and understanding. All of this is a predictable outcome, given that understanding was never the goal here – manufacturing conflict is the aim of the game. These news programs don’t exist to inform you; they’re here to entertain you and sell advertising.

A better and infinitely more responsible approach would be to report things fairly, accurately, and comprehensively. Journalists might further acknowledge their biases upfront instead of trying to exist in a magical bias free-zone.

One of the problems that we are left with here, even when we aim to do better, is that sharing factual data with the public does not always change strongly-felt but erroneous views that conflict with people’s personal beliefs and feelings (facts being immaterial).

“I feel like” and Using the Personal Pronoun “I”

Ever notice how often a problem comes up for conversation or discussion and instead of addressing the problem objectively people respond by saying something like “yes, but I feel like” and they proceed to relate the problem to their own personal experiences? Notice how those same people are more committed to defending their feelings much harder than facts?

Lots of people do this. It’s a very subtle and often unchecked form of narcissism that allows you to divert attention away from an issue or problem that may be controversial (or you simply don’t know much about it), where you default to the subject that you are most comfortable discussing – yourself! To some extent, this is to be expected, considering how today’s students have come of age in a time of growing diversity and political polarization. No one could blame them for wanting to back away from confrontation (Worthern, 2016).

In North American English, “I feel like” and “I believe” have in the last decade come to stand in for “I think” (Worthen, 2016). Sociologist Charles Derber describes this tendency as “conversational narcissism.” Often subtle and unconscious, it betrays a desire to take over a conversation, to do most of the talking, and to turn the focus of the exchange to yourself (Headlee, 2017).

To illustrate, people say things like “I feel X about XYZ problem.” What would be better is for them to say something like: “I think, based on XYZ evidence, that the idea of X appears to be supported.” In the case of the latter, the speaker “de-centers” themselves (emphasizing evidence and conclusions, not personal beliefs) and uses objectified scientific language.

Note: if you are taking my course in Research Methods, you will need to demonstrate to me that you can write using objectified scientific language.

Worthen points out that when we use language like “I feel like” we are playing a trump card. And that’s because when people cite feelings or personal experience, “you can’t really refute them with logic.” Why not? Because that’s like saying they didn’t have that experience or that their experience is not valid. “It halts an argument in its tracks” (Worthen, 2016).

The recourse to feelings is problematic because you are limiting what you can discuss/engage within the narrow confines of your own personal experience. This is not a solid ground upon which you can build knowledge of a subject; subjective perspectives and personal “feelings” are not frameworks that facilitate the analysis of complex problems.

I write this with full knowledge of the fact that there are, of course, long-standing debates in the social sciences about objectivity and the role value judgments play and, more importantly, about whether or not value-laden research is possible and even desirable. In his widely cited essay “‘Objectivity’ in Social Science and Social Policy,” Max Weber argued that the idea of an “aperspectival” social science was meaningless (Weber 1904a [1949]).

Nevertheless, in the spirit of compromise, I would argue that we are well served when we can simultaneously reflect on how our personal experiences/feelings connect to a problem we are trying to understand, even as we aspire to think about those problems critically. The ethic that guides us here should be to cultivate a degree of professional detachment from what we are studying, while also acknowledging our biases. Trust me when I say this – it’s hard. And that’s okay.

Political Thinking vs. Critical Thinking

With the advent of 24-hour cable news, young and old alike have become enthralled by the theatrical banter of entertainment news media, which thrives on conflict and encourages demagoguery as part of the process of discussing important social issues.

Political thinking, such as what we often see featured in our MSM (mainstream news media) can contribute to the cultivation of a closed mindset; one that is rigid, dogmatic, defensive, and most of all not critical (to be sure, there is plenty of criticizing – but that’s different from how I am using the term “critical”).

This process of relying on entertainment media to become “informed” has proven to be deeply satisfying for many people. Politics, is in many respects, a performance that is experienced like a “television show.” People have their favorite characters, as political news is both rendered and experienced like a “story.” That it sometimes “informs” is merely tangential to the process.

Some experts have speculated that our media have become addictive. This is because political parties and our MSM all traffic in audience-tested (focus group) simple frameworks – sound bytes – that operate like intellectual short-cuts. They encourage simple solutions to complex problems that help give people a feeling of control that is connected to a deeply held desire/belief that they understand everything. And so it follows, people don’t have to think very hard. And guess what – that’s attractive to many people!

A perfect example of this is when a person accepts a political party’s full roster of beliefs, which is often coupled with a tendency to defend all of its policy positions. This is not at all unlike being a sports fan and rooting for a sports team. The ongoing contest between the Democrats and Republicans is in many ways similar to the Steelers and Ravens rivalry. Such thinking, oddly enough, shares common elements with religious belief (see Durkheim below). Again, you don’t have to think very hard about the issues. Rather, you simply need to identify with and support your team.

Not surprisingly, individuals who desire political affinity are attracted to people who hold their same views. As long as they stay within the confines of their social group, their views won’t be challenged, they can feel like they are “in the know,” and they almost always “get to be right.”

Identity confirming behavior like this further generates strong feelings of belonging, which may, in some instances, constitute a vital aspect of a person’s self-concept. In this instance, confirming social identity is more important than exercising rationally informed, independent, critical thinking! Mind blown!

The powers of affinity that drive identity politics are powerful precisely because they enable individuals to solidify their social group membership when they identify with issues and problems in conforming ways that mirror party-line thinking. The attraction here – and I can’t emphasize this enough – is that political thinking helps people to not feel alone; in sacrificing their independence to the group, they relieve themselves of the burden of thinking on their own.

One interesting issue that I want to call attention to is the case where people are forced to confront information that they cannot reconcile with their deeply-held political beliefs. This conflict is identified by psychologists, who study it, by the term cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance usually involves feelings of discomfort that most of us would prefer to avoid. In order to reconcile the mental discomfort and to restore balance, people with strong political beliefs may actively resist and dismiss critical facts and information that conflict with their cultivated worldview.

Critical Thinking in the Social Sciences

C. Wright Mills & the Sociological Imagination

The American sociologist, C. Wright Mills, coined the term the “Sociological Imagination” in his 1959 book of the same title to describe a type of critical insight that could be offered by the discipline of sociology. The term itself is often used in introductory sociology textbooks to explain how sociology might help people cultivate a “habit of mind” with relevance to daily life; it stresses that individual problems are often rooted in problems stemming from aspects of society itself.

Mills intended the concept of the sociological imagination to describe “the awareness of the relationship between personal experience and the wider society.” More specifically, he intended the concept to help people distinguish “personal troubles” and “public issues.” To this end, an individual might use this cultivated awareness to “think himself away” from the familiar routines of daily life. We will use this concept in our work together to critically think about social issues and problems.

Personal troubles are problems that affect individuals, where other members of society typically lay blame for lack of success on the individual’s own personal and moral failings. Examples of this include things like unemployment/job loss, eating disorders/overweight, divorce, drug problems.

Public issues find their source in the social structure and culture of a society; they are problems that affect many people. Mills believed it is often the case that problems considered private troubles are perhaps better understood to be public issues.

Let’s take Mills example of unemployment. If it were the case that only a couple of people were unemployed, we could then perhaps explain their unemployment by saying they were lazy, lacked good work habits, etc. That is to say, their unemployment would be their “personal trouble.” To be sure, there are some unemployed individuals who are no doubt lazy and/or lack good work habits. Notwithstanding, when we find millions of people are out of work, unemployment is better understood as a public issue. Which is to say, a structural explanation that looks at the lack of opportunity in connection with the economy is better suited to explain why so many people might be out of work. (Mills, 1959, p. 9).

By following Mills and developing a sociological imagination, people might develop a deep understanding of how one’s personal biography is the result of a historical process. Everyday experiences are connected to a larger social context.

Individual vs. the Social (Agency vs. Structure)

The root of a given problem, according to Mills, is almost always found in the structure of the society and the changes happening within it. Put another way, Mills is saying that many of the problems individuals confront in society have social roots. Moreover, the problems that people assume are theirs and theirs alone are, in reality, shared by many other people. This is why sociologists spend so much time trying to illustrate the sociological roots of problems, because it helps people to understand how their biography is linked to the structure and history of society.

So why do we bother with all of this? Well, for some of us (researchers included), it is because we want to empower individuals to transcend their day-to-day personal troubles, to see how they are public issues and in the process help facilitate social change.

Let’s look at a practical illustration. Take, for example, a person who can’t find a job, pay the mortgage, pay the rent, etc. These are problems that are typically (and sadly) often seen to be the result of a personal failing or weakness. The individual is thought to be the cause of their own problem due to some failure or error.

In the same manner, unemployment can be an extremely negative private experience. Feelings of personal failure are common when one loses a job. Unfortunately, when the employment rate climbs (any number about 6 percent is considered high in the United States) people often see it as the exclusive result of a character flaw or weakness, not the result of larger and more overwhelming structural forces.

Now, for the record, Mills is not arguing that individuals are never responsible for some of their own problems – that they don’t have the ability to make choices, even bad ones, or that they that they have no personal responsibility for their actions. It’s just that many of their decisions don’t occur in a void. They are socially structured.

The same holds true for people who commit crime. Rather than focusing only on individual pathology alone, we should also look at the social and political context within which crime occurs. That is, we need to look at the role that structure plays in determining who commits a crime and who becomes a victim of crime.

Mills would ask: is there is something within the structure of society that is contributing to the problem?

As it turns out, the answer is often YES! In many countries today, unemployment may be explained by the public issue of economic downturn (deindustrialization), caused by industry failures (mortgage, banking, manufacturing). In other words, the problem is social and institutional – not simply the result of the personal shortcomings of one person or a group of people not working hard.

Again, this is why it is important to distinguish that Mills is not saying people shouldn’t work hard. The sociological imagination should not be used as an excuse for an individual to not try harder to achieve success in life, or for people to not claim some measure of personal responsibility for their problems.

Rather, what Mills is saying is that in many situations a person may fail even if they try to do everything right, work hard, go to school, get a job, etc.

When it appears that many people or social groups in society lack the ability to achieve success, instead of being quick to assign blame, Mills says we should dive in and identify the roots of the structure, such as inefficient political solutions, the racial, ethnic, and class-based discrimination of groups, and the exploitation of labor forces.

We should all be reminded that there are problems that cannot be solved by individuals alone (by individuals working harder).

In light of this, it is important that we use our sociological imagination and apply it in our daily lives, this way we might be able to change our personal situation and in the process create a better society.

Emile Durkheim (note: this passage about Durkheim is reblogged here from an article by Galen Watts sourced below)

Globally, we are currently experiencing tremendous social and political turbulence. At the institutional level, liberal democracy faces the threat of rising authoritarianism and far-right extremism. At the local level, we seem to be living in an ever-increasing age of anxiety, engendered by precarious economic conditions and the gradual erosion of shared social norms. How might we navigate these difficult and disorienting times?

Emile Durkheim, one of the pioneers of the discipline of sociology, died just 101 years ago this month. Although few outside of social science departments know his name, his intellectual legacy has been integral to shaping modern thought about society. His work may provide us with some assistance in diagnosing the perennial problems associated with modernity.

Whenever commentators argue that a social problem is “structural” in nature, they are invoking Durkheim’s ideas. It was Durkheim who introduced the idea that society is composed not simply of a collection of individuals, but also social and cultural structures that impose themselves upon, and even shape, individual action and thought. In his book The Rules of the Sociological Method, he called these “social facts.”

A famous example of a social fact is found in Durkheim’s study, Suicide. In this book, Durkheim argues that the suicide rate of a country is not random, but rather reflects the degree of social cohesion within that society. He famously compares the suicide rate in Protestant and Catholic countries, concluding that the suicide rate in Protestant countries is higher because Protestantism encourages rugged individualism, while Catholicism fosters a form of collectivism.

What was so innovative about this theory is that it challenged long-standing assumptions about individual pathologies, which viewed these as mere byproducts of individual psychology.

Adapting this theory to the contemporary era, we can say, according to Durkheim, the rate of suicide or mental illness in modern societies cannot be explained by merely appealing to individual psychology, but must also take into account macro conditions such as a society’s culture and institutions.

In other words, if more and more people feel disconnected and alienated from each other, this reveals something crucial about the nature of society.

The Shift from Premodern to Modern

Born in France in 1858, the son of a rabbi, Durkheim grew up amid profound social change. The Industrial Revolution had drastically altered the social order and the Enlightenment had by this time thrown into doubt many once-taken-for-granted assumptions about human nature and religious (specifically Judeo-Christian) doctrine.

Durkheim foresaw that with the shift from premodern to modern society came, on the one hand, incredible emancipation of individual autonomy and productivity; while on the other, a radical erosion of social ties and rootedness.

An heir of the Enlightenment, Durkheim championed the liberation of individuals from religious dogmas, but he also feared that with their release from tradition individuals would fall into a state of anomie — a condition that is best thought of as “normlessness” — which he believed to be a core pathology of modern life.

For this reason, he spent his entire career trying to identify the bases of social solidarity in modernity; he was obsessed with reconciling the need for individual freedom and the need for community in liberal democracies.

In his mature years, Durkheim found what he believed to be a solution to this intractable problem: religion. But not “religion” as understood in the conventional sense. True to his sociological convictions, Durkheim came to understand religion as another social fact, that is, as a byproduct of social life. In his classic The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, he defined “religion” in the following way:

“A religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden — beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church, all those who adhere to them.”

The Sacred and the Quest for Solidarity

For Durkheim, religion is endemic to social life, because it is a necessary feature of all moral communities. The key term here is sacred. By sacred Durkheim meant something like, unquestionable, taken-for-granted, and binding, or emitting a special aura. Wherever you find the sacred, thought Durkheim, there you have religion.

There is a sense in which this way of thinking has become entirely commonplace. When people describe, say, European soccer fans as religious in their devotion to their home team, they are drawing on a Durkheimian conception of religion. They are signaling the fact that fans of this nature are intensely devoted to their teams — so devoted, we might say, that the team itself, along with its associated symbols, are considered sacred.

We can think of plenty of other contemporary examples: one’s relationship with one’s child or life partner may be sacred, some artists view art itself — or at least the creation of it — as sacred, and environmentalists often champion the sacrality of the natural world.

The sacred is a necessary feature of social life because it is what enables individuals to bond with one another. Through devotion to a particular sacred form, we become tied to one another in a deep and meaningful way.

This is not to say that the sacred is always a good thing. We find the sacred among hate groups, terrorist factions, and revanchist political movements. Nationalism in its many guises always entails a particular conception of the sacred, be it ethnic or civic.

But, at the same time, the sacred lies at the heart of all progressive movements. Just think of the civil rights, feminist and gay liberation movements, all of which sacralized the liberal ideals of human rights and moral equality. Social progress is impossible without a shared conception of the sacred.

Durkheim’s profound insight was that despite the negative risks associated with the sacred, humans cannot live without it. He asserted that a lack of social solidarity within society would not only lead individuals to experience anomie and alienation but might also encourage them to engage in extremist politics. Why? Because extremist politics would satiate their desperate desire to belong.

Thus we can sum up the great dilemma of liberal modernity in the following way: how do we construct a shared conception of the sacred that will bind us together for the common good, without falling prey to the potential for violence and exclusion inherent to the sacred itself?

This question which preoccupied Durkheim throughout his entire life — remains as urgent today as ever before.

~ end blog post

Contrarianism is a Helluva drug – The Devil’s Advocate

Playing the “Devil’s Advocate” (DA) is not a very good way to exercise critical thinking. That is because this particular approach to debate is premised on the idea that every intellectual idea can be explored through a discussion of its opposite.

One tell you will notice is that the DA often advocates for viewpoints that have already been discredited or ones they are not prepared to offer critical evidence to support (…and I might add here, often ones that they personally believe but they are embarrassed to say as much).

This is a Game

The devil who proposes a game of “Devil’s Advocate” in a debate are actively circumventing/undermining critical thinking under the guise of being reasonable; they’re playing a game and the goal of the game is to “win.”

People who play DA are not helping to advance a discussion of a problem or situation. Even though they may profess an interest in political neutrality by evaluating “both sides” of an argument, what they are doing with this pedagogical approach is indulging in binary thinking. Playing game of “point-counterpoint,” the DA aims to limit perspective (confining it to the two poles of the binary) even as they are pretending to open it up. And as it has already been pointed out, real problems that are worth solving are generally more complicated than “two-sides.”

I will concede one point here, however, which is that the Devil’s Advocate (DA) approach can be a legitimate debating tool if it helps integrate a perspective that is not being considered, where the aim is to get someone to consider new information. In this aspect, the DA might help if the goal is to help overcome ideas perceived to be one-sided and biased (Fabello, 2015).

Righteous dude, Elon Musk, hits a blunt with Joe Rogan, while workers in his Tesla plant are subject to drug testing. Like Hegel before him, he is smart but he’s a walking contradiction (no one likes him either). Don’t be Elon.

Where groups of students are concerned, debate games are admittedly a good way to learn about a topic. This approach can help “juice up” classroom dynamics beyond what might be accomplished by a traditional lecture approach, as it gives give students an opportunity to compete, inform, and have fun with each other.

Unfortunately, in real life, when the Devil’s Advocate shows up to argue, it doesn’t work out like this. The debate tends to play itself out and quickly becomes tiring for those relegated to the role of witness.

The Dialectics of the DA

The DA is a master of contradiction. Unfortunately, constant contrarianism does little to foster understanding of a problem. In a classroom it can be downright annoying for those forced to listen on the sidelines.

When the DA joins the debate, their true objective is to provoke conflict. Mistaking antagonism for skepticism and critical inquiry, the DA is often the consummate polished bully.

DA’s like zero-sum combat. Nothing delights them more than dragging a room full of spectators through seemingly endless, fruitless, and circular discussions, which ultimately never serve to help anyone change their point of view.

That’s why this approach cannot be dismissed as only a tiresome debate tactic; it’s far more than that – it’s a malignant thought paradigm that aggressively works to shut down critical thinking.

Reducing problems to two sides – the formula for a classic conflict paradigm – is a Hegelian exercise in futility; it’s designed to wear you out. As a result, you may be tempted to give up on critical thinking and side with the bully in the room if only for reasons of wanting to avoid sheer exhaustion!

The Devil in Disguise

A typical DA positions himself as a well-meaning “honest broker,” who merely wants to provide us with “the other side of the story.” To recap, DA thinking goes something like this: by arguing from an opposite, contrarian perspective, I will contribute a much needed missing perspective and help achieve a new level of understanding.

Efforts are made to signal neutrality when discussing the topic at hand. Convinced of their own earnestness, the DA will often emphasize how they want to intelligently and rationally debate a topic (even if they have zero experience with the said topic). Sounds legit. But hold on. There’s more.

In some instances, a DA may go as far as to politely assert that viewpoints outside of their own are not wrong; they are just uninformed or misguided. No doubt, they are convinced they are flexing their critical thinking muscles when debating this way, as they attempt to wrestle people to the mat to bring them around to accepting their simple truths. Sadly, this debate tactic screams bush-league; it’s high school-level debate. Hint: this is why no one ever likes the devil’s advocate.

In reality, DAs advocate for, and even perform to some extent, a combination of the following:

1) They advocate popular/ conventional “status quo” viewpoints.

2) They advocate polarized “contrarian” thinking.

3) They accuse others who don’t espouse their point of view of being biased.

4) They aim to shut down conversation and discourse – not add to it.

5) They aim to “mainstream” retrograde (out of favor) philosophies.

When I encounter the devil’s advocate, more often than not I find someone who is actively trying to interrupt and, in some cases, dominate my presentation of a problem/idea. But it’s not the fact that they asked me to consider new information that I find to be a problem; it’s their assumption (conceit) that I did not already consider alternative ideas before making my presentation. It’s as if they are telling me they don’t trust my ability to evaluate research and think critically (Fabello, 2015).

Gender & the DA

Shutting down conversation and discourse with debate tactics does not add to learning; it subtracts from learning and that’s oppressive. Nevertheless, the DA is not one who gives up easily.

As is often typical with DAs, sometimes they will go so far as to accuse their debate partner of having a personal bias (even though it never seems to occur to them that they may also be biased). This happens a lot. Sadly, more often than not, it happens with men in particular [even sadder is the fact that men talking down to women remains a common classroom occurrence].

Journalist Melissa Fabello, explains: “men are used to living in a world that affirms and validates their experience as ‘the way things are’ and they are almost never are asked to consider those biases.” When they accuse others of being a victim of their own subjectivity they do so while proclaiming they are, in fact, the one who is demonstrating critical thinking (Fabello, 2015).

What the devil’s advocate offers, more often than not, are feelings and personal opinions stated with confidence, which are disguised as reasoned, conventional, contrarian positions. In a final act of projection, they tend to accuse the very people who are practicing critical thinking of offering personal opinions.

Unable to engage problem-solving based on the actual substance of research and evidence, the DA may resort (when they are at their laziest) to suggesting that the other person’s position or argument be dismissed. In keeping with this, they may go so far as to suggest we consider the radical position that we do nothing at all to solve the problem.

It’s Easy to be a Devil’s Advocate

To put it simply, a DA is a performance artist; one who puts a lot of effort into telling people they are wrong. They are so obsessed with being rational, that they consistently mistake their own feelings for objective logic, on the basis that simply believing in rationality makes their feelings magically rational; thus, their logic system remains a closed circle – and they always get to be right!

Keep in mind that it’s easy to play the role of the Devil’s Advocate. It’s easy to be a contrarian and say “let’s go to opposite land and look at the opposite of what you proposed.” You know what’s hard? Solving a problem. It’s far more difficult to say “yes, we may not be doing it right, so let’s try to think through some different approaches that will allow us to think about this problem from different perspectives and maybe do something new.”

Just to be clear, I want to state for the record that debate and dissent are useful, valuable, and indispensable to the pursuit of knowledge; dissent can help sharpen and sculpt our efforts to achieve knowledge and understanding. Unfortunately, many DA-type contrarians are not interested in these things.

Understanding different points of view, respecting people for those views, and still having the courage to advance your views based on evidence is the goal of rationally informed critical inquiry. The best of us study for years in order to learn about the efforts and approaches others have tried in the service of solving problems. Standing on the shoulders of giants, we look for ways to make a contribution to the research – that means we must do some heavy lifting first, where we evaluate the best ideas and research methods and subsequently devise a new plan to move the research forward. Success here is often achieved in small increments.

In the end, we may or may not make a significant contribution. But we try. Even if we are only one step closer to solving a problem that’s still something to be proud of. The point is that thinking critically about the different steps in the process, collecting the best data and evidence, and even revising our approach along the way is more important than winning a debate or scoring points in the court of public opinion.

Remember that knowledge isn’t a one-way street. The more you treat knowledge acquisition as a competition, the more annoying you’re going to be as a person. You’ll find you won’t gain more wisdom,. You won’t influence anyone with your ideas…and you probably won’t make any friends.

Being smart isn’t about gamesmanship and proving someone wrong; sometimes it’s about fostering agreement through disagreement while getting someone to see your side of it. Wisdom is ultimately less about pride and being correct and more about having empathy and building bridges to knowledge.

What is the Solution?

There are no simple answers. We must begin the process of rational inquiry by putting the problem in the center of our efforts to solve problems. By taking ourselves out of the equation and attempting to begin from neutral ground (some people argue all research is ME-search), we might then set about the task of asking a critically informed question.

At this point, assuming there is intellectual curiosity, I hope we can move forward together to discover:

1) what experts have to say about problems; and

2) conceive of a plan (a research design) that can support the gathering of new data to advance understanding and suggest a solution to the problem.

Rinse and repeat as necessary.

Case Dismissed

It cannot be emphasized enough that this debating strategy is not driven by a desire to engage in rational inquiry to advance discourse and knowledge, even if it appears to do that. At its best, it’s an amusing parlor game. At its worst, it betrays an indication of disrespect.

Summary

Critical thinking is more than a “buzz” term. It’s incredibly essential to one’s ability to exercise sound decision-making and function in modern complex societies. The pitfalls and barriers to critical thinking that were discussed here are important to distinguish because they are not only incredibly common, they are important as structures that govern how people understand the world around them – how they interpret their feelings and achieve agreement reality about important social issues and problems. The thought paradigms that were discussed here are essential to how people develop logic systems and whether or not they can think; they have a profound impact on shaping everything that you know and what you think may be possible to know.

Finally, don’t avoid dissent. Don’t always seek out people who agree with you. Try to prove yourself wrong. Disagree. Debate. Admit mistakes. But be respectful. Carve out time and space to consciously reflect. And never forget – if you are the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room!

Sources

“Pioneering Sociologist Foresaw Our Current Chaos 100 Years Ago,” by Galen Watts, 2018.

4 Things Men are Really Doing When They “Play Devil’s Advocate” by Melissa Fabello, 2015.

“Why We Should All Stop Saying ‘I Know Exactly How You Feel,’ “ by Celeste Headlee, 2017.

“Stop Saying ‘I Feel Like’ “ by Molly Worthen, 2016.

“Max Weber and Objectivity in Social Science”

“This Week Should Put the Nail in the Coffin for Both Sides Journalism,” by Margaret Sullivan, 2017.

Discussion

What do you do when you have a certain understanding of what you know as Truth and others do not?

What do you do when others are operating under a belief system gained from what others have told them instead of basing their understanding on the knowledge of experts and/or research? Do you challenge them? Or do you “agree to disagree?” [Hint: do not concern yourself if others believe differently. Model what you are coming to know by means of accessing good sources of knowledge and information.]

When you were in high school did you feel prepared to take your exams? Did you do well on your exams? If you did not do well, how did this impact your interest in higher education and your assessment of whether or not you were “smart enough” to do well when you enrolled in college?

How comfortable are you when it comes to discussing sensitive topics in the classroom? Do you ever feel intimidated by professors or classmates?

What would it take for you to feel more comfortable engaging in “difficult” types of conversations?

Law and Order Society

Judging by the popularity of TV crime shows, many people appear to be fascinated by criminology and the criminal justice system! This could explain why you decided to take this class…or why you might decide at some point to major in criminology/criminal justice.

Why do you think people are fascinated by crime and criminal behavior? How does the popularity of so many TV shows reflect something about the American mindset towards crime and criminal behavior?

Some crimes fascinate us because they defy explanation – murder, serial killing, rape, mass shooting. While this sort of crime might lie far outside the realm of our individual experiences, the world of TV allows us to peer through the window so to speak; we now have a front row seat that permits us to get up close and personal with larger than life characters as well as other people and events that are removed from our day to day experiences.

It is only natural, as humans, that we seek to understand things that defy explanation. We look for reasons to explain that which appears to be unreasonable. This course will explore some of the theories and causative factors that underlie crime and will look at what might motivate people to commit crime. We’ll look at the different sources of data and other information available for researchers and students, who might want to assess the different patterns that are in evidence as part of an effort to explain crime.

What’s the Difference Between Criminology and Criminal Justice?

The academic differences between the study of criminology and criminal justice break down simply as follows:

Criminology is the study of the science of crime and criminals. Criminologists tend to be degree-holding academics, researchers, and policymakers, who study crime and criminals as well as associated social trends and patterns of activity that may apply to the former.

Criminal Justice is the study of the institutions that make up the criminal justice system: courts, police, and the law.

What is a Crime?

Simply put, a crime is any human conduct that violates the criminal laws of a state, the federal government, or local jurisdiction that has the power to make and enforce the laws. But we will not only be concerned with what factually constitutes a crime in this course. We’ll also take a look at what may be considered as falling short of criminal behavior – what is deviant or abnormal – and the process by which human conduct may at some point fall outside of social norms, but not the law.

A youngster wears his pants with underwear showing in Riviera Beach, Florida (Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Crime, Deviance, Delinquency

Pants “sagging,” for example, was for some people deviant, based on social norms, but not against the law. Now, as a result of public outcry, some jurisdictions have passed local ordinances to prohibit the practice. Critics argue that pants sagging is not only not criminal, it is not deviant, to the extent the practice merely expresses a fashion statement. More important, the practice of sagging one’s pants ultimately hurts no one and prohibition constitutes a form of racial profiling.

This case is a classic example of how people point to a consensus view of what some would argue is “bad behavior.” Seeing this as a breach of social norms, people in some communities decided to politically mobilize and redefine bad behavior considered deviant, reclassifying it as behavior that is subject to criminal sanction.

Delinquency, on the other hand, is a term that is used to refer to violations of criminal law and deviant behavior committed by young people. The law typically defines “young people” as youth who have not yet attained 18 years of age (varies by state). After attaining the age of 18, youth are processed in the adult criminal justice system.

What Should Be Criminal?

There are two perspectives that help define the U.S. CJ system perspective on crime and criminality: 1) the consensus perspective; and 2) the pluralist perspective.

The consensus perspective emphasizes homogeneity; it is an approach to understanding criminality informed by the idea that most members of society agree about what is right and what is wrong and that the various elements of society work together toward a common vision of the greater good. Put another way, this model assumes that the majority of citizens in a society share the same values and beliefs. Criminal acts are acts that conflict with these shared values and beliefs; this view, likewise, assumes there are values and morals that we all agree on and that they should be reflected in the law. Multicultural societies like the United States find it difficult to achieve this model. Despite this, there are residential areas in the U.S. that are less diverse, where people are more easily drawn to the consensus perspective and to feel that this is a “natural” way to think.

Alternatively, the pluralist perspective emphasizes diversity; it is an analytical approach that holds that a multiplicity of values and beliefs exist in any complex society. In spite of this, most social actors agree on the usefulness of law as a formal means of dispute resolution, even as it is understood that in a diverse society with many different social groups conflict is inevitable.

It is the view of both perspectives that the legal system is value-neutral and should be concerned with the best interests of society.

Discussion

Think about the crime shows that you have seen on television and reflect on which shows you found engaging. Why did you watch or like them? How do you think they have influenced what you know and how you think about the criminal justice system, police and the profession of policing, and who is/is not a criminal?

Welcome to Criminology!

Welcome to Criminology! This course of study aims to promote a more complete understanding of crime and how it is enmeshed in human social life. To do this, we will set out to explore the foundational theories and research that help explain how crime is measured and understood. After we establish some basic level understanding, we’ll move on to consider how the study of crime evolved over time. This includes how early theorists described and documented the characteristics of criminals. We’ll see how later, as science evolved, sociobiology theories were advanced to explain crime as both a function of genetics and environment – the classic “nature vs. nurture” paradigm. This will give way to a study of psychology and sexual crimes. Lastly, we’ll look at white-collar crime, organized crime, and war crimes and terrorism.

How Do We Investigate Crime & Criminals?

Many students who wander into this field of study might find themselves asking: how exactly do researchers investigate crime and criminals? What makes a crime a crime? As you will learn later, in most cases an act is considered a crime because the person committing it intended to do something that the legal scholars and governments have determined is wrong. This is what is known as “criminal intent” – or the mental state generally referred to as “mens rea,” Latin for “guilty mind.”

To this end, we will examine the social science research methods that underlie the scientific research testing that informs public policymaking. Students will learn about sources of information that provide data that essential to the study of criminal behavior. Developing an understanding of the critical frameworks researchers use (particularly those that focus on demographic variables like age, gender, race, and ethnicity) will, likewise, be emphasized. Let’s get started!

Who Is a Criminal? What Makes a Crime a Crime?

Unfortunately, there are no easy answers to these questions. The aim of the course is to discover both the long and short answers. As for the short, it depends. Crime and criminality vary considerably over time and space. Once condemned as a criminal, the same person might now be admired. To investigate, we have to go all the way back to the Age of Enlightenment.

What Was the Enlightenment?

The Age of Enlightenment refers to a time period as well as an elite 18th-century cultural movement that sought to mobilize the power of reason in order to reform society and advance knowledge. Some people like to think of the Enlightenment as the beginning of modern philosophy. It was important because the ideas that came from this movement influenced future democratic governments.

The Enlightenment period in the history of western thought and culture stretches roughly from the mid-decades of the seventeenth century through the eighteenth century; it was characterized by dramatic revolutions in science, philosophy, society, and politics. These revolutions swept away the dark medieval world-view and ushered in the light that is thought to typify our modern western world.

Enlightenment thought culminates historically in the political upheaval of the French Revolution, in which the traditional hierarchical political and social orders (the French monarchy, the privileges of the French nobility, the political power and authority of the Catholic Church) were violently destroyed and replaced by a political and social order informed by the Enlightenment ideals of freedom and equality for all, founded, ostensibly, upon principles of human reason.

The Enlightenment begins with the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The rise of the “new science” progressively worked to undermine not only the ancient geocentric conception of the cosmos and with it the entire set of presuppositions that served to constrain as well as guide philosophical inquiry. The dramatic success of the new science in explaining the natural world, in accounting for a wide variety of phenomena by appeal to a relatively small number of elegant mathematical formulae, promotes philosophy (in the broad sense of the time, which includes natural science) from a handmaiden of theology, constrained by its purposes and methods, to an independent force with the power and authority to challenge the old and construct the new, in the realms both of theory and practice, on the basis of its own principles. D’Alembert, a leading figure of the French Enlightenment, characterizes his eighteenth century, in the midst of it, as “the century of philosophy par excellence,” because of the tremendous intellectual progress of the age, the advance of the sciences, and the enthusiasm for that progress, but also because of the characteristic expectation of the age that philosophy and science (in this broad sense) would dramatically improve human life.

Who Are the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment?

The Enlightenment is associated with the French thinkers of the mid-decades of the eighteenth century, the so-called “philosophes”- Voltaire, Diderot, D’Alembert, Montesquieu, et cetera. The philosophes constitute an informal society of men of letters who collaborate on a loosely defined project of Enlightenment centered around the project of the Encyclopedia. But the Enlightenment has broader boundaries – geographical and temporal – than this suggests.

Other thinkers, who turned out to be influential in shaping the early study of crime and criminals, included John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, and Jeremy Bentham.

John Locke, for example, was concerned with the relationship between civil society, human behavior, and punishment. He theorized that when humans lived in a pre-societal state of nature, they had no formal constraints on their behavior.

Thomas Hobbes was also concerned about this relationship. In the case of Hobbes, he believed that life in the state of nature was one where individuals constantly faced danger and peril; that humans were always on the brink of a war of “all against all.” The only potential restraint on human behavior was government or what Hobbes referred to as the Leviathan. In his view, people needed to give up their claim to unrestrained “freedom” in order to live in a civil society. Striking the proper balance between freedom and restraint on freedom was essential to the social contract.

Man and the State of Nature

According to Locke, the term “state of nature” refers to the way human beings lived before they came together to form societies. In the state of nature, human beings have absolute freedom to pursue their desires, and because there are no laws, they can steal or kill without the fear of institutionalized punishment. However, everyone also has absolute freedom to protect themselves and attack others for perceived slights. Since individuals alone decide on how and when to seek retribution, Locke doubted whether any actions enacted by these individuals could actually constitute punishment.

Punishment in Society

Locke argued that the idea of punishment is one of the principle reasons why humans come together to form a society. According to Locke, in a state of nature, each person acts as a judge in his own case, but this unchecked power puts all humans in a potential state of danger, particularly when they are living in more complex societies. In exchange for living and benefitting from the rewards of a cooperative society (for more on these see “Social Contract theory”) humans consent to turn their power to seek individual retribution and punish over to the government. They relinquish absolute freedom in order to acquire the benefits of living in society. As such, other external authorities, such as kings or elected officials, were given the power to formalize ideas of punishment.

Ethics of Punishment

Locke viewed punishment as a means of repairing the social order. If somebody steals something, the government selects an appropriate punishment and enacts it in order to return order to that society. Locke’s theory on the severity of this punishment relates to restitution, and he claimed that an appropriate amount of punishment is whatever provides restitution for the injured and deters other people from committing a similar crime. According to the University of Stanford, critics believe that this view of punishment is no different than his conception of punishment in the state of nature, since both views center around the notion of preservation. In the state of nature, the individual is punishing others in the interest of self-preservation, while in society an individual or individuals create laws and enact them, but they still create these laws in the interest of preserving the state or even humanity.

Implications

Locke’s theory of punishment influenced — and continues to influence — governments and individuals all over the world. Several countries have built laws on the ideas espoused by Locke, and some countries, such as the United States, have built the ideas into their constitutions. The U.S. Constitution enshrines the idea that the government derives its power from the people, who turn some of their freedoms over to the government when they consent to be governed. This, as well as many other aspects of the Constitution, comes directly from Locke.

The David Hume statue on its pedestal outside of St. Giles Cathedral on the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, Scotland.

In addition to the English and French movements/thinkers represented here, there was a significant Scottish Enlightenment. Key figures were Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid as well as a similarly influential German Enlightenment (die Aufklärung) including Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn, G.E. Lessing and Immanuel Kant. All of these different Enlightenments and thought leaders might be thought of as particular nodes or centers of thought in a far-flung and varied intellectual development. Given the variation depicted here, Enlightenment philosophy is perhaps better understood in terms of general tendencies of thinking; not in terms of specific doctrines or theories.

Pre-classical Perspectives & Punishments

Prior to the Enlightenment, religious and spiritual perspectives were cited as a basis for organizing society and punishing individuals. Religious worldviews eventually gave way to “rational” science-informed perspectives.

Notwithstanding the influence of the Enlightenment, religion remained an important feature of crime and punishment. We see this perhaps nowhere more so than in colonial America. Religious dissenters, who migrated from England (i.e. the Puritans of New England and the Quakers of Pennsylvania) were particularly keen to enforce religious norms among the colonists. Many colonies made little distinction between sin and crime. These influences constitute a strong undercurrent in U.S. society, even in our current political moment, as research has documented that many Americans favor using the law to enforce a religious worldview. But this too is changing, as the same research documents that young Americans increasingly do not advocate this kind of thinking.

Salem witch trials

The Inquisitional chairs

This instrument of torture comes in different versions. We are first going to examine their common features and, then, their differences. All of them have common features, in that they are covered with spikes on the back, on the arm-rests, on the seat, on the leg-rests and on the foot-rests. The chair exhibited at the museum of San Gimignano has 1300 spikes, a real “carpet” of spikes. One version has a bar screwed on the lower portion of the chair, by the victim’s feet, which by a screw mechanism forced the back of the legs against the spikes, thus penetrating the flesh of the victim. Another version had two bars immobilizing the victim’s wrists forcing his forearms against the arm-rests resulting in the flesh being penetrated by the spikes.

Another version had a bar at chest height, to immobilize the victim’s bust, while the spiked seat had holes to allow the victim’s bottom to be ‘heated” by hot coals placed under the seat, causing painful burns, but still keeping the victim conscious.
The strength of this instrument lies mainly in the psychological terror it causes and the threat that the torture will get increasingly worse, conforming to a model where the pain starts off easy and then gets progressively worse. The idea is that the Inquisitors can interrupt it at any stage, upon visual inspection of the damages that have been inflicted.

This instrument was used in Germany up to the 1800s, in Italy and in Spain up to the end of the 1700s, in France, in Great Britain, and in the other central European countries, according to certain sources, up until the end of 1800s.

“Torture is a sure means to absolve robust villains and condemn weak innocent men”
“The law makes you suffer because you are guilty, you could be guilty, it wants you to be guilty” – Cesare Beccaria

The Classical School of Criminology

As we move forward in our course of study together, we’ll be investigating different approaches to theorizing crime and punishment. The Classical School of theories remains important to our current understanding of these issues, even though they have fallen out of favor to some extent. What distinguishes them is their emphasis on individual “free will” as well as rational decisionmaking – aspects of crime that are not always emphasized by contemporary theories. The Enlightenment helped to provide Classical theory with a framework for thinking through decisionmaking and rationality. The work of Cesare Beccaria here proved to be highly influential and he is considered to be the father of the Classical School of Criminal Justice.

Cesare Beccaria

Cesare Beccaria was a prominent Italian economist and criminologist. He wrote during a time when authoritarian governments wielded a heavy hand against citizens. The justice system during his time was often decidedly unjust. Beccaria’s reforms focused on free-will and the individual’s ability to make a rational choice about committing a crime, after giving consideration to the chance they might be caught and punished.

Enlightenment philosophy is readily apparent in the works and thinking of Beccaria, who emphasized the social contract among other important ideas. That is to say, he believed that citizens must give up rights in exchange for protection from the government or state.

Beccaria advocated swift punishment as the best form of deterrent to crime. His best-known work was his treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764), which condemned torture and the death penalty. This work still stands as a pioneering study in the field of criminology. Here, he argued that capital punishment was neither useful as a deterrent, nor was it necessary or ethically appropriate for the state to take the life of any of its citizens. The book tackled criminal reform and suggested that criminal justice should conform to rational principles.

Beccaria’s work greatly influenced the Neo-Classical theorist and architect, Jeremy Bentham, in his development of his doctrine of Utilitarianism.

Beccaria’s Understanding of Punishment – 3 Characteristics

Punishment must be swift
Punishment must be certain
Punishment must be severe

Beccaria & Deterrence Theory – Specific vs General

Beccaria emphasized that for punishment to be truly effective, it must have a deterrent effect on people who might decide to commit a crime. He developed two different concepts to elaborate the concept of deterrence: specific deterrence and general deterrence (he did not coin the terms; he merely emphasized they are important to distinguish).

Specific deterrence refers to punishments given to an individual that are meant to prevent/deter the individual from committing the crime again in the future.

General deterrence refers to punishments given to an individual that are meant to prevent/deter other potential offenders in the society at large from committing the crime in the future.

While the two of these categories overlap to some degree they, nonetheless, continue to form the basis of modern day sentencing strategies.

Beccaria’s Ideas About the Death Penalty

Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments marked the high point of the Milan Enlightenment. In what was a major contribution, Beccaria put forth the first arguments ever made against the death penalty. Beccaria claimed first and foremost that the use of capital punishment violated the social contract. Secondly, he thought that reflected negatively on the government, as it not only set a poor example for the rest of society, it failed to deter crime for reasons that it effectively endorsed barbarism (researchers have referred to this as the Brutalization effect).

Image result for death penalty

So What?

Why should we care about the theories of old Cesare Beccaria? Well, for one, they had a major impact on the governing of the United States. Beccaria’s propositions and theoretical model of deterrence was incorporated into the U.S. Constitution. His emphasis on due process rights, right to a speedy trial, right to a trial by jury, right to confront and cross-examine witnesses, and the requirement that all trials be public and the public be informed of all decisions regarding the justice system – we owe our rights to all of these things to Cesare Beccaria.

Jeremy Bentham

One of the more notable theorists inspired by Beccaria’s work was the English philosopher and political radical, Jeremy Bentham. Bentham is primarily known today for his moral philosophy, and especially his principle of utilitarianism, which evaluates actions based upon their consequences. According to him, the most relevant consequences are the overall happiness created for everyone affected by the action.

Like Beccaria before him, Bentham was influenced by Enlightenment thinkers, especially empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume. Bentham developed an ethical theory grounded in a largely empiricist account of human nature. He famously held a hedonistic account of both motivation and value according to which what is fundamentally valuable and what ultimately motivates us is pleasure and pain. Happiness, according to Bentham, is thus a matter of experiencing pleasure and lack of pain. One of his most important contributions was the “hedonistic calculus” – the weighing of pleasure vs. pain that individuals potentially undertake when they think about committing a crime.

Bentham also became known for his design of a prison structure, known as the Panopticon (the model incorporates a wagon wheel design so that a post in the center of the structure can conduct a 360-degree visual observation of prisoners – the spokes/corridors contain inmate cells). One famous model can still be visited in the state of Pennsylvania at the Eastern Penitentiary, located in Philadelphia.

Field Trip! Penn State Criminal Justice students (2017) look at a model of Eastern Penitentiary, which is based on Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon

Okay, Now What?

In the next section, we’ll take a look at the policy implications of how the Classical School and its theories eventually led to the Neoclassical perspective. Despite their influence becoming diminished over time, classical theories have been reinterpreted for the modern era – echoes from the past thus remain with us.

The prison watchtower at Eastern Penitentiary (photo credit: Sandra Trappen)

Review Questions

What are the three characteristics that define Beccaria’s understanding of punishment?

How did Enlightenment philosophy influence Beccaria?

How did Beccaria influence the U.S. criminal justice system?

What did Beccaria think about torture?

What did Beccaria think was the proper relationship between crime and punishment?

Criminology vs. Criminal Justice

The last section addressed the work of the Classical Theorists, who had and continue to have a major influence on the Criminal Justice system. But how, you might ask, is Criminal Justice different than Criminology?

Criminology, as a discipline, addresses the scientific process of conducting rational empirical investigation into matters that involve both crime and criminals. Criminal Justice address itself to the institutions that make up the justice system. We will, of course, move back and forth to address for reasons that there are many points of overlap.

For now, we turn our attention to the Positivist School, which informs the early formulations of scientific criminological testing and theorizing in the discipline of criminology. The emphasis on science in criminology began with the time period of the mid-1800’s and still continues today.

What is Positivism?

Positivism is a philosophical theory based on the idea that positive knowledge might be achieved through a process of investigation, whereby one comes to understand natural phenomena, including their properties and relations. Put another way, we might say that information derived from sense experience, interpreted through reason and logic, can inform the basis of all certain knowledge. Positivism holds that valid knowledge (certitude or truth) is found only in this a posteriori knowledge (knowledge learned from empirical investigation).

Verified data (positive facts) received from the senses are known as empirical evidence; thus, positivism is based on empiricism.

Positivism also holds that society, much like the natural physical world, operates according to general laws.

Positivism rejects intuitive knowledge (like the knowledge you acquire through your individual personal experiences); likewise, it rejects knowledge based on metaphysics and theology.

Although the positivist approach can be traced to different writers and thinkers throughout the history of western thought, the modern understanding of the term was formulated by the philosopher Auguste Comte in the early 19th century. Comte argued that, much as the physical world operates according to gravity and other absolute laws, so does society.

Skull on display in the Cesare Lombroso museum of pathological anatomy

Cesare Lombroso – The Father of Modern Criminology

Cesare Lombroso was one of the first people in history to use scientific methods to study crime. Recall now that most previous theorists were not scientists (i.e. Beccaria was a lawyer; Bentham was a philosopher). Lombroso, by way of contrast, was trained in medical science. In light of this, it was only natural that he approached his subject matter from a perspective that advocated the use of scientific methods of study. He is perhaps best known for his work Criminal Man in 1876. Lombroso’s theory of the born criminal dominated thinking about criminal behavior in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Lombroso’s fascination began in Italy in 1871 with a meeting between a criminal and a scientist. The criminal was a man named Giuseppe Villella, a notorious Calabrian thief and arsonist. The scientist was an army doctor called Cesare Lombroso, who had begun his career working in lunatic asylums and had then become interested in crime and criminals while studying Italian soldiers. Now he was trying to pinpoint the differences between lunatics, criminals and normal individuals by examining inmates in Italian prisons (Mason).

Lombroso found Villella interesting, given his extraordinary agility and cynicism as well as his tendency to boast of his escapades and abilities. After Villella’s death, Lombroso conducted a post-mortem and discovered that his subject had an indentation at the back of his skull, which resembled that found in apes. Lombroso concluded from this evidence, as well as that from other criminals he had studied, that some were born with a propensity to offend and were also savage throwbacks to early man. This discovery was the beginning of Lombroso’s work as a criminal anthropologist (Mason).

Delinquent skulls pictured in Criminal Man (1876)

Lombroso wrote: “At the sight of that skull, I seemed to see all of a sudden, lighted up as a vast plain under a flaming sky, the problem of the nature of the criminal – an atavistic being who reproduces in his person the ferocious instincts of primitive humanity and the inferior animals (Mason).

“Thus were explained anatomically the enormous jaws, high cheekbones, prominent superciliary arches, solitary lines in the palms, extreme size of the orbits, handle-shaped or sessile ears found in criminals, savages and apes, insensibility to pain, extremely acute sight, tattooing, excessive idleness, love of orgies and the irresistible craving for evil for its own sake, the desire not only to extinguish life in the victim, but to mutilate the corpse, tear its flesh, and drink its blood” (Mason).

Illustrations of the body parts of criminals, Criminal Man (1876)

Lombroso’s Stigmata

While having Christian origins, Lombroso used the term stigmata to refer to physical signs of the state of atavism (a morally and biologically inferior person). More to the point, he used the term “atavistic stigmata” to refer to what he determined were “criminal” characteristics, which he observed in his study of physiognomy and other characteristics that he identified while studying the corpses of known violent criminals [historically, “stigmata” are the bodily marks, sores, or sensations of pain in locations that correspond to the crucifixion wounds of Jesus].

Essentially, Lombroso believed that criminality was inherited and that criminals could be identified by physical defects that confirmed them as being atavistic or savage. As such, the stigmata of criminality were things like the shape of ears, length of fingers, large jaws, sloping foreheads, large chins, large noses and flattened noses. A thief, for example, could be identified by his expressive face, manual dexterity, and small, wandering eyes. Habitual murderers meanwhile had cold, glassy stares, bloodshot eyes and big hawk-like noses, and rapists had ‘jug ears’. These were the features that identified the “born criminal.”

Lombroso, of course, took a number of his ideas from Charles Darwin’s original ideas. People who looked “less evolved” were in his view not demonstrating the higher brain functions of homo sapiens. This led him to speculate that they were perhaps more likely to act on criminal impulses that cultural training and “civilization” helps others to forgo.

It should be noted that Lombroso did not confine his views to male criminals – he co-wrote his first book to examine the causes of female crime, and concluded, among other things, that female criminals were far more ruthless than male; tended to be lustful and immodest; were shorter and more wrinkled; and had darker hair and smaller skulls than ‘normal’ women. They did, however, suffer from less baldness, said Lombroso. Women who committed crimes of passion had prominent lower jaws and were more wicked than their male counterparts, he concluded (Mason).

Unfortunately for Lombroso, subsequent research showed that the “stigmata” he identified in criminals was present in noncriminals almost equal proportion to the criminal population. As a result, he was forced to revise his theory. His revisionary hypothesis stated that “in almost all cases” it was a biological predisposition to commit crime as evidenced by stigmata (not the environment) that led to the commission of crime.

Phrenology

Why are people so fascinated by the features of criminals? What can we learn from making models of people’s heads? During the early and mid 19th century, people were taken with the”science” of phrenology – a pseudoscience that focused primarily on human skull measurements. According to this understanding, the brain was the organ of the mind; one that could be divided into functional modules.

So it was believed that by examining the shape and unevenness of a head or skull, one could discover the development of the particular cerebral “organs” responsible for different intellectual aptitudes and character traits. For example, a prominent protuberance in the forehead at the position attributed to the organ of Benevolence was meant to indicate that the individual had a “well developed” organ of Benevolence and would, therefore, be expected to exhibit benevolent behavior.

Gall’s and the phrenologists’ assumption that character, thoughts, and emotions are located in specific parts of the brain was, at the time, considered an important historical advance toward neuropsychology. The basic tenets of Gall’s system were:

1. The brain is the organ of the mind.

2. The mind is composed of multiple distinct, innate faculties.

3. Because they are distinct, each faculty must have a separate seat or “organ” in the brain.

4. The size of an organ, other things being equal, is a measure of its power.

5. The shape of the brain is determined by the development of the various organs.

6. As the skull takes its shape from the brain, the surface of the skull can be read as an accurate index of psychological aptitudes and tendencies.

While compelling, phrenology extrapolated well beyond any knowledge that could be empirically determined. Consequently, while it put on a good show, phrenology was not a true science.

However, like so many popular sciences, Gall and his colleagues sought only confirmations for their hypotheses and did not apply the same standard to contradictory evidence. Any evidence or anecdote which seemed to confirm the science was readily and vociferously accepted as “proof” of the “truth” of phrenology. At the same time, contradictory findings, such as a not very benevolent and disagreeable person having a well-developed organ of Benevolence were always explained away.

Australian Phrenology – Death Masks

The death masks tell us a lot about what people were thinking about criminals in the 19th century. It was not controversial to believe that there was a definitive criminal “type” and/or that there was a distinctive criminal class. For more on this, check out the short video clip.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MO5429RjvM

Contemporary Phrenology – Face Mapping

Modern Biological Theories of Criminality

What is the relationship between criminality and biology? As we have seen here, Nineteenth-century practitioners of medical science, phrenologists among them, insisted that criminality was innate, inherent in the offender’s brain matter. While they were eventually repudiated as pseudo-scientists, today the pendulum has swung back.

Today we find again there are criminologists and biologists who have begun to speak of a tantalizing but disturbing possibility: that criminality may be inherited as a set of genetic deficits that place one at risk to commit theft, violence, or acts of sexual deviance. But what do these new theories really assert? Are they as dangerous as their forerunners, which the Nazis and other eugenicists used to sterilize, incarcerate, and even execute thousands of supposed “born” criminals? How can we prepare for a future in which leaders may propose crime-control programs based on biology?

Image result for lombroso museum

What Can Crime Museums Teach Us About Crime?

The crime museum, as we know it today, locates its birth in the 19th century. Museums like the Cesare Lombroso Museum of Criminal Anthropology at the University of Turin can tell us a lot about the development of the discipline of criminology, criminological theory, and criminal justice systems. While Lombroso, as we know, believed that criminals were born, the discipline of criminology has since evolved to understand that crime and criminals are produced by a combination of historical, social, and cultural social forces.

Although they are often popular with people who have a taste for the macabre – many of the exhibits that tend to reflect the dark side of human nature – museums like this one can continue to help shape our current thinking about crime and criminals. They are rich sources of forensic artifacts and, in some instance, offer dramatizations of high-profile crimes. The same holds true for police and prison museums (see my module on Pennsylvania’s Eastern Penitentiary).

Nevertheless, crime museums remain controversial. That is to say, they are contested social spaces. This owes to the fact that the museum itself is a site of spectacle that cannot avoid being embedded in the history of specular politics that haunts the history of crime and punishment. Additionally, the museums share a connection with the development of the professions (policing, medicine, the law, and the nation-state). It cannot be overstated that these institutions, in many respects, grew and prospered on the backs of marginalized and criminalized poor people, many of whom suffered for no other reason than that they were born into a powerless social class.

You can find the Cesare Lombroso Museum located on Via Pietro Giuria, 15, 10126, in Torino, Italy.

Sources

The “Born Criminal”? Lombroso and the Origins of Modern Criminology, by Emma Mason

Discussion Questions

What characteristics distinguish the Positivist School from the Classical School regarding criminological thought?

How did positivistic theories influence Lombroso? Do you see any validity in this approach?

What can Lombroso’s theories tell us about modern biological perspectives on crime? Do you think they cause these theories to be less popular?

What parts of Lombroso’s theory do you find least valid…more valid?

Criminal Anthropology

The discipline of anthropology shares a history with criminology. As we learned in the last section from Lombroso, there was a well-established school of thought that believed we might learn something about criminals by studying their physical and mental characteristics.

Modern criminology has its roots in criminological anthropology as well as the study of morbid anatomy in medicine (criminals were often dissected to teach medical students and doctors). This fact establishes the interdisciplinary orientation of criminology, as well as its subsequent development. The emergence of criminology as an independent science is, moreover, related to the anthropological school of criminal law. Criminology branched off from criminal law, the development of which can be discovered in the valuable works of the representatives of this school. These works include works of Ch. Lombrozo (Russian author) “Crime” and “Criminal anthropology,” “Anarchists” by E. Ferri, “Criminal Sociology,” and “Criminology” by R.Garofalo (Konarbayeva and Kazachstan).

Since its inception, criminological anthropology has been subject to wide-ranging criticism, the essence of which was that the criminological anthropology put too much emphasis on heredity, atavism, and the anthropometric data of the criminal, which it hypothesized was the cause of committing crimes. Advocates of criminological anthropology have been cited for the limitations of these theories and their focus on what are alleged to be “pseudoscientific” ideas that aim to explain criminal behavior by a single reason (like Lombroso’s theory of the” born criminal”). Theories of criminological atavism were followed by theories that attributed criminality to moral degeneration and epilepsy. These were followed by psychiatric explanations that emphasized mental disability/mental illness.

Subsequently, a large body of criticism was addressed to criminological anthropology. This has lasted for more than a century and despite a new wave of theorizing the “biological” origins of crime, it continues to influence the modern interpretation of the subject as well as the methodology of criminological anthropology.

History

Historically, we might think of criminological anthropology as constituting a specific response to the limitations of the dogmatic classical school, which was not given to take into consideration either the personality of the criminal or social conditions when considering the crime. Consequently, in the second half of the 19th century, it became apparent that the criminal law based on the theories of the classical school (which ignored social and psychological conditions and the reasons for the existence of crime) was not able to restrain the growth of crime. This meant that new approaches were necessary to solve the problem of crime.

There is, nevertheless, an interesting history that develops that we might trace to Italy, where we discover the roots of criminal anthropology in the study of medicine and morbid anatomy. The oldest anatomical theatre was built in Padua in 1594 to be used for medicine lessons at the local university. Anatomical theatres were subsequently built at universities and hospitals across Europe. Among the oldest in Italy are the anatomical theatres of the University of Bologna inside the Palazzo dell’Archiginnasio built in 1637, those of the University of Pavia and Ferrara, and of the Ospedale del Ceppo in Pistoia (18^th century).

Anatomical Theater, University of Padova, Italy

The Pleasures of Morbidity

The world’s oldest surviving anatomical theatre is situated in the Palazzo del Bo at the University of Padua and was built in 1594 by the Italian surgeon and Renaissance anatomist who helped found modern embryology, Girolamo Fabricius Acquapendente. Here, the elliptical-shaped theatre has six tiers carved from walnut and can accommodate up to 300 spectators. The seating was arranged so that each student could have an uncompromised view of the dissecting table (Lillie and Donati). Still visible is the inscription, Hic locus est ubi mors gaudet succurrere vitae (This is a place where the dead are pleased to help the living). Following the last dissection in 1872, the theatre has been preserved, even the original table still stands and now the building houses historic surgical tools and artifacts of medical importance (Lillie and Donati).

And if this is not enough, you will also find here the chair and lectern that belonged to the University’s greatest lecturer, Galileo.

[Should you ever find yourself lucky enough to spend some time in Italy, you can visit the university, which is located at Palazzo del Bo, via VIII Febbraio, 2, Padua – note there are strict hourly sessions devoted to welcoming visitors].

Anatomical Theater, University of Bologna

At the University of Bologna houses one of the world’s most beautiful anatomical theatres. Completely carved from spruce, construction of the anatomical theatre of Archiginnasio began in 1636 and was completed in 1737, when dissections of human cadavers were performed by candlelight.

Sections of the room are elaborately decorated and reigning over the room is the carving of a woman being offered a thigh bone by an angel and carved statues of physicians like Hippocrates, Galenus, etc. stand in niches.

In keeping with tradition when surgeons would consult the stars before performing operations, the ceiling is decorated with astrological symbols in the belief that every part of the body was placed under the guardianship of a zodiac sign. This ornate decoration reflects the understanding of man and his relationship with the cosmos.

Two famous statues of the Spellati, anatomical models displaying the muscles beneath the skin, hold up the canopy above the teacher’s chair and are the work of the well-known artist of anatomical wax displays, Ercole Lelli.

On January 29, 1944, during the Second World War, the theatre was almost completely destroyed; after the war ended, the theatre was rebuilt using all of the original pieces that were recovered among the rubble of the building.

This theatre is also open to the public and is located at Archiginnasio of Bologna, Piazza Galvani 1.

The Mutter Museum in Philadelphia offers a more convenient local opportunity to visit an impressive display of medicine’s efforts to study crime and criminals using medical scientific methods. In addition to offering exhibits that attest to the progress of medicine and the birth of the modern hospital, showcases feature more than 25,000 medical models of infectious diseases, osteological (bone & skeleton) specimens, cysts, tumors, organs, and old surgical instruments, many of which look more like implements of torture than medicine.

During the time of the 19th century, only criminals’ bodies were permitted to be disseminated and publicly displayed. Since most regular folks didn’t want to associate themselves with that element, it wasn’t fashionable to donate your body to science. Thus, grave robbing was a thing (doctors and scientists bought corpses), as were moulages, or wax sculptures.

Syphilis Face Wax Figure is listed (or ranked) 4 on the list 14 Super Weird And Disgusting Things On Display At The Mütter Museum

In the above photo, we find a person with late-stage syphilis. How would a doctor treat this patient? The standard course of treatment was to lock the person in a box with mercury fumes, which had a tendency to kill the person before the syphilis did. Yikes!

Sources

“Criminological anthropology during the dynamic integration of scientific knowledge,” by Nurgul Konarbayeva and Astana Kazachstan.

“Italy’s Ancient Medical Schools: Anatomical Theaters,” by Barry Lillie and Silvia Donati.

NOTE: I am in the process of making plans to take a group of Penn State students to visit the anatomical theatres in Padova and Bologna in addition to the Cesare Lombroso museum in Turin (goal: Spring break 2022). If you think you might be interested in going on this trip, drop me a message and stay tuned!!!!!

What is Research?

For a lot of people, “research” is what you do when you spend a few hours sitting in library or at home looking things up on the Internet. You open your favorite web browser, like Google, and that’s when the research magic happens. Well, sort of.But not really.

This post aims to introduce students to the process that professional researchers engage when they study something. We undertake a systematic process that you will find differs dramatically from simply looking up information and statistics on the Internet. What follows here is a very simple general overview of the research process.

Newsflash: if you think you have a research question/problem you want to study and you can find the answer/solve the problem by simply retrieving and reading a few articles in the library, you really haven’t conducted research.

So what exactly is research? How do academics and criminologists actually go about conducting research? The slides that follow depict important steps that researchers take to ensure that their research is systematically conducted in such a way as to respect the rules of rational inquiry. If you are using a textbook in the social sciences (i.e. sociology or criminology) there is typically an entire early chapter devoted to the study of research methods. Because it’s that important!

Most researchers start with a basic problem and pose a question that they have about that problem. For example, they may be interested in the problem of juvenile crime. In light of this, a researcher might start with a simple questions like:

Is juvenile crime increasing?

Why is juvenile crime increasing?

Do immigrants commit more crime?

Are juvenile boys more violent than juvenile girls?

Do police body cameras reduce the police use of force?

Why are so many black people incarcerated?

The point here is, there is a mystery to be solved and the investigator is going to undertake a systematic inquiry to see if they can collect data that will allow them to solve the question/problem.

But first, let’s talk about things that will present you with difficulty. A common problem among students is that they tend to want to study problems that are too broadly conceived, not well defined, which are likewise difficult to count/quantify. For example, some might ask:

How does crime impact society?

Is there a “War on Cops?”

Why is capitalism the best (or worst) form of social organization?

We will address this common problem of being “too general” as we continue our work together. For now, simply be assured that there different types of research that help facilitate the study of social problems. All research, furthermore, starts with a specific problem and question.

Institutional Ethnography

One other form of important research not listed on these slides is referred to as institutional ethnography (IE). First developed by the sociologist, Dorothy Smith, IE is less about a particular set of research methods than it is an approach to research.

IE centers the everyday work problems of people in institutions, which become the starting point for an exploration of what are often-invisible social relations that underlie human experience.

People’s everyday lives are treated as a site of interface between individuals and a network of institutional relations, discourses, and work processes. Put another way, the research object is the relational point of interface between individuals and institutions.

Summary

To conduct research, the researcher has to formulate a strategy/plan with defined research objectives. They must, furthermore, employ systematic methods as they design a plan of study, where they first spend a lot of time taking into account previous research before they collect data. The research design outlines the structure of the research plan; it’s the “glue” that holds the study together. Without this basic plan, the research will be unfocused and wander, which defeats the purpose of the study, as it tends to leave the reader (and your professor) confused.

Once researchers collect their data, they will conduct an interpretive analysis and report findings. In short, they are going to employ the scientific method.

Steps in the Research Cycle/Process

Step 1: Define a problem

Step 2: Formulate Objectives & Strategy (formulate a hypothesis)

Step 3: Conduct a Literature Review

Step 4: Design a Research Question, Define Concepts, and Operationalize a Research Plan

Step 5: Conduct Observations & Gather Data

Step 6: Analyze Data

Step 7: Report Findings

Characteristics of the Scientific Method

Sometimes it is hard to not inject your personal bias when studying a problem. Keep in mind now, most of us choose problems to study based on our personal interests and background to some extent, so there is a lot of debate about whether or not it is possible to be truly objective. We all have issues and problems that we care about and so we naturally have something to say about it!

But you must resist these impulses to the best of your ability; try (to the extent that this is possible) to set them aside and design a plan to gather data. It is good to be curious, just try to keep an open mind and resist being judgemental at every step in the process. Note the following are characteristics of the scientific method:

Systematic, Step by Step Procedure
Relies on Evidence
Uses Concepts
Uses Reasoning
Subscribes to Ethics – Neutrality, “Do No Harm”
Verifiable and Replicatable

Research Methods in Criminology

Thus far, what I have presented here is a basic architecture for social science research methods. This is not to be understood as doctrine, however, as there are numerous nuances and different approaches that characterize the process, which this short posting simply cannot address. Nonetheless, by using this basic outline you can begin to get a sense for how social science research and research in Criminology is conducted.

What is a Hypothesis?

Not all research formally states a hypothesis (and so it follows not all research engages in formal hypothesis testing). But even if one is not formally stated, researchers will still have a “hunch” and speculate out loud about what they expect to find.

Summary

People who are great observers of life around them make great researchers. You might be doing some of these things without noticing that you are practicing the life skills that will enable you to become a great researcher one day!

How Can You Use This Information to Write a Research Paper?

In a class like ours, we don’t have the luxury of time (or the funding) for everyone to conduct their own research projects. What we can do, however, is focus on problems, then undertake a formal process of investigation to learn about that problem in the way a researcher would approach it.

I am going to suggest that you choose a problem/topic and that conduct a brief literature review to learn about how previous professional researchers have conducted studies to investigate the problem. In conducting your review, you should (ideally) plan on reading at least 3-4 studies in-depth – studies that took different approaches and used different research methods and subjects, this way you will acquire a more fully developed appreciation for how complex problems are and how difficult they are sometimes to solve!

Assignments

Working in groups and independently, you will complete assignments that address the different major sub-sections of research papers. Assignments will cover the following:

Abstract/Annotated Bibliography
Literature Review
Research Methods Section
Surveys
Conducting Observations
Visual Ethnographies
Interviews

Data Collection Fallacies

Of course, you knew this process would have a few curveballs, right? Even if you are not working on a project right now that requires you to collect data, you should be aware of some common data collection pitfalls which can have a major impact on study results and findings. Keep these fallacies in mind as you evaluate sources of information and think about how you might collect data. This applies not only to your coursework; it can help you in your future occupations, as you might be asked to lead an initiative that requires you to conduct research to solve a problem.

Discussion questions (you don’t have to answer these, but you should know the answers)

What are the steps in the research process?

What are the characteristics of the scientific method?

What is a hypothesis?

At what point do you formulate your research question – before or after the literature review?

The Sociology of Crime

Sociology has traditionally had three classic concerns that are relevant to the study of crime. One area of concern is power and domination (Max Weber). Sociology can help us understand the social dynamics by which some individuals and social groups are able exert force on others, thereby creating as well as maintaining and enforcing relations of social inequality. Of course, an area of focus that is very much related to this concerns the study of social conflict, especially social class conflict (Karl Marx). A classic Marxist approach to the study of crime might ask: how does modern capitalism, distinguished by social class polarization, contribute to the production of crime and social unrest?

Sociology is also concerned with the maintenance and reproduction of social order (Emile Durkheim). How does society exist? How does it cohere and “hang together” as it were? What keeps society from breaking down into what Thomas Hobbes called a “war of all against all?”

Another area of focus involves governance and control. The interest in studying the management of human affairs implicates criminal justice institutions like the police, courts, and prisons. This further involves schools, hospitals, and armies – what some might refer to as modern organizations. Altenatively, social theorists might call them agents of social control.

And finally, there is a concern with studying things that are distinctly “social” (as opposed to, for example, things that are “biological” or “cognitive”).

Social Structure Theories of Crime

There is a group of theories in the social sciences dedicatied to understanding the role played by social structure in crime. To this end, three subgroups of structural theories have been articulated by sociologists and criminologists which are thought to help identify potential root causes of crime. Why is this important? Because when researcheres are able to identify root causes, they are able to find solutions to solve problems.

Social structure theories suggest that an individual’s place in the socioeconomic structure may exert a major influence on their chances of becoming a criminal. According to this line of thinking, poor people are more likely to commit crimes because they may be frustrated/impeded when they try to achieve success through convention means. Crime results when they are unable to achieve monetary or social success in any other way.

Social Disorganization Theory: This theory places a significant amount of responsibility for criminal behavior upon an individual’s residential location. Social disorganization theory directly links the crime rate of a given neighborhood to its ecological characteristics. It might be used to explain that slum dwellers violate the law because they live in areas where social control has broken down.

Strain Theory: Strain theories view crime as resulting from the anger and frustration that people experience over their inability to achieve legitimate social and economic success. These theories hold that most people share common values and beliefs but the ability to achieve them is differentiated throughout the social structure. Strain theories call attention to certain strains or stressors that may act as triggers for crime.

For example, people might use crime as a way to get revenge on someone who is causing the pressure, or they may resort to crime to alleviate financial pressure. They also may turn to illicit drugs to help offset some of the pressure. Consequently, when placed under strain, the way they may deal with the increased strain is through crime.

There are a number of different variations of strain theory, the best known of which are by Emile Durkheim and Robert Merton. They each theorize in different ways what happens when social controls are lacking (Durkheim) and people have inadequate means to satisfy their needs (Merton).

Cultural Deviance Theory: Cultural deviance theories hold that a unique value system develops in lower class areas. Lower-class values approve of behaviors such as being tough, never showing fear, and defying authority.

Cloward and Ohlin argue that crime results from lower-class people’s perceptions that their opportunities for success are limited.

Durkheim and Strain (Anomie) Theory

The French anthropologist, Emile Durkheim, helped to establish sociology as a science by objectively studying social facts- i.e. suicide. He believed that shared values and customs helped to hold societies together. Most notably, he theorized that the division of labor in society (the labor mechanism) replaced religion as the primary basis of social cohesion.

Major concepts that are important to his studies are “Anomie” – refers primarily to a loss of moral control and standards, which leads to a feeling of normlessness and despair; as well as two different types of social solidarity – “Mechanical Solidarity” and “Organic Solidarity.”

Durkheim’s Theory of Crime

Durkheim argues that crime is inevitable for two main reasons:

Everyone is socialized differently and some people may not be effectively socialized. Poor socialization means that they do not accept the shared norms and values of mainstream society which can make them deviant.
Modern society is also very complex, especially in large cities, where there are many people with many different cultures and lifestyles in a concentrated area. This causes the formation of subcultures and these subcultures may have norms and values that do not agree with the norms of mainstream society. For example, in some cultures, it is acceptable to eat with your hands but if such a person was residing in Europe, mainstream European society may see this practice as deviant.

Durkheim also believes that there tends to be anomie (normlessness) in modern society caused by the division of labor in society (workers vs. the owners of capital). Everyone does their own thing in their effort to get ahead and that leads to a weakened social solidarity and value consensus, which Durkheim believes leads to high levels of crime and deviance.

Yet while it may seem intuitive to argue that crime is bad for society (because it can lead to the breakdown of society), Durkheim gives us a functionalist perspective that argues the reverse may, in fact, be true; that too much crime is bad for society, but too little crime can also be bad. Highlighted below are two functions that he believes crime may serve in society:

Boundary maintenance – the whole purpose of the law and justice system is to “dramatize evil” in order to act as a warning to the law-abiding citizens. “Perp walks” of famous criminals and televised court proceedings can serve the functional purpose of solidifying boundaries that separate law-abiding citizens from criminals. People who follow the law can look at these examples and reassure themselves that they have good values, they follow the law, and this constitutes a form of social solidarity. “I am not like those people who commit crimes.

Adaption and change – when individuals challenge or go against the norms of their society, at first they are seen as deviants. However, challenging the norms of a society is what allows it to adapt and grow so that society can meet the functions of its members. Think of the freedom riders, who challenged social norms about where black people could legally occupy social space. When societies are too controlling and do not allow for adaption, the society may stagnate.

Difference Between “Anomie” & “Alienation”

What is the difference between Durkheim’s concept of anomie and Marx’s concept of alienation? This is a good question. One that is worthy of distinction, which the following chart illustrates:

One final word on anomie – “Anomie” is not something that you catch like the flu – it is a state of being and/or feeling that results when social norms and standards break down, which causes people to feel lost and not certain of their place or how they fit into society.

Robert Merton & Strain Theory

To keep things simple, we might say that Robert Merton adapted Durkheim’s theory and gave it a more contemporary spin. His particular adaptation emphasized both structural and cultural factors, where he emphasized the economic dimensions of social strain.

Adaptations to Strain

Adaptations. Goals. Means. Conformity. Accept. Innovation. Reject. Ritualism. Retreatism. Rebellion. Replace.

Means vs. Goals

Criticisms of Strain Theory

Durkheim never really states precisely what level of crime is the right amount in a given society. And just because crime may serve a function in society does not necessarily mean that the society is deliberately creating crime in order for the functions of it to be prevalent. DH never specifically addresses how crime affects individuals and/or groups in society. DH does not address how crime can weaken solidarity and increase isolation – i.e. women may self-isolate, not trust men, or stay in at night due to the fear of rape.

One general critique of strain theory is that it overemphasizes the role of social class in crime and deviance.

Functionalist and strain theories, while they may do a good job of explaining the relationship between macro social structure and deviance and crime, nonetheless, they neglect the individual and interpersonal and aspects of crime, which may be more effectively examined through a symbolic interactionist approach. Symbolic interactionism is able to address issues of socialization – how unique peer groups influence the meanings and symbols an individual attaches to certain behaviors or ideals.

For example, symbolic interactionists might point to labeling theory to demonstrate how an individual within his social circle (family, friends…) might be labeled as deviant based on their values that they impose on him (Brym and Lie, 2007:198). The metamorphosis of culture, primary and secondary socialization, also enhance the socio-cultural context of deviance and crime – in this aspect, the functionalist (focusing on macrostructures) framework is more rigid and too general.

Social learning theory (i.e. Sutherland’s Differential Association Theory) further extends the idea of people’s propensity to turn to deviance and crime having been socialized in contexts with differing levels of exposure to it (Brym and Lie, 2007:197). Crime, in other words, is learned within an interpersonal and group social context.

Labeling theory and Social Learning Theory are able to more successfully bridge the gap between social class differences when accounting for crime, unlike the functionalist and strain theory approach, whose explanations are more focused on explaining he behavior of the poor and lower classes.

For more extensive reading on criticism of strain theory you can look to the following sources:

Doesn’t explain conformity: Travis Hirschi, Bonding (or Control) Theory

2. Doesn’t consider “illegitimate opportunity”: Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin, Subculture Theory

3. Overlooks social interaction and group processes: Albert Cohen, Subculture Theory

4. Assumes a common culture in the U.S.: Walter Miller, Lower-Class Culture Theory

5. Ignores social control: Howard Becker, Labeling Theory

6. Overlooks “crime in the suites”—crimes by the wealthy and powerful: Richard Quinney, Conflict Theory

A Summary of the Evolution of Strain Theory

Policy Implications of Strain Theory

The most immediate policy impact of strain theory is that it demonstrates the importance of educational and vocational training opportunities and programs. These types of programs can offer opportunity and coping mechanisms for individuals, who might be dealing with economic stress and are desiring non-criminal approaches to addressing their needs.

Research shows that interventions are necessary for high-risk youth, who do not always have the intrinsic motivation to participate in organized structured activity, which can lead them to successful economic outcomes and thereby avoid offending/crime. Providing a person with a job or preparation for a job has been shown to be key to leading a stable life. Thus, they will feel less stressed or strained.

What is the Chicago School of Criminology?

The traditional Chicago School of Criminology (sometimes called the ecological school) refers to work conducted by faculty and students at the University of Chicago, who utilized a macro-sociological theory called “social disorganization” to understand why crime and delinquency rates are higher in some neighborhoods than others. It played a major role during the late 19th and early 20th centuries in shaping the general theoretical and analytic foundation of criminology that was at that time a mere fledgling discipline.

The department’s influence still can be detected in much contemporary criminological research. This work actually subsumed a wide variety of conceptual and methodological orientations, and references to a single “Chicago School” of thought represent an oversimplification of the rich intellectual diversity of the department.

Insights generated in the area of urban sociology played an especially critical role in the development of American criminology.

Ecological Theories – Park & Burgess

The Chicago School of Criminology is identified with neighborhood studies of crime and delinquency that focus particularly on the spatial patterns of such behavior, especially as reflected in maps of their spatial distributions. However, such a characterization is at best a caricature of the rich insights that were fostered by the intellectual context of the University of Chicago that shaped the orientation of these early criminologists.

Social Disorganization Theory – Studies of Delinquency

The origin of social disorganization theory can be traced to the work of two Chicago School criminology researchers, Clifford Shaw and Henry D. McKay, who concluded that disorganized areas marked by divergent values and transitional populations produce criminality.

Social Disorganization Theory focuses on the absence or breakdown of social control mechanisms (it share obvious links with social control theory). One of the key assumptions of social disorganization theory is that a person’s physical location and social environment are primarily responsible for the behavioral choices that a person makes. According to the theorists, if someone grows up in a disadvantaged area where delinquency and crime are seen as acceptable, they are more likely to participate in criminal activities. Neighborhoods that appear to be disorganized or not cared for potentially serve as a signal to criminals that no one is watching and/or no one cares.

Social disorganization theory is widely used as an important predictor of youth violence and crime. Shaw and McKay noted that neighborhoods with the highest crime rates had three common problems: physical dilapidation, poverty, and higher levels of ethnic and culture mixing.

In light of this, the two theorists held that delinquency was not an individual level pathology, rather, it was a normal response by normal individuals to adjust to abnormal conditions.

In Causes of Delinquency (1969) Travis Hirschi argued that variations in delinquent behavior among youth could be explained by variations in the dimensions of the social bond, namely attachment to others, commitments to conventional goals, acceptance of conventional moral standards or beliefs, and involvement in conventional activities. The greater the social bonds between a youth and society, the lower the odds of involvement in delinquency.

When social bonds to conventional role models, values and institutions are aggregated for youth in a particular setting, they measure much the same phenomena as captured by concepts such as network ties or social integration. But the fact that these theories focus on the absence of control or the barriers to progress, means that they are ignoring the societal pressures and cultural values that drive the system Merton identified in the Strain Theory or the motivational forces Cohen proposed were generating crime and delinquency.

Modern theorists like Empey (1967) argue that the system of values, norms and beliefs can be disorganized in the sense that there are conflicts among values, norms and beliefs within a widely shared, dominant culture. While condemning crime in general, law-abiding citizens may nevertheless respect and admire the criminal who takes risks and successfully engages in exciting, dangerous activities. The depiction of a society as a collection of socially differentiated groups with distinct subcultural perspectives that lead some of these groups into conflict with the law is another form of cultural disorganization, is typically called cultural conflict.

Other versions of the theory sometimes use different terminology to refer to the same ecological causal processes. For example, Crutchfield, Geerken and Gove (1982: 467-482) hypothesize that the social integration of communities is inhibited by population turnover and report supporting evidence in the explanation of variation in crime rates among cities. The greater the mobility of the population in a city, the higher the crime rates. These arguments are identical to those proposed by social disorganization theorists and the evidence in support of it is as indirect as the evidence cited by social disorganization theorists. Here, by referring to social integration rather than disintegration, this research has not generated the same degree of criticism as social disorganization theory.

Cultural & Subcultural Theories of Crime

Subcultural theory argues that certain groups develop norms and values that are different from those of other members of society. Those values are communicated to participants through a process of socialization. Crime and deviance is thus a reaction by a group who decides to opt out of the value system of the major culture.

Policy Implications

Discussion Questions

Explain the differences between Durkheim and Merton’s strain theories.

Give a contemporary example of a crime that might be explained by Merton’s strain theory.

What does the term “Anomie” mean?

Explain how social disorganization theory might explain crime and deviance in neighborhoods with which you have some familiarity.

Social Media & Crime

Most Americans’ knowledge and opinions of crime and justice are based on what they see on television and read in the newspapers (Warr, 2000). Social media, however, is increasingly becoming an important way that people both engage with and learn about crime.

Historically there’s always been crimes committed with an audience in mind, but it’s been a low-level background noise in the general crime picture,” said Surette, citing pre-internet cases of self-immolation.

What’s new is the access people have to tools, via the smartphone, that allows for the creation, publication, and distribution of content at the touch of a button – through photos, tweets, status updates, videos and now live streaming. Facebook isn’t the only app that allows smartphone users to broadcast in real-time, but it’s the only one available to an audience of 1.79 billion users.

The allure of attention from online peers, reinforced by immediate feedback in the form of shares, likes and other “engagement” indicators, can be intoxicating.

What Does the Research Say?

Sveinung Sandberg, who has been studying why people film their crimes in his native Norway, agrees. “There’s a snapshot culture. If we come across something extraordinary it doesn’t count unless we’ve filmed it or taken a picture. It becomes an instinct,” he said. “So then when you commit a violent crime or a rape the same instinct might strike you. You just grab for the phone and film it without thinking about the consequences.”

Celebrity culture also plays a role, said Surette. “It’s better to be famous for being bad than to be unknown. Criminality has become part of our infotainment world,” he said.

Research studies have also shown that media present a distorted and exaggerated view of the extent and seriousness of crime; moreover, they tend to portray racial minorities as responsible for the majority of crime (Surette, 1998; Dorfman & Schiraldi, 2001).

Discussion Questions

Have you ever committed a crime and documented it on social media?

Have you ever watched a crime be committed (during or after the fact) on social media?

Public opinion polls and peer-reviewed survey research point to one of the great paradoxes of American life: guns are everywhere, but the average person doesn’t seem to know much about them. With mass shootings occurring in the United States at rates not seen in other Western industrialized countries, Americans remain puzzled nonetheless about why they occur with such regularity here.

To get a sense of what passes for common knowledge, one poll by NPR/Ipsos found that less than 10 percent of Americans were able to answer seven out of 10 questions on gun violence correctly.

In the wake of the Las Vegas shooting, Ipsos Public Affairs President Cliff Young said, “what we know actually is that gun violence like this typically has a short-term effect on public opinion where there’s a crystallizing event” that temporarily bumps support for gun control upward”(Kurtzleben).

Gun control remains a contested “hot-button” issue in the United States. Not surprisingly, political party identification has a big impact on public opinion on the topic of guns. Thus, pollsters find that while Republicans and Democrats alike support specific restrictions, the general idea of tighter gun control is much more firmly supported by Democrats than anyone else — 84 percent of Democrats said gun laws should be “a lot” or “somewhat” stricter than today, compared to 61 percent of independents and 55 percent of Republicans (Kurtzleben).

Here’s a summary based on race, education, and gender differences on the issue of gun control. See if you can find yourself in these statistics:

Image result for international gun deaths

Here’s another summary of what people think about guns based on political party ID:

One-third of Republicans said gun laws right now are “about right,” compared to 23 percent of independents and just 9 percent of Democrats.
Partisan differences also showed up in exposure to guns — significantly more Republicans than Democrats have fired guns, own guns, and have friends who own guns, as the survey shows.
And this dovetails with some particularly wide partisan gaps on attitudes toward guns: two-thirds of Republicans agreed with the statement “owning a gun would make me feel safer,” compared to around just a third of Democrats. Likewise, 72 percent of Republicans agreed with the statement, “The benefits of gun ownership outweigh the risks.” Democrats were the near opposite of this, with 60 percent disagreeing about the benefits of gun ownership (Kurtzleben).

What About Other Countries?

The United States has the highest rates of gun violence and gun ownership in the world – by far. This fact is not in dispute. And it has the highest rate of homicides with guns among advanced countries. But, again, those are statistics and not demonstrative of a causal relationship. But what about other countries. How do we stack up and/or compare?

The National Research Council of the National Academies concluded in its report that studies comparing large geographic areas, what it called “ecological studies,” didn’t show a distinct trend, and instead “provide[d] contradictory evidence on violence and firearms.”

One problem in comparing various countries is the wealth of other factors, besides the mere presence of guns, that can affect whether a homicide occurs, such as the economy, general crime rates, and laws governing guns. Another issue is that the data isn’t all that great. Gun ownership numbers are largely based on public opinion surveys, and the reliability of numbers can vary widely from country to country. “We don’t have good data on the prevalence of ownership on all the countries we’d want to have it on,” says Wintemute.

The numbers in the chart below are from the (2007) Small Arms Survey. This project gives high and low estimates, along with an average. Using average numbers, they show the U.S. with 88.8 guns for every 100 people (you can also see this in the chart above. That makes the U.S. No. 1 in the gun ownership rate in the world. Switzerland, with 45.7 guns per 100 people, is No. 3 in the world, with nearly half the rate of the U.S. Switzerland also requires military service. (Yemen is No. 2, with 54.8 guns per 100 people.)

Image result for international gun deaths

The Small Arms Survey acknowledges that its numbers are approximations, making these estimates is far from an exact science. In addition to surveys, the researchers rely on gun registration, experts, other indicators such as firearm suicides, and comparisons to similar countries. The survey qualifies its results by saying “All gun numbers—even those that seem most accurate—approximate reality or reveal only part of it. They should be used with caution.”

The firearms homicide rate and homicide rate overall is also higher in the U.S. compared to other advanced countries, such as Canada, Australia and those in Europe, according to data from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. The U.S. gun homicide rate was 3.2 per every 100,000 people in 2010, according to UNODC figures. The UNODC measures “intentional homicide,” which is “an unlawful death purposefully inflicted on a person by another person.”

More Guns = More Homicides

In 2008, researchers explored the issue of whether more gun ownership meant more or less gun violence. What they found, and it still holds true, was that some studies had shown a statistical relationship between those factors — areas with a higher prevalence of guns had higher prevalence of gun homicides and homicides in general. But studies haven’t been able to show a causal relationship — that the mere presence of guns, as opposed to other factors, caused the higher rates of gun violence. It’s doubtful, however, that a study could ever beyond-a-doubt prove a causal relationship (Farley).

The international data show that country-to-country comparisons are inherently difficult to make — and, as the NRC said, and they can sometimes provide “contradictory evidence.” For instance, Latin American countries with high levels of firearm homicide show low levels of gun ownership. Honduras has a gun ownership rate of 6.2 per 100 people and a gun homicide rate of 68.43 per 100,000 people, and Colombia has a gun rate of 5.9 and firearm homicide rate of 27.09, as shown in this chart produced by the Washington Post using the same data cited here (Farley).

But among advanced countries, the U.S. homicide rate stands out. “We seem to be an average country in terms of violence and aggression,” says Harvard’s Hemenway. “What we have is huge homicide rates compared to anybody else.” These sentiments are echoed by Wintemute: “The difference is that in the U.S. violence involves firearms and firearms change the outcome” (Farley).

Image result for international gun deaths

Do Concealed Carry Laws Reduce Violent Crime?

Typically, in the wake of a high profile shooting, emotion and public opinion fill the airwaves as people debate whether or not the answer is more guns or fewer guns. It’s not uncommon for people to say things like had the (insert victim) been armed, they might have killed the shooter. Individual case illustrations will be offered up to illustrate a time when a “good guy with a gun” took down a bad guy. But there’s a difference between studying individual cases and aggregates. Research and statistical analysis focus on aggregates to make statements about populations.

John Lott, the author of the 2010 edition “More Guns Less Crime,” contends that “[a]llowing citizens to carry concealed handguns reduces violent crimes, and the reductions coincide very closely with the number of concealed-handgun permits issued.” (p. 20) He goes on to state that the results of his research “clearly imply that nondiscretionary [concealed carry] laws coincide with fewer murders, aggravated assaults, and rapes” (p. 57). More controversially, he argues that “[w]hen state concealed handgun laws went into effect in a county, murders fell by about 8 percent, rapes fell by 5 percent, and aggravated assaults fell by 7 percent” (p. 59). Similarly, Carlisle Moody, an economics professor at William & Mary, says guns prevent injuries and death.

Alternatively, one of the leading researchers on gun violence, Dr. David Hemenway at the Harvard Injury Control Research Center, contradicts Lott and says “that’s completely wrong.” Hemenway along with a committee of the National Research Council of the National Academies in 2004 analyzed Lott’s research and took issue with his findings, concluding that “it is impossible to draw strong conclusions from the existing literature on the causal impact of these laws.” According to them:

The initial model specification, when extended to new data, does not show evidence that passage of right-to-carry laws reduces crime. The estimated effects are highly sensitive to seemingly minor changes in the model specification and control variables. No link between right-to-carry laws and changes in crime is apparent in the raw data, even in the initial sample; it is only once numerous covariates are included that the negative results in the early data emerge. While the trend models show a reduction in the crime growth rate following the adoption of right-to-carry laws, these trend reductions occur long after law adoption, casting serious doubt on the proposition that the trend models estimated in the literature reflect effects of the law change. Finally, some of the point estimates are imprecise. Thus, the committee concludes that with the current evidence it is not possible to determine that there is a causal link between the passage of right-to-carry laws and crime rates.

Again in 2008, the Harvard Injury Control Research Center reviewed the reams of scientific research on concealed gun-carrying laws and broadly concluded: “the changes have neither been highly beneficial nor highly detrimental” (Farley).

More Guns = More Suicide

National debates over gun violence tend to focus on mass murders and high profile shootings (i.e. the Newtown, Connecticut, elementary school, Las Vegas shooting, Columbine). Unfortunately, what tends to get lost in the shuffle of sensation is one important face: many more people kill themselves with a firearm every year than are murdered with one.

In 2010 in the U.S., 19,392 people committed suicide with guns (compared with 11,078 who were killed by other people). According to Matthew Miller, associate director of the Harvard Injury Control Research Center (HICRC) at Harvard School of Public Health, “If every life is important, and if you’re trying to save people from dying by gunfire, then you can’t ignore nearly two-thirds of the people who are dying.” Suicide is the 10th-leading cause of death in the U.S.; in 2010, 38,364 people killed themselves. In more than half of these cases, they used firearms. Indeed, more people in this country kill themselves with guns than with all other intentional means combined, including hanging, poisoning or overdose, jumping, or cutting. Though guns are not the most common method by which people attempt suicide, they are the most lethal. About 85 percent of suicide attempts with a firearm end in death. (Drug overdose, the most widely used method in suicide attempts, is fatal in less than 3 percent of cases.) Moreover, guns are an irreversible solution to what is often a passing crisis. Suicidal individuals who take pills or inhale car exhaust or use razors have time to reconsider their actions or summon help. With a firearm, once the trigger is pulled, there’s no turning back (Drexler).

Quiz

Test your knowledge on gun violence and take an online quiz here or simply follow below:

1. About how many people in America are shot each year?

1,000

10,000

50,000

100,000

2. Of those shot in the United States annually, how many people are killed?

350

3,500

35,000

350,000

3. How many guns are there in the United States per 100 people?

8 per 100 people

32 per 100 people

88 per 100 people

175 per 100 people

4. T or F: The number of guns in America has increased over the last 20 years.

5. What is the most common type of firearm in America?

Handgun

Shotgun

Rifle

6. What kind of firearms are most commonly used in homicides?

Handgun

Shotgun

Rifle

7. What percentage of gun deaths are the result of mass shootings?

1.5%

15%

30%

50%

8. T or F: Most gun deaths in the United States are homicides.

9. About what percentage of reported suicide attempts carried out with a gun result in a death?

20%

40%

60%

80%

10. About how many children are shot each day in America?

5

10

15

20

11. T or F: Every gun buyer undergoes a background check, whether purchasing from a store or a private seller.

12. T or F: Chicago has the highest homicide rate in America.

13. T or F: Households with guns are more likely to experience a fatality from crime, accident or suicide than households without guns.

14. Kids and adolescents are at an increased risk for suicide when there is a gun in the home. What Suicide rates in this population are _______times higher than for kids who live in homes without guns.

15. More than _________% of all unintentional shootings of children take place in the homes of their friends, neighbors, or relatives.

How Did You Score?

Answer Key:

An average of 115,000 people were shot each year from 2011 to 2015, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control.
More than 38,000 people died by firearms in 2016, preliminary CDC reports indicate, and the rate of gun deaths increased to 12 per 100,000 people. In 2015, there were 36,000 gun fatalities and about 33,500 annually from 2012 to 2014.
With 88 per 100 people, the United States has more guns than any other country. Yemen, with 54.8 guns per 100 people, is second.
There are an estimated 265 million firearms in American households, an increase of 70 million from two decades before, one survey found. In 2015, there were approximately 55 million gun owners, compared with approximately 44 million in 1994. But because of population increases, the share of Americans who owned guns over the same period actually dipped slightly, from 25 percent to 22 percent.
A recent survey estimated that 42 percent of all firearms were handguns, most of them acquired for self-defense. That reflects a big shift: two decades ago, the most common gun owned by Americans was a hunting rifle.
Handguns are used in homicides more than twice as often as other types of firearms, according to the Department of Justice.
Mass shootings account for less than 1.2 percent of annual gun deaths, the New York Times estimates, using figures from the nonprofit, nonpartisan Gun Violence Archive.
About a third of the 35,000 gun deaths recorded annually are homicides; 60% are suicides. Unintentional shootings make up another 1 percent.
Suicide attempts by firearms have an 82.5 percent fatality rate, one study found. Guns are not the most common means of suicide attempt, but they result in more deaths than every other method combined.
Nineteen children are shot in the United States every day. Three die, on average, a study released this year in the journal Pediatrics found.
Federal law requires that gun buyers undergo a background check only when purchasing a weapon from a licensed firearms dealer. Fewer than 20 states require checks on sales between private parties. In an estimated 22 percent of gun transfers, the person acquiring the gun is not vetted by law enforcement, research shows.
Chicago has the most homicides in raw numbers. But on a per-capita basis, the city’s homicide rate is lower than seven other cities, including New Orleans, St. Louis and Buffalo, New York.
Polls show that a majority of Americans believe a gun makes a household safer, but crime and violent injury data suggest the opposite. One study found that “For every time a gun in the home was used in a self-defense or legally justifiable shooting, there were four unintentional shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides.”
Suicide rates among kids and adolescents are four times higher than for kids who live in homes without guns.
More than 30% of all unintentional shootings of children take place in the homes of their friends, neighbors, or relatives.

Sources

“How Much Do You Know About Gun Violence in America?” by Team Trace

“Poll: Majorities of Both Parties Favor Increased Gun Restrictions,” by Daniel Kurtzleben

“Gun Rhetoric vs. Gun Facts“, by Robert Farley

“Guns & Suicide, The Hidden Toll” by Madeline Drexler

Politicians love to thump on the campaign trail about the crime rate. You’ve no doubt heard experts discuss the crime rate on TV. Everyone loves to talk about crime and violence in America – doing something about it, however, is a different matter. How can we talk about crime if we can’t even agree what it is and how to measure it?

Crime Rate

When talking about the “crime rate,” keep in mind this number is expressed as a ratio of crimes in an area to the population of an area in a given year (i.e. per 1000 members of a population).

There are two commonly cited measures of the nation’s crime rate. One is an annual report by the FBI of serious crimes reported to police in approximately 18,000 jurisdictions around the country. The other is an annual survey of more than 90,000 households conducted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), which asks Americans ages 12 and older whether they were the victims of crime in the past six months (regardless of whether they reported those crimes to the police or not). Both the FBI and BJS data show a substantial decline in the violent crime rate since its peak in the early 1990s.

Using the FBI numbers, the rate fell almost 50% between 1993 and 2015, the most recent full year available. Using the BJS data, the rate fell by 77% during that span (for both studies, 2016 is the most recent full year of data). It’s important to note, however, that the FBI reported a 3% increase in the violent crime rate between 2014 and 2015, including a 10% increase in the murder rate. (The BJS figures show a stable violent crime rate between 2014 and 2015, but they do not count murders) (Pew report).

Experts are predicting that 2016 FBI data will show another increase in the violent crime rate – including another rise in the murder rate – when they are released later this year (Pew report).

Why is the Crime Rate Falling?

A report from the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, called What Caused the Crime Decline? finds that the simple answer – increasing incarceration – is not the answer. As Nobel laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz writes in the foreword, “This prodigious rate of incarceration is not only inhumane, it is economic folly.”

So what’s the reason? Well, it’s complicated. And many experts disagree with one another. One team of economic and criminal justice researchers spent 20 months testing fourteen popular theories for the crime decline. They delved into over 30 years of data collected from all 50 states and the 50 largest cities. The results are sharply etched and in the words of the researchers “We do not know with precision what caused the crime decline, but the growth in incarceration played only a minor role, and now has a negligible impact.”

Variations in Crime Rates

There are large variations in crime rates. The FBI’s data allow for geographic comparisons of crime rates and these comparisons can show big differences from state to state and city to city. In 2015, for instance, there were more than 600 violent crimes per 100,000 residents in Alaska, Nevada, New Mexico and Tennessee. By contrast, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont and Virginia had rates below 200 violent crimes per 100,000 residents.

Chicago has drawn widespread attention for its soaring murder total in recent years, its murder rate in 2015 – 18 murders and non-negligent manslaughters per 100,000 residents – was less than a third of the rate in St. Louis (59 per 100,000) and Baltimore (55 per 100,000). Here again, as the FBI notes, there are different social factors might influence a particular area’s crime rate, including its population density, age of the population, and economic conditions (Pew Report).

Public Perceptions of Crime Don’t Tend to Align with Data

Opinion surveys regularly find that Americans believe crime is up nationally, even when the data show it is down. In 17 Gallup surveys conducted since 1993, at least six-in-ten Americans said there was more crime in the U.S.compared with the year before, despite the generally downward trend in national violent and property crime rates during much of that period. Pew Research Center surveys have documented this pattern.

Another Pew survey in late 2016 found that 57% of registered voters said crime had gotten worse since 2008, even though BJS and FBI data show that violent and property crime rates declined by double-digit percentages during that time span (Pew Report).

Oddly enough, while perceptions of rising crime at the national level are common, fewer Americans tend to say crime is up when asked about the local level. In 20 Gallup surveys conducted since 1996, about half of Americans or fewer said crime is up in their area compared with the year before (Pew Report).

The failure of public perceptions to line up with data is that too often Americans support increasingly harsh and longer sentencing (unfair and very expensive), which means there is less money available for things like education and research. Consequently, Americans end up with criminal justice policies that are unable to effectively address social problems, which in turn feeds into increased crime and more cost over the long run.

Sources of Crime Statistics

Crime and what we know about it is in many ways – to borrow a term from sociology – socially constructed. As a philosophical orientation, social constructionism holds that the meaning of acts, behaviors, and events is not an objective quality of those phenomena but is assigned to them by human beings in social interaction. In other words, the meaning we attribute to crime is socially defined and therefore is subject to social change (Berger and Luckmann, 1967). These meanings have a major impact on what we decide to “count” as criminal.

Behaviors become crimes through a process of social construction. The same behavior may be considered criminal in one society and an act of honor in another society or in the same society at a different time. The legal status of a behavior—whether it is defined as a crime—lies not in the content of the behavior itself but in the social response to the behavior or to the persons who engage in it. Changes in the legal status of a behavior are often brought about by social movements and may entail considerable social conflict. Examples include the recent controversies over abortion policy and assisted suicide in the United States. Finally, the social response to crime—including many social-science explanations of criminal behavior—are based not only on the qualities of the act but also on the social and moral standing of the offender and the victim.

Without data, however, crime would in many ways not exist because we wouldn’t have a way to talk about it; there would be no substance. Some of the most important sources for crime reporting that we will refer to often are among the essential elements in helping to construct crime. They are:

Uniform Crime Reports (UCR) – Part I and Part II Offenses
Supplementary Homicide Reports
The National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)
National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS)

The Dark Figure of Crime – Many Crimes are not Reported

The dark figure of crime refers to a term utilized by criminologists and others. The term “dark figure of crime” was first used by the Belgian mathematician and sociologist Adolphe Quetelet in 1832. These are crimes that are known to exist due to the reporting of observers and/or victims, but they tend not to be reported or recorded by law enforcement agencies; they include criminal incidents/occurrences that meet the definition of a recordable crime, but they effectively elude capture by sources of official statistics.

In its annual survey, BJS asks victims of crime whether or not they reported that crime to police. In 2015, the most recent year available, only about half of the violent crime tracked by BJS (47%) was reported to police. And in the much more common category of property crime, only about a third (35%) was reported. The proportion was substantially higher for offenses classified as serious violent crime (55%), a category that includes serious domestic violence (61% of which was reported), serious violent crime involving injury (59%) and serious violent crime involving weapons (56%). There are a variety of reasons why crime might not be reported, including a feeling that police “would not or could not do anything to help” or that the crime is “a personal issue or too trivial to report,” according to BJS (Pew Report).

Image result for dark figure of crime

Why is the Dark Figure of Crime so Important?

Crimes go unreported for various reasons, whether it’s from fear of reporting the crimes or from a fear of the police. The important takeaway here is that the failure to report these crimes calls into question the accuracy of official sources of crime statistics.

Sources

“5 Facts About Crime in the U.S.,” Pew Report

“The Many Causes of America’s Decline in Crime,” The Atlantic

Discussion Questions

How is crime “socially constructed?”

What are some of the potential reasons that explain the falling rate of crime in the U.S.?

What is the “dark figure of crime” and why is it important?

Why do you think the public tends to believe crime is becoming more prevalent, even though statistics show (with some exceptions) that it is falling almost everywhere in the U.S.?

What did you learn about the crime rate when you looked at your local area?

Guns, Violence & the War at Home

Millions of Americans have come to find that they want and need to carry guns. How we have arrived at this moment in time in the United States is indeed one of the most vexing issues than confronts our society. Why, for example, do so many people feel a need to carry a gun with them everywhere they go – even to do pedestrian things like trips to the store, the movies, and to buy coffee? Do they not feel safe in their neighborhoods? Do they feel their lives are in imminent danger? Does carrying a gun afford a sense of pleasure? Or does it give people access to a sense of power that they may otherwise not have? Whatever the case, Americans have a unique history that informs a complex relationship with firearms and guns. Without a doubt, the subject of carrying firearms and guns instigates sharp debate in U.S. society.

Up until now, most of the scholarship that addresses gun ownership has focused on documenting demographic characteristics – Who owns guns? Why do they own them? Where do they live? Perhaps more in-depth critical analysis might yield answers that could account for the social and psychological processes bound up within our culture that may offer insight and help solve some of the problems with gun violence in America.

Gun Culture – Why Are Americans So Attached to Their Guns?

For some people, having and holding a firearm is a way to express pride and carry on family traditions. For others, it might be about looking tough. Doubtless, there are a variety of reasons, social, psychological, and political that all factor into how guns interact with people and their expression of their social identity.

The research tells us that the physical location of where you grew up most assuredly will have an impact on what you think about guns and gun violence. To this end, if you are someone who is lives in a place where you are culturally and/or racially isolated, so that you typically only interact with other people who are: 1) part of your own racial cohort; 2) share local cultural values (i.e. attend similar schools, churches, and enjoy similar entertainment activities like hunting), this will determine in many respects what you think and believe about guns.

For example, research has shown that people who live in predominantly all-white communities, where they have never attended a school or worked in a workplace that reflects any kind of cultural/racial diversity, such that they only know and socialize with other people who look like them, are more likely to view places that reflect racial and cultural diversity with a mixture of suspicion, fear, scorn, and perhaps even hatred.

Researchers have found that people who live in culturally and racially homogeneous area are statistically more likely to: 1) own and carry firearms, and 2) to support policies that make it easier to own and carry firearms; 3) view “others” (racial and otherwise) with suspicion and animus. Put another way, what this research is telling us is that affinity for firearms is not simply always about hunting and “protecting the family.”

Aside from issues of having fear of people who may be different, it is important to bear in mind that issues of “culture” are notoriously difficult to define. This only serves to add to the difficulty of understanding guns and gun violence. No one knows this more than the people who make and sell guns.

Debates about “gun culture” often become fixated on ideas like “gun culture is under attack” or “people who grew up around guns are a problem.” Consequently, fears are easily stoked that people want to dismantle gun culture by taking guns away from people who own them and/or see guns as being representative of a vibrant part of their culture. People have been encouraged to be sympathetic to those fears and to respect the feelings of people who fear the loss of their culture. But maybe there’s more to it than this.

What about the fact that there are lots of people in the United States who think NOT having guns is part of their culture? Many of them don’t mind saying that they don’t want to live around people who love guns. As it turns out, research tells us that a sizeable majority of Americans do not own guns. For people in this group, they might define their cultural values and the places they like to live as places where people don’t always walk around armed with weapons and ready to fight. This too can be considered a culture that is worthy of respect, yet we don’t often hear consider this perspective in public debates.

As one author put it, “But back when a far greater portion of the American public lived in rural areas and small towns than do today, there wasn’t really anything like today’s “gun culture.” If you had a hunting rifle or a shotgun your dad gave you, as millions of Americans did, you weren’t participating in an encompassing “culture” in which guns defined your identity. That gun was a tool, like a broom or a shovel or a cleaver. But the gun culture of today, with so much fetishization of guns and an entire political/commercial industry working hard to spread and solidify the idea that guns are not just a thing you own but who you are, is what we’re now expected to show respect for.

For instance, the idea that anyone should be able to own military-style rifles designed to kill as many human beings in as short a period as possible, for no real reason other than the fact that some people think they’re cool, is supposed to be a part of people’s culture, no matter how ludicrous it would have seemed to your grandparents. And when you say something is part of your culture, you’re placing it beyond reasoned judgment. In other words, when you place something in the sphere of culture, you automatically afford it a kind of conditional immunity from criticism. And you can demand that it be respected” (Waldman, 2018).

According to Waldman, “the “gun culture” promoted by gun advocates today is toxic. It’s paranoid, angry, hostile, and is built on the idea that even the most modest restrictions on guns represent a cataclysmic evisceration of liberty. It’s constantly fed fantasies of oppression and righteous violence in order to maintain its power — which of course keeps the customers buying more and more guns” (Waldman, 2018).

Righteous Violence – Fighting for Freedom & Rugged Individualism

The idea of the “rugged individual” is one that is deeply ingrained in the American psyche. It is one that evokes images of the early settlers, who set out to conquer new frontiers. Back in the “old days” men (and it was mostly men) proved their worth by using guns to hunt and kill animals to eat; they needed guns to protect themselves and their families. Guns, in other words, were effective tools that served a vital purpose. While the days of the frontier are part of our past, the popularity of hunting, particularly in rural and rural parts of the U.S., evokes the nostalgia of this past and the popularity of this ideal.

But that’s not where this ends. The notion of the rugged individual who prevails over the social “collective” is another important dimension of this thinking and this idea too has become foundational to contemporary notions of American patriotism. Now, a “real” patriot is one who both loves their country and loathes their government. What about duty, honor, country? These self-identified patriotic individuals serve only a duty to themselves and their families.

According to this view, no one has a right to rely upon or demand that the government and society provide them with assistance or the means for subsistence. To this end, governments that interfere with the individual’s pursuit of their freedom – which is to say, their self-interest – is the enemy.

It is this “enemy” ideation of government that has become the wellspring for a sizeable number of people in the U.S., who now feel a need to stockpile arms in order to face down an overreaching government and its army. And herein lies a glaring contradiction: “Schrodinger’s Patriot,” it turns out, doesn’t really support the troops after all.

The Second Amendment (2A) to the US Constitution has, in the minds of some Americans, virtually enshrined the right of individuals to keep and bear arms. Notwithstanding, there have been numerous attempts to interpret this provision by entities like the U.S. Supreme Court, who have noted that the language contained in the amendment applies to state militias and not individuals, whose rights may be constrained. This says nothing of the fact that the kinds of weapons that existed at the time these historical documents were written bear no resemblance to today’s modern firearms.

Oddly enough, Americans who rightly revere the extraordinary sacrifices made by war veterans are also advocating for the increasing militarization of American culture when they support weak regulation of guns (which leads to the increased proliferation of guns).

As the data here indicate, the trends toward owning, carrying, and stockpiling firearms has had hugely problematic effects in American society, which by far experiences more gun violence, injuries, and deaths than any other developed nation – by a long shot.

Basic Nomenclature

Before moving forward, some basic housekeeping around the nomenclature that is conventionally used for how we talk about guns in the United States is in order. Not only does this often vary from state to state in legal discourses, the very naming guns as you will see here shortly can be politically contentious.

Firearms are understood to be a generic category made up primarily of portable guns (barrel ranged weapons). These guns fire shaped projectiles and are propelled by rapidly expanding high-pressure gas produced by the exothermic combustion of propellant within the ammunition cartridge.

The general category of “firearms” can be broken down further, such that it includes handguns, long-guns, rifles, and weapons. Handguns tend to be the smallest of all firearms. There are two typical classifications that apply to the handgun – the revolver and the semi-automatic pistol.

Long guns are conventionally fired with two hands; they tend to have a barrel that ranges between 10 and 30 inches in length. The barrel, along with the receiver and trigger group, is mounted onto a wood, plastic, metal or composite stock; the stock is composed of one or more pieces that form a foregrip, rear grip, and optionally (but typically) a shoulder mount called the butt. Muskets are one example of an early form of long guns; they featured a smoothbore barrel that fired one (or more) ball shot.

Contemporary forms of long guns include both rifles and shotguns. Rifles are distinctive as a result of their spiral bore fluting (rifling). The rifling helps put a spin on the bullet as it is launched down the barrel. Shotguns, on the other hand, are smooth bore weapons that are designed to fire shot (pellet cartridges). Shotguns can also fire slugs, bean bags, and other forms of breaching rounds (i.e. tear gas). Rifles and shotguns have more traditionally been used for hunting and for home defense. But this too is changing.

To make matters a bit more complicated, rifles can be broken down to distinguish automatic rifles and assault rifles. An automatic rifle is a magazine-fed firearm that chambers rifle cartridges and is capable of automatic fire.

The U.S. military originally adopted the M19 Browning Automatic rifle as its first infantry weapon/battlefield rifle. Big rifles were eventually replaced because they were too big/heavy to carry and were cumbersome. They were too slow to fire and often the range was not long enough. Soldiers wanted a lighter weapon that could fire on automatic like a machine gun without being too heavy and one that could still fire big-rifle ammunition, all while absorbing recoil, so as to not detract from accuracy. To address this need, a new category of firearm was developed – the light “assault rifle.”

Another discrepancy worth pointing out occurs in usage over the term “guns” which some (not all) states use to denote long guns, reserving the term “firearms” to designate handguns. This is how the state of Pennsylvania defines it.

Spare Us the Jargon – The Semantics of Assault Rifles

The AR-15 is America’s most popular rifle. It has also been the weapon of choice in mass shootings from Sandy Hook to Aurora to San Bernardino. In Orlando, the shooter used a Sig Sauer MCX, an AR-15 style rifle originally developed for special ops, to kill 49 people in the Pulse nightclub. The carnage sparked new calls to reinstate a ban on assault rifles like the AR-15, which were originally designed as weapons of war (Zhang).

While it’s possible to argue about everything when it comes to the politics of guns—including about the definition of “assault rifle” itself— it’s harder to argue about history and physics. So let’s take a look at the history and physics of an AR-15.

History

As Michael Schurkin writes in The Atlantic, “The assault rifle is a class of weapon that emerged in the middle of the last century to meet the needs of combat soldiers on the modern battlefield, where the level of violence had reached such heights that an entirely new way of fighting had emerged, one for which the existing weapons were a poor match. The name “assault rifle” is believed to have been coined by Adolf Hitler. Toward the end of World War II, the story goes, Hitler hailed his army’s new wonder weapon by insisting that it be called not by the technical name given it by its developers, the Machinenpistole (the German name for a submachine gun), but rather something that made for better propaganda copy. A Sturmgewehr, he called the new gun: a “storm” or “assault” weapon.”

The United States Defense Department’s Defense Intelligence Agency book Small Arms Identification and Operation Guide explains, “assault rifles” are “short, compact, selective-fire weapons that fire a cartridge of intermediate power between submachine gun and rifle cartridges.” In terms of size, they are slightly smaller than battlefield rifles.

Assault rifles are, in other words, battlefield rifles that can fire automatically; they have mechanisms that allow the user to select between different functional settings – single shots, fully automatic bursts, or fully automatic fire.

The M-16 rifle and its shorter M-4 version are the standard assault rifles used by the U.S. military. Other armies use these rifles in addition to different versions of the AK-47 and AR-15 assault rifles.

Put another way, assault rifles are military rifles which have select-fire capability (they can shoot on full auto – like a machine gun; or more than one round with the single pull of a trigger). These rifles, however, are not easy for the average shooter to obtain, for reasons that they are subject to strict regulations that limit their availability and pricing that will break the bank account of the average person.

ArmaLite “AR” Rifles

The decision to adopt the AR/M-16 was preceded by the U.S. Army testing several different rifles to replace the obsolete M1 Garand (Springfield Armory’s T44E4 and heavier T44E5 were essentially updated versions of the Garand chambered for the new 7.62 mm round, while Fabrique Nationale submitted their FN FAL as the T48). ArmaLite/Colt entered competition late, after submitting several AR-10 prototype rifles to the United States Army’s Springfield Armory for testing. It was subsequently adopted by the military as the M16 rifle, which went into mass production in March 1964.

Before this time, beginning in 1959, after a combination of product line setbacks and financial difficulties, ArmaLite sold its rights to the AR-10 and AR-15 to Colt. Colt made modifications to the original AR rifle (notably, the charging handle was re-located from under the carrying handle like AR-10 to the rear of the receiver. Soon after, Colt rebranded it the Colt ArmaLite AR-15 and marketed the redesigned rifle to military services around the world.

The ArmaLite AR-15 was a select-fire (manual, semi, fully auto) rifle equipped to shoot 5.56x45mm ball ammunition; it’s an air-cooled, gas-operated, magazine-fed assault rifle, with a rotating bolt and straight-line recoil design. Originally created by Eugene Stoner, Jim Sullivan, and Bob Fremont in the late 195o’s, its design is based on the ArmaLite AR-10 rifle. This rifle used a system called “direct impingement.” Most modern AR-15-type rifles use this system (Gibbons-Neff).

The AR-10 and AR-15 were designed, first and foremost, to be lightweight assault rifles; they fired a new lightweight, high-velocity small caliber cartridge, which enabled their primary customer, the U.S. military/infantryman, to easily carry additional reserves of ammunition.

The Colt AR-15, as it is known now, was manufactured with the extensive use of aluminum alloys and synthetic materials. It is a civilian semi-automatic version of the United States military M16 rifle.

Consequently, if it’s not already clear, “AR” does NOT stand for “assault rifle” or “automatic rifle.”

After Colt’s patents expired in 1977, other manufacturers started to copy the original Colt AR-15 rifle’s design. However, the term “AR-15” is a Colt registered trademark and Colt only uses the term to refer to its line of semi-automatic rifles. Consequently, other manufacturers marketed their generic AR-15s under different names, which are frequently referred to as AR-style rifles.

AR-15 rifles and other AR-style rifles are semi-automatic rifles that are popular with civilian shooters because they are reliable, simple, cool-looking, and easily customized; they’re also relatively inexpensive and easy to use (Peters). How customizable? Only the sky and $$$$ limit you. Users can add scopes, lasers, suppressors, slings, and various handles. They can even change out the lower portion of the gun – the receiver – as well as the magazine, which allows for total customization to whatever the user wants. The gun lobby prefers to call these weapons “modern sporting rifles” But make no mistake: what the Orlando attacker used was a weapon of war -it was designed to kill people quickly and efficiently.

Image result for ar and semiautomatic and damage

Pictured below is a replica of the rifle Omar Mateen used in the Pulse Club massacre, which he alternated shooting that day with a Glock 17 9mm handgun. Able to shoot the same caliber ammunition — .223 — as an AR-15, the Sig Sauer MCX, better known as the “Black Mamba” in military circles, was originally designed for military Special Operations forces to fire a round called a .300 Blackout. This relatively new caliber was designed to provide them with a bullet that was as quiet as a pistol round even as it packed the range and lethality of a rifle cartridge [another feature of the bullet’s design is that it mimics the size of the round fired by AK-47-type assault rifles].

Although the legal civilian version of the gun fires on semi-automatic, it is still highly lethal. The fact that the rifle, despite being sold with modifications, can be acquired by a civilian purchaser does not erase the history of its development as a weapon of war – nor should this preclude anyone from calling it an “assault rifle.”

Physics

The key difference between the standard AR-15 series rifle and the MCX “sporting” rifle can be traced to the operating system that is used to 1) mechanically propel the bullet from the gun; and 2) cycle the next round to be fired.

The military version of the assault rifle has a fully automatic select-fire capability and it uses the lesser power rifle round (intermediate cartridge – such as the .223 or 5.56 caliber ammunition ). The round fired from this rifle cartridge reduces recoil and allows a shooter to fire controllable 3 round “bursts” at short range, all while retaining rifle-like accuracy at medium ranges.

Alternatively, civilian AR and AR-style rifles are semi-automatic rifles. They have a more limited function mechanism in the sense that these M-16 style rifles are not technically made to fire as many rounds per minute as the military automatic rifles. The semi-automatic sporting rifles fire one round every time the trigger is pulled.

So while gun enthusiasts argue there is a simple basic difference between the two rifles based on fire selection mechanism, where the assault rifle alone has the ability to fire on full automatic and switch between automatic and semi-automatic fire; this view only tells part of the story. Civilian legal rifles aren’t “select-fire “capable. This means they don’t have a select-fire switch that lets them shoot in a fully-automatic mode.

By way of comparison, the bullet from a handgun is—as absurd as this may sound—slow compared to that from an AR-15. In the case of the former, it can be stopped by the thick bone of an upper leg. Or it might pass through the body, only to become lodged in the skin, which is surprisingly elastic (Zhang).

Military M-4 – note the select fire mechanism with the full-auto select fire option

Strike Industries AR-style rifle with a restricted selection mechanism

The bullet from an AR-15 /AR style rifle, however, accomplishes an entirely different kind of violence to the human body. The round itself is relatively small, but it leaves the muzzle at three times the speed of a handgun bullet. It has so much energy that it can disintegrate three inches of leg bone. “It would just turn it to dust,” says Donald Jenkins, a trauma surgeon at University of Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio. If it hits the liver, “the liver looks like a jello mold that’s been dropped on the floor.” And the exit wound can be a nasty, jagged hole the size of an orange (Zhang).

These small but high-velocity bullets can damage flesh inches away from their path, either because they fragment or because they cause something called cavitation. When you trail your fingers through water, the water ripples and curls. When a high-velocity bullet pierces the body, human tissues ripples as well—but much more violently. The bullet from an AR-15 might miss the femoral artery in the leg, but cavitation may burst the artery anyway, causing death by blood loss. A swath of stretched and torn tissue around the wound may die. That’s why, says Rhee, a handgun wound might require only one surgery but an AR-15 bullet wound might require three to ten (Zhang).

Multiply the damage from a single bullet by the ease of shooting an AR-15, which doesn’t kick. “The gun barely moves. You can sit there boom boom boom and reel off shots as fast as you can move your finger,” says Ernest Moore, a trauma surgeon at Denver Health and editor of the Journal of Trauma and Acute Surgery, which just published an issue dedicated to gun violence (Zhang).

Handguns kill plenty of people too, of course, and they’re responsible for the vast majority of America’s gun deaths. But a single bullet from a handgun is not likely to be as deadly as one from an AR-15 (Zhang).

How fast can you pull the trigger?

A top gun competitor can easily pull the trigger of a semi-automatic weapon three times a second for short periods of time. Theoretically, their “cycling rate” might be 180 rounds per minute, even though may only do this to fire bursts of a second or two. Most modern semiautos use 30-round magazines, which means the magazine would have to be changed six times to reach the magic 180 number. Keep in mind that an expert can change a mag on some rifles in about two to three seconds (depending on the gun and how he/she has staged the mags), but that results in 12–18 seconds of lost shooting time per minute. So that leaves them with a maximum theoretical firing rate of about 138 rounds per minute.

Now take an average shooter with a top speed of about two shots per second; they’re emptying a magazine in 15 seconds. Reloading takes maybe four seconds, so it takes about 19 seconds to empty a mag and recharge. Their effective firing rate is about 90 rounds per minute, not counting the time it takes to aim.

Now ask yourself: if an average shooter fired only 90 rounds a minute into your body, as opposed to 138, would you feel less assaulted?

Rifle Modifications

A semi-automatic rifle can easily and in many cases can legally be modified to mimic automatic fire through the use of a bump stock. Bump stocks are legal and are part of a class of products that are designed with one purpose in mind – to increase a semiautomatic weapon’s rate of fire.

When used correctly, a bump stock increases the output of the average firearm to such an extent that it is almost indistinguishable from that of a machine gun. This accessory is not subject to federal regulations and they’re legal in all but a handful of states. They’re also cheap — a typical bump stock sells for a few hundred dollars. This is, for many people, a preferable option compared to the more difficult and costly undertaking of modifying the receiver, as this requires expensive fabrication and additional paperwork – not easy, though it is certainly attainable for someone with money to burn.

How does a bump stock work? When employing a bump stock, the shooter keeps his trigger finger rigid. Using his second hand, he gently pushes the gun forward. The forward movement causes the user’s finger to depress the trigger. The shot’s recoil then drives the gun backward, and the bump stock is designed to allow this cycle of discharge and recoil until the shooter chooses to stop firing or the gun’s magazine is spent (Kohrman). The Las Vegas shooter used this in his massacre, which killed 58 people and injured 489 others.

The Last Word on “All American Toys”

Assault rifles were always designed to fight wars. The fact that different versions of these rifles are now being marketed to/used in domestic civilian social spaces doesn’t mean we cannot or should not call them assault rifles. As writer Justin Peters explains, “The sporting rifle designation is merely a euphemism the gun industry created in 2009 to describe modular semi-automatic rifles. The phrase is an artful attempt to recast weapons such as the MCX and the AR-15 (and its variants) as “all-American toys” (Peters).

To be sure, it’s understandable that people who like their toys don’t want them taken away. But instead of debating issues of substance and policy, there is a tendency to resort to jargoning everyone to death to win (shut down) argument. And by this, I’m referring to the non-stop haggling over the distinction between civilian AR-styled rifles and military-style assault rifles. These differences – AR vs. AK, civilian vs. military, fully automatic vs. semi-automatic – have become the rallying cry for many gun enthusiasts, who protest – “stop calling an AR-15 an assault rifle!”

This laboring over technical distinctions amounts to what is essentially a semantic dance; it constitutes a form of identity politics, where “in-group” members/gun enthusiasts play a game of cultural virtue signalling, where they deploy language as a weapon to tell “outgroup” members to more or less shut up and exit the debate (see example above).

For what it’s worth, I served in the military intelligence services, where I was an Army Captain and served on active duty for a number of years. And like a lot of people, I was rated “expert” on these weapons many times. So, I know a thing or two about guns. People don’t have to be sharpshooters to take part in conversations about guns. They don’t have to be able to take a rifle apart blindfolded or name every last part of a gun without fail before they can talk about guns and what capabilities guns have. Guns, furthermore, shouldn’t be a symbol to tell other people whose “side” you are on in terms of politics. And finally, you don’t have to be a gun expert to see there is an abundance of research and evidence that suggests it’s simply common sense for many of these guns to kept out of the hands of untrained civilians.

As for the remaining term “weapons,” this addresses a broad category of items that can cause death or injury; this includes knives, bows, arrows, explosives, chemicals, and hand grenades. The important takeaway here is that there may be considerable linguistic variation when it comes to the use of these terms; people may slide easily from one term to the other without always being specific and consistent in terms of practical usage. “Gun” is perhaps the shortest and simplest term. Notwithstanding, if you are/were in the military, you probably already know that it’s not always a good idea to say “gun.”

Photo from the film Full Metal Jacket – “This is my rifle, this is my ‘gun.’ ”

Framing the Debate

What is the appropriate way to frame the debate over guns in public? Is it a rights discourse – the right to own, to carry concealed, to carry open? Or is it about freedom? As in, Americans are uniquely constitutionally guaranteed the freedom to own and carry any type of gun anytime and anyplace? Do gun rights outweigh human rights?

Advocates of gun control say that easy access to firearms increases gun violence and therefore the restriction of gun ownership will save lives. Opponents of gun control say that such restriction violates individual liberty guaranteed by the Constitution and cite the need for armed self-defense.

Julius Goat has some ideas:

So What Does the 2nd Amendment Really Say?

The meanings implied by the 2nd Amendment (2A) to the U.S. Constitution continue to be disputed and tested by the courts. On one side, opponents of gun control maintain that the 2A guarantees an individual’s right to have firearms. On the other side, gun control supporters say the amendment embodies only a collective right of the states to maintain militias. Just to be clear then, the 2nd Amendment says nothing about private gun ownership. In light of this, gun ownership is protected under private property laws for use on our own properties and are subject to regulation by local, state and federal jurisdictions.

Over the years, the federal courts have been nearly unanimous that the Second Amendment protects only the collective right of the states to maintain militias, and not an individual’s right to own
guns (the District of Columbia v. Heller, 2008 is the lone exception to this consensus).

Heller is a landmark case in many ways, not least of which for Justice Antonin Scalia’s majority opinion, one of his most discussed and most quoted. Because it says the 2A is not unlimited and that no one has a right to carry a weapon in any manner for any purpose. But a close look at decisions over the past decade indicates Heller did not revolutionize the judicial treatment of gun laws in quite the way that justice Stevens and others might have feared… or gun rights supporters might have hoped (Blocher and Rubin, 2018).

So where are we at? The Second Amendment, as courts have come to interpret it, undoubtedly protects a fundamental constitutional right, but it also leaves room for a potentially wide range of interpretation and regulation (Blocher and Rubin, 2018).

Espresso Shots, Not Gun Shots

Why do some Americans need to carry guns to buy bread, milk, and Starbucks? Why is coffee so scary? The simple answer is – because they can.

Starbucks, in particular, has a symbolic value – the American corporate coffee chain has become an iconic signifier of effeminate liberal consumption. Unlike Dunkin Donuts, it offers a “target rich” environment to the extent that it is likely to be chock-full of liberals who will be unnerved (if not pissed off) by the aggressive posturing of 2A enthusiasts openly carrying loaded firearms.

Starbucks customer — gun on his hip & drink in hand — watches a rally held by gun control advocates in Seattle, Washington.

Regulatory Framework

The regulation of firearms in the United States has proved to be extremely controversial. Opponents of Gun Control argue that the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution makes the right to bear arms an inherent and inalienable right. In practice, it is a combination of federal and state laws that work together to regulate who may own firearms and impose other conditions on their use (Burtons)

The passage in 1993 of the Brady Handgun Violence Prevention Act (18 U.S.C.A. § 921 et seq.) was the first major federal gun control law. The Brady Act bars felons and selected others from buying handguns, establishes a five-day waiting period for purchase, requires the local police to run background checks on handgun buyers, and mandates the development of a federal computer database for instant background checks (Burtons).

The 1994 federal crime bill is addressed to the use of deadly weapons by criminals. This law (108 Stat. 1796) banned nineteen assault-type firearms and other firearms with similar characteristics. It also limited the magazine capacity of guns and rifles to ten rounds, but exempted firearms, guns, and magazines that were legally owned when the law went into effect (Burtons). These changes, it should be emphasized, focused on gun characteristics, which gun manufacturers ultimately proved willing to change in an effort to get around the new law.

In what remains the deadliest instance of chemical explosives use was demonstrated by the April 1995 bombing of the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. In response, Congress passed the 1996 Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. (P.L. 104-132). The act increases the penalties for conspiracies involving explosives and for the possession of nuclear materials, criminalizes the use of chemical weapons, and requires plastic explosives to contain “tagging” elements in the explosive materials for detection and identification purposes (Burtons).

FBI Agents investigate the damaged rear wall of the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, where Omar Mateen massacred club goers with his Sig Sauer sporting rifle.

Concealed Carry

One of the reasons I took up this problem to study is that within the span of my own lifetime, I have seen a dramatic turn of events in terms of how people own, carry, and interpret their social identity as this pertains to guns and other firearms. The desire to conceal and carry is on the upswing. The question is why?

Unless prohibited by statute, possessing or carrying a weapon is not a crime, nor does it constitute a breach of the peace. However, most states make it a crime to carry a prohibited or concealed weapon. The term concealed means hidden, screened, or covered. The usual test for determining whether a weapon is concealed is whether the weapon is hidden from the general view of individuals who are in full view of the accused and close enough to see the weapon if it were not hidden. If the surface of a weapon is covered, the fact that its outline is distinguishable and recognizable as a weapon does not prevent it from being illegally concealed. In addition, most states have enacted laws mandating longer prison terms if a firearm was used in the commission of the crime (Burtons).

Law enforcement officers (LEOs) who must carry weapons in order to perform their official duties ordinarily are exempted from statutes governing weapons. Private citizens may apply to the local police department for a permit to carry a firearm. Permits are generally granted if the person carries large sums of money or valuables in his or her business, or can demonstrate a particular need for personal protection (Burtons).

Who Owns Guns in the United States?

Not only is the United States the runaway world leader for gun ownership – it also suffers mass shootings at more than 11 times the rate of any other developed country, according to a 2014 study published in the International Journal of Criminal Justice Sciences (McCarthy, Beckett, Glenza, 2017).

A 2017 Pew study found that nearly 4 out of 10 Americans say they either own a gun themselves or live in a household with guns; 48% say they grew up in a household with guns. At least two-thirds of adults say they’ve lived in a household with a gun at some point in their lives.

Roughly 7 out of 10 – including 55% of those who have never personally owned a gun – say they have fired a gun at some point (Igielnik and Brown).

The total number of guns in circulation in the United States has been increasing oddly enough at the same time as the number of people buying guns is decreasing.

More interesting (or troubling?) is the fact that those individuals who are acquiring firearms and guns represent a concentrated demographic of people – they are predominantly middle-class white men.

The Guardian journalists point out: “The US is home to 88 guns for every 100 people and sees mass shootings more than 11 times as often as any other developed country.” Check out the statistics featured in their report:

73%

The proportion of firearm murders among all murders in 2016 – the highest ever on record in the United States, according to FBI statistics. While murders in the United States are well down from historic highs, gun murders represent a greater share of the overall total.

70%

The proportion of gun murders in the United States in which a handgun is the weapon, according to FBI statistics.

127

The number of US cities and towns accountable for half of America’s gun homicides in 2015, according to a spatial geographic analysis by the Guardian.

71%

Increase in the number of handguns owned in the United States since 1994.

38%

Increase in the total number of guns owned in the United States since 1994.

3%

The proportion of people who own half of the country’s guns. Anchoring this group are America’s super-gun-owners – the estimated 7.7 million Americans who individually own between eight and 140 guns.

The Pew study reported similar findings; in this study two-thirds (66%) of gun owners indicated they own more than one firearm; roughly three-in-ten (29%) say they personally have five or more guns. Among those who own just one gun, handguns are by far the most popular: 62% say they own a handgun, compared with 22% who say they own a rifle and 16% who own a shotgun (Pew study).

An early study in 2007 conducted by Hepburn, Miller, and Hemenway examined the size and composition of the privately held firearm stock in the US; this study aimed to describe the demographic patterns of firearm ownership as well as the motivations for ownership. They found that 13 percent of Americans, most of whom are men, own four or more guns; 20 percent of these gun owners with the most guns possess the equivalent of 2/3rds of the nation’s stockpile.

Building on that work, a 2017 Harvard/Northeastern study conducted by the same researchers found that the number of privately-owned guns in America grew by more than 70 million—to approximately 265 million—between 1994 and 2015. According to this study, half of the gun stock in the U.S. is owned by only 3 percent of the population (Miller et al). This survey is the first nationally representative survey of firearm ownership and use in more than a decade, according to Miller, a professor of health sciences and epidemiology at Northeastern.

So why are such a small proportion of white Americans stockpiling guns? Who are these people? Where do they live? What kinds of guns do they own? Why do they feel like they need so many guns? Who do they imagine they might need to shoot?

As indicated by Pew, 3 in 10 American adults say they own a gun. As the concentration data indicate, gun ownership cuts across demographic groups but is more concentrated among middle-class white men. That is, white adults are more likely than blacks or Hispanics to own guns: 48 percent of white men say they own a gun, compared to 24 percent each for nonwhite men and white women, who all say they own one. The percentage ownership rate for non-white women is low at 16% (Pew study). Americans with less education are also more likely to be gun owners – a gap that is again noted to be widest among whites.

As for the women, despite these reported statistics, the gun industry believes the potential female market may actually be much larger. White women outnumber non-white women in terms of gun ownership.

What is the Top Reason for Owning a Gun?

Current research documents a consequential shift in terms of attitudes about owning guns. Again, the Pew Study finds that protection and self-defense top the list of reasons for owning a gun – this reflects a shift away from hunting, which was the traditional reason for owning a gun. Consequently, even though gun owners cite more than one reason for owning a firearm, the Pew study found in 2017 that 67% of respondents cited protection as a major reason for owning a gun. Compare this to statistics recorded in the late 1990’s, where the trend is nearly reversed: 49% cited hunting and 26% cited protection (26%).

Hunting, nonetheless, remains a popular reason for owning a gun. The 2017 study documents that 4 in 10 gun owners 38% cite hunting and 30% cite sport shooting, with smaller shares of people citing a gun collection or their job as major reasons (2017 Pew study).

Rural/Urban Divide

Majorities of gun owners who live in cities, suburbs and rural areas say protection is a major reason they own firearms. But when we focus only on owners who live in rural areas, they are significantly more likely to cite hunting as a major reason for owning a gun (Pew study). A question to consider then is how do we measure this? Median distance from home to a major city? Population density or some measure of zip code ID?

To complicate this even more, despite the fact that studies document rural men are statistically more likely to own a gun for hunting purposes, trends show this may be changing. Data reported by the General Social Survey (which contains a panel of questions about hunting) find fewer men reporting over time that they own weapons for hunting purposes. In 2012, when the survey asked men if they hunted, 25% responded positively. Compare this to the roughly 40 percent of men who responded positively in 1977 – that’s a significant decrease.

To what then do we attribute the increasing preference for handguns among rural men?

Group behavior is, of course, of primary interest to sociologists and psychologists. How do people acquire, maintain, and assert group identity? What beliefs do they adopt which we might view as “markers” of group identity? Given all of this, what happens when factual information challenges the basis for a belief that is deeply bound up in group identity formation? These are all interesting questions to ponder.

Here’s another question: if given the choice of being technically “right” about an issue that conflicts with and/or challenges group affinity & identity, what would you choose? In other words, are you willing to sacrifice group belonging if you came to be aware of information that the group belief was not well-informed, supported by evidence, or just plain wrong? (refer to the Ash test of group conformity in psychology). Hint: significantly large numbers of people have been shown to rank group conformity & belonging as more important than being right about a given issue.

Moving on, let’s consider for a moment how the desire to project a social identity as “one who carries” might explain this trend? Is it possible that carrying a handgun is important to men for reasons other than practical ones (i.e. hunting/protection)? Obviously, handguns are easier to carry and conceal than hunting rifles. Is it possible that men (and it is statistically still mostly men) are using guns to help bolster precarious social identities that they perceive to be under attack? What happens when traditional social identities (i.e. male breadwinner/ head of household with a submissive wife/mother – notably the form of manhood revered by many white, middle-American, rural and suburban men) prove difficult or even impossible to attain?

My Penn State Research Assistant – “Hunter 1”

The Political Economy of Gun Sales

Gun sales are often tracked by proxy in light of the number of U.S. federal background checks that are conducted. Basically, when someone wants to buy a gun (from a dealer), the dealer submits paperwork to the FBI, who runs a background check. While this figure does not technically represent the number of guns sold (for that you would have to rely on industry self-reports) the total number of checks initiated through the NCIC (National Crime Information Center) are publicly documented, reported, and are available for analysis (see FBI.gov).

Fears of new gun regulations throughout the Obama presidency were instrumental in helping to boost gun sales for gun manufacturers and retailers. Increases in incidents of mass shootings have also helped to stoke fear and fatten the industry’s bottom line. The trend only continued as people anticipated a Hillary Clinton victory in the 2016 election. The expectation was that she would be more aggressive about pushing gun controls that never materialized during Obama’s tenure.

Trump’s victory, however, took a toll on the gun trade almost immediately, as fears about gun control receded and gun demand reached an all-time low in 2017. During the months of January through July 2017, approximately 4.3 million background checks were performed; a figure down by comparison from 16 million checks performed in the same period during the prior year. In light of this, the first half of the year saw Sturm, Ruger & Co.’s net sales fall to $299.2 million from $341.1 million in the first half of 2016. But Killoy, the CEO, points to its more diverse consumer base, including “a lot more women shooters,” as a reason for optimism (Schultz).

To make up for the shortfall and overcome the “Trump slump,” the industry initiated new promotions that targeted women. As reported above, the ownership rate for women is 24 percent. Consequently, industry researchers estimate there is a much larger potential upside for the female market. “With the overall decrease in demand for guns, the increasing prevalence of female consumers is more important to gun manufacturers than ever before,” said Kevin Cassidy, an industry analyst for Moody’s (Schultz).

Men & Guns: Are Firearms an Extension of Masculinity?

So what are the important trends as it pertains to men? As it has already been discussed, both men and women gun owners are equally likely to say protection is a major reason (65% and 71%, respectively); men, however, are reported as more likely than women to say hunting and sport shooting are central to why they own a gun (Pew study).

Among the men, middle-aged white men (the ones with disposable income) are buying more and more of the guns and firearms. Again, it is this demographic group in particular where we see the highest concentration of gun ownership. But why? And more to the point, what are they afraid of?

Men, furthermore, are the largest demographic group represented by the community of Law Enforcement Officers (LEOs). Yet according to peer-reviewed research, LEOs are documented as having disturbingly high rates of domestic abuse. They have also, due to their occupation, been shown to be at a high risk for suicide. What are the potential problems associated with this? Should law enforcement officers who are convicted of domestic violence lose their right to carry a firearm? What about LEOs with mental health problems? Should they be permitted to carry firearms?

Gender dynamics in advertising are also important to consider, given the stark differences that distinguish the marketing of guns to men and men. Take a look here at an example of how the advertising of gun industry manufacturers is designed to appeal to male customers. The advertisements are rife with what gender scholars refer to as “toxic masculinity.”

Toxic masculinity is here understood to be only ONE form of masculinity among different “masculinities,” where in this case there is a distinct appeal to dominance narratives. As the ads below seem to indicate, “real men” carry guns and dominate others through violence if necessary; worse, if you don’t carry a gun, you’re not only a failed man – you’re a woman…you might even be gay.

The activist and scholar Time Wise confronts these ideas head-on when he says to men “Shooting things in rapid fire with lots of bullets makes you feel like more of a man. Because your manhood is fragile and pathetic and built on a foundation of sand. And rather than deal with that, or get therapy, or redefine masculinity in a less toxic way, you — we as a culture — just keep repeating the same bullshit. It’s time for you to grow up and find other ways to define yourself as a man other than through weaponry and violence. At the very least just admit your pathology. Owning your sickness, after all, is the first step to healing.”

Alternatively, Leonard Steinhorn reports, “Glock guns give men “confidence to live your life.” The Walther PPX handgun is “Tough. Very Tough.” The Tavor Semi-Automatic Rifle, promises to restore the “balance of power” to anyone holding the gun. Buying a Bushmaster semi-automatic “confirms that you are a Man’s Man, the last of a dying breed, with all the rights and privileges duly afforded” (Steinhorn).

Guns & Military Chic

Not to be underestimated is the symbolic power of military chic that is being marketed. Gun advertisers are quick to exploit the demographic fact that the vast majority of American men (roughly 99%) have not experienced military service. This fact may be highly relevant, considering the major social changes that have taken place since the 1950’s in the wake of World War II.

After the war, many men were left questioning their place in the world, as changes in the economy brought about changes at home and at work. Relations between men and women during this time were radically reformulated. For many many men, their jobs became outdated and “feminized” as office work replaced the stereotypical masculine heavy industry occupations that were the mainstay of previous generations. Even men born later, in 1960’s and 70’s are subject to being caught up in this cultural drift. They are the first generation of men, who didn’t follow their fathers into the coal mines and mills; the first to not earn a living wage from the family farm. And they’re pissed.

This is why the 1950’s time period continues to be ensconced in the minds of many men as a “golden era.” It’s as if they can’t avert their eyes from looking longingly at the “real men” of the Greatest Generation – the gruff, thick-cut, mans’ man – the man who is no longer “fashionable” (so we are told by Hollywood and Madison Ave) as the revered male archetype. Sadly for them, this man of old was replaced by a highly stylized/refined image of man. He is the new man that we see depicted so often in films and popular media – the well-groomed, lithesome, chiseled model, who strips for money and fronts bikini briefs. These are not men in the traditional sense; they’re feminized “gay” men.

Men have been domesticated. In other words, they’re not “real men” anymore. Having effectively called into question what it means to be a man, these developments have left many men feeling hopelessly adrift; they’re unsure of their place in a world that seems to have left them behind. What does it mean to be masculine? What can a man do? What would it take to make men “great again.”

Gun advertisers absorbed these cultural lessons and are now targeting their ads to make money from men who are not happy with the cultural change. The latest ads suggest men might assuage their dissatisfaction by vicariously affiliating their personal social identity with the identity of military men – one of the last remaining vestiges of proper manhood. The best part is that they can do this without any of the inconvenient blood sacrifices. A simple gun purchase and salutary “thank you for your service” makes everyone feel good. Violence fixes everything.

Always the astute observer of social and demographic changes, the NRA (National Rifle Association) stepped in during the 1970’s to help men shore up their creeping anxiety, while maintaining the flow of new weapons into U.S. society. This occurred during a time when statistics were revealing that men were hunting less and buying fewer guns. Guns represent power; they offer a way for wounded men to reclaim their manhood. This is the easy path to greatness that many men choose. The problem is, not all of us are going to live as they figure out how to adjust.

The SIG MCX “sporting” rifle

Girls & Guns: Pretty Guns for Pretty Ladies

Magazines, online ads, and gun/firearm manufacturers are increasingly making direct appeals to women. But the sales pitch to women is distinctly different from the way guns are marketed to men. For women, it’s all about keeping other men from hurting and killing them.

The typical female gun owner favors a handgun, not a rifle. Studies document that women, not unlike men, also want access to a firearm for protection purposes. Yet unlike the trend established for men, women who own guns are more likely than male gun owners to live in an urban area; further, they are less likely to have grown up in a gun-friendly household (based on a survey by the Guardian). Again, this trend for women contributes to why the gun industry views them as a growth opportunity.

“Confident Women Carry the Cross” states a banner ad for gun holster brand CrossBreed that recently ran on Women’s Outdoor News. A Smith & Wesson ad shows a woman grasping a handgun with the copy, “Where protection meets performance.” In the ad below, we move into the realm of desire, where we are given a sense of what women want in terms of men and guns.

The website for Miss Concealed includes a variety of female gear that they refer to as “hidden heat.” These include stylish concealed carry purses and lacy corset belts that contain pouches for your Glock, lipstick, and passport. Boise, Idaho, resident Lorelei Fay founded the retailer in 2014 after she noticed a problem with guns for women. In her view, “there is nothing out there that’s even remotely feminine” (Schultz).

Display, Gettysburg gun show, 2018.

Women gun owners appear to be more accepting of at least some restrictive gun policies. Of gun-owning Republican women, 60 percent favor banning assault weapons and 57 percent support creation of a federal gun-sales tracking database, according to a recent Pew survey. That compares with 28 percent and 35 percent, respectively, for Republican men gun owners. (Pew did not include a similar statistic for Democrats) (Schultz).

My first day of fieldwork – research is “me-search!”

Narrowing the Gender Gap – “Pink it & Shrink It”

It’s not exactly a surprise that the gun industry is male-dominated; its sales, likewise, are targeted to men – real men, who support an arms trade in guns and ammunition that generates nearly $13 billion in sales. While the targeting of women customers is not new, efforts to do so have been reinvigorated due to the softening of product demand in the post-Obama era. According to one market research firm, Southwick Associates, who specializes in market research for hunting, shooting and sportfishing, they find that women account for 46.8 percent of the 24 million Americans who have yet to purchase a firearm but are interested (Schultz).

“More women are working, more women are single, more women are in their own homes and they have a very unique interest in self-protection that they never had before,” says Deb Ferns, co-founder of Babes with Bullets, which runs a traveling firearms academy geared to female first-time gun buyers (Schultz).

Deb Ferns of Babes with Bullets

Babes with Bullets is backed by manufacturers like Smith & Wesson, who have contributed to sponsoring female training camps (a total of 11 in 2017), which spanned states from California to New Hampshire. Contributions furnished the camps with loaner guns, holsters and other financial support, including gun-range fees. Guns were not made available for purchase at the camps (Schultz).

A forthcoming study by Northeastern and Harvard universities also paints a tightening gender gap, albeit a lower percentage of female owners. Gun ownership among American men dropped from 42 percent in 1994 to 32 percent in 2015 while female ownership increased from 9 percent to 12 percent, according to the Guardian, which got an early look at the data last year (Schultz).

Marketing Rape Scripts

The National Rifle Association is actively promoting the narrative that women need to purchase guns to protect themselves from rapists and domestic abusers. The most visible female supporter of the NRA is the well-known conservative talk show host Dana Loesch, who was last year named as an NRA special adviser on women’s policy issues. Her videos are currently running on the NRA TV online network, which is currently promoting female gun ownership at the same time as it attacking Second Amendment critics.

In one video that drew national headlines and backlash, Loesch targeted The New York Times, calling it “an old gray hag,” while saying, “We’re going to fist the New York Times.” “We’re coming for you.”

In another video, she directly addresses rapists and domestic abusers. “Your life expectancy just got shorter, because there’s a very good chance your next target will be armed, trained and ready to exercise her right to choose her life over yours,” she says. “This is what real empowerment looks like.” (Schultz).

NRA Critics: The Mother Movement

Gun control proponents, including one female-led organization called Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America have been pushing back hard against the NRA’s marketing initiatives.

Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America, founded in 2012, pushes its gun-control agenda with a variety of tactics, including an attention-grabbing one called “stroller jams.” These involve crowding statehouse halls with babies and moms armed with infant gear like diaper bags, making it “impossible for lawmakers to get by without answering our questions,” says the organization’s founder, Shannon Watts, a mother of five who founded the group in the wake of the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting (Schultz).

When Sandy Hook happened, “it really spoke to me as a mom,” says Watts, a former corporate communications executive who at the time was a stay-at-home mom in Indiana. She looked to join an organization like Mothers Against Drunk Driving, but for gun safety, and couldn’t find one. So she started a Facebook page that evolved into an organization created to demand action from legislators, companies and educational institutions to establish gun reforms (Schultz).

Last year, the group won the North American Grand Effie for a campaign called “Groceries Not Guns” by Grey Canada that pressured Kroger stores and other retailers to ban the open carry of guns in stores (Schultz).

The group says it supports the Second Amendment but wants “common-sense solutions” to help “decrease the escalating epidemic of gun violence that kills too many of our children and loved ones every day,” according to its website. “There’s never been a grassroots movement in gun violence prevention. It’s really been male-run think tanks mainly to shape federal legislation,” says Watts, who now resides in Boulder, Colorado. “For decades the NRA has been able to generate emails and calls and industry meetings and outrage with the flip of a switch, and we needed that kind of power on our side. And we have that now”(Schultz).

According to one spokesperson, “the NRA has figured out … they have to create a culture war now to sell guns. They don’t have a bogeyman in the White House to use in their marketing campaign, so they have to make Americans afraid of one another,” says Watts (Schultz).

How Do Federal Background Checks for Guns Work?

Before ringing up the sale (when it’s a dealer/retailer) Federal Firearms Licensees (FFLs) must first contact the FBI, who initiates the background check using the NICS system (National Instant Criminal Background Check). This is done by completing the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF) Form 4473 and by contacting NICS via a toll-free telephone number (or electronically on the Internet and the E-Check System) to request a background check. The system was designed to provide a means to instantly determine whether or not a prospective buyer can buy firearms. Records searches are conducted to ensure that customers do not have a criminal record or are not ineligible to make a purchase for other reasons.

There are three databases that comprise NICS:

The National Crime Information Center contains information on restraining orders and warrants;
The Interstate Identification Index holds convictions;
The NICS Index records on mental health commitments and dishonorable discharges from the military (Pane).

Holes in the System

According to the 2017 Northeastern and Harvard study, 1 out of 5 U.S. gun owners who obtained a firearm in the past two years did so without a background check. The reasons for this are varied. The biggest culprit and the most difficult to control is the unregulated sale of guns between individuals who own guns. Also contributing to the problem is the infamous “gun show loop hole.”

Federal vs. State Law

Complicating matters is the fact that state standards that regulate who can carry a gun in public are often different from the federal standards that regulate who can buy a firearm. Background checks at the state level can also be different.

In Texas, someone applying for a permit can be turned down for being charged with or convicted of certain misdemeanors or for being delinquent in child support — things that don’t prevent someone from buying a gun. Texas uses a variety of databases, including NICS as well as statewide criminal databases.

In Hawaii, the standards are more strict. There you need to demonstrate to the local police chief that you have an “exceptional case” and a very specific reason for needing to carry a gun in public. Other states, such as Vermont, don’t require a license to carry a firearm (Pane).

(Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

Pennsylvania state law regulates people two ways – upon application and at the point of purchase.

APPLICATION: individuals who are 21 years of age or older can apply for a license by submitting a completed application for a Pennsylvania “License to Carry Firearms” (LTCF) to any Pennsylvania County Sheriff’s office along with the required fee. The sheriff has 45 days to conduct an investigation to determine an individual’s eligibility to be issued a license. Included in the investigation is a background check conducted on the individual through the Pennsylvania Instant Check System (PICS) to determine if the records indicate the individual is prohibited by law. The license is valid for a period of five (5) years unless sooner revoked(PA.gov website).

An individual who is age 18 or older and is licensed to hunt, trap or fish, or who has been issued a permit relating to hunting dogs, may apply for a Sportsman’s Firearm Permit by submitting a completed application along with the required fee to the county treasurer’s office. A Sportsman’s Firearm Permit is NOT a License to Carry Firearms concealed.

In accordance with 18 PA C.S. §6109, a sheriff may deny an individual the right to a License to Carry Firearms if there is a reason to believe that the character and reputation of the individual are such that they would be likely to act in a manner dangerous to public safety. If the PICS check is approved and the subject is of good character, the sheriff may issue a License to Carry Firearms.

PURCHASE: a license to “carry” firearms in Pa, however, is NOT the same as a license to purchase. Individuals who purchase a firearm from a licensed dealer are required to have a background check conducted regardless of whether they have a license to carry firearms or not (PA.gov website).

VEHICLES:

Car carry in Pennsylvania is governed in part by 18tC Pa.C.S.A. § 6106. In many states, it is no problem to have a firearm (meaning a handgun) in your vehicle whether you have a license to carry a firearm or not. In Pennsylvania, this is not the case. The minute you enter your vehicle with your firearm, however, it becomes covered under 6106.

Under §6106, “any person who carries a firearm in any vehicle or any person who carries a firearm concealed on or about his person, except in his place of abode or fixed place of business, without a valid and lawfully issued license under this chapter commits a felony of the third degree.”

In Pennsylvania the issuance of a “License to Carry Firearms” allows individuals to carry a firearm (not a long gun) concealed on or about their person or in a vehicle throughout the Commonwealth.

Even if your handgun is on your hip, open and exposed, and even if it is on the dash so everyone can see it, the minute you get in the car, it might as well be in your shoulder rig under a jacket.

Pennsylvanians are not breaking the law if they have non-NFA regulated shotguns or rifles (regulated National Firearms Act regulated weapons include machine guns, short-barreled rifles, short-barreled shotguns (SBS), any other weapons AOW or concealable weapons other than pistols or revolvers and silencers) in their car, provided they are not loaded.

No person, even the holder of an LCTF, may carry a loaded long gun in a vehicle.

Pennsylvania, it is worth noting, does not prohibit the carrying of weapons on college campuses, leaving it up to individual institutions make their own rules in regards to where weapons are permitted. Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, and Temple do not permit the carrying of weapons on campus (USA Today).

“Open Carry” in Pennsylvania

No one needs a special license to open” carry in Pa, but if you enter a vehicle with a firearm w/o the proper license to carry you committed a crime.

Problematic Social Identities

While they are too numerous to list them all, here are a few recent examples of men who developed pathological social identities around guns and/or used guns to commit horrific crimes. The question that haunts in both cases is: How Are “Bad Guys” – men like Devon Kelly and Dylan Roof – able to buy guns?

Given that federal law forbids anyone convicted of domestic violence from purchasing a firearm, and it also forbids sale to people dishonorably charged from the military – Kelly failed on both counts – we are left to question how did he manage to get his hands on a gun so easily?

For one, the Air Force (his former employer) failed to inform federal law enforcement authorities that Kelley had been court-martialed for assaulting his wife and child (he cracked her son’s skull). Consequently, when went to buy guns after he was released from military prison, there was no conviction registered in the database system used for the background check and thus the purchase was allowed (Pane).

As it turns out, the state of Texas (where Kelly lived), produced documentation that showed Kelley sought a permit in 2015. His application was delayed by the state “due to a possibly disqualifying issue.” Kelley at that time had failed to respond to the agency’s request for additional information and so he was denied. The “disqualifying issue” was never identified, but his 2014 misdemeanor animal-cruelty conviction for beating his dog in Colorado might have have been enough to trigger the delay (Pane).

Unfortunately, Kelly was authorized at the Federal level even as he was flagged and denied at the state level.

Dylan Roof, on the other hand, convicted last year (December 2016) of murdering nine parishioners of the Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina, was able to buy a gun due to a break down in the federal FBI background check system. Despite having been convicted of drug possession and demonstrating mental health problems, mistakes were made by FBI agents that resulted in this application being approved. Roof’s mental health issues were common knowledge, though they apparently remained untreated. People described him a strange loner who signed his name in block letters, fell asleep on the job, stared at the walls when home and worried in a Craigslist post that, “I have no friends even though I am cool.” Roof had a well-documented preoccupation with imaginary/exaggerated health concerns, including lymphatic cancer, a thyroid disorder, and Hashimoto’s disease.” He was also known for his sudden efforts to reach out to former childhood acquaintances through social media.

Roof also was able to exploit the FBI’s 3 day wait period – a stipulation that gives the FBI 3 days to investigate the applicant’s background – on the fourth day, Roof was able to return to the dealer to procure his gun (Schmidt).

Trouble in Western Pennsylvania – “Guns Don’t Kill People, I Kill People”

Social media was the platform of choice for a Western Pennsylvania man, George Shallenberger, who was arrested on charges of making terroristic threats via Facebook after posting the status update: “Guns Don’t Kill People, I Kill People.” His threat was directed at teachers on strike in the Ringold School District. Shallenberger also wrote: “f—ing school teachers need to get real jobs. Damn snowflakes.” “shoot them and start over.” Another post on his page said: “Happiness is a warm gun,” – which also happens to be the name of a Beatles song.

So What Happened?

The shootings in Texas by Kelly and South Carolina by Roof point to what are apparently significant holes in the system put in place for background checks. After the shooting by Kelly, journalists from the Huffington Post submitted requests for comment from the Air Force, Department of Defense, FBI and Department of Justice, all of whom failed to provide clear explanation on the question of whether or not the military is routinely submitting domestic violence records to the background check system, as they are required to do under federal law (Miller and Jeltsen).

Consequently, no one knows if the Kelly case was a simple case of one person “falling through the cracks” or if it is an indicator of a systemic failure. There could theoretically be “potentially hundreds or thousands of other convicted domestic abusers whose records were not entered into the background check system by the military”(Miller and Jeltsen).

The initial review conducted by journalists found, given a review of military procedural documents, that there was a problematic lack of shared protocol across federal agencies, where reporting variances across different federal bureaucracies may be preventing the federal background check system, National Instant Background Check System (NICS), from performing effectively (Miller and Jeltsen).

Towards a Theory of Social Identity

Concepts of identity, community, and social solidarity are foundational to the discipline of sociology. Such themes, nonetheless, are also highly contested and subject to interpretation. Contemporary theories have tended to focus on the intersectionality of multiple social identities and how they interact within the context of social inequality (Patricia Hill Collins, 1990; Crenshaw, 1989). People, for example, have identities that situate them within both privileged groups (i.e. white, male, heterosexual, middle and/or upper class) and oppressed groups (i.e. female, person of color, poor, gay, disabled, or working class) (Twine, 2013). Questions remain, however, as to how we might use and expand upon these theories to explain current happenings as they pertain to guns and social identity in the United States.

Researchers have documented that over the course of the last 30 years, gun ownership has evolved – guns are no longer a mere functioning “tool” – a simple piece of hardware used to enjoy outdoor sports and hunting. Now, they represent something else; they constitute a form of symbolic currency for their owners, which itself can be weaponized.

Gendered social identities, for example, may be caught up in men’s efforts to preserve a sense of self in the face of rapid social change. Class-based identities reflect a distinctly American form of relative deprivation, leading to what scholars have referred to as “aggrieved entitlement” (Kimmel, 2014), which may be further fueled by “toxic masculinity” (R.W. Connell, 2005; Trappen, 2017). In light of this, it is critical that we understand the social psychological factors that drive the self-making process, particularly as this interacts with violence, which can occur when people have suffered from trauma, feel their life chances have been thwarted, or when they have been shamed or aggrieved.

To address this, I employ an assemblage of interpretive, poststructuralist, feminist, psychoanalytic, and social identity theories to explain how guns have become important to the articulation of social identity. On one level, I propose a classic historical and materialist approach, which aims to explain how the making and taking of human life as well as human labor power are bound up with social inequality and the political economy of guns. On another level, I propose a social psychological approach, where I will explore how trauma, fear, anxiety, and rage play a role in the development of problematic social identities. Lastly, I want to look at the problem of guns and social identity in terms of its embodied affective social dynamics (Shapira and Simon, 2018). In taking this multidimensional approach, it becomes possible to explain the complex and often contradictory experiences of people who reach for guns as a way to complete their self-making projects (Trappen, 2017).

The policy implications are obvious. What should the gun regulations policies in the United States look like at the national and federal levels of control? Ultimately, everyone has to ask themselves – what kind of society do I want to live in? Is it one where everyone is armed and ready to shoot at a moments notice? Does accepting the sanctity of some people’s “culture” mean we all have to accept as normal the idea that more than 30,000 Americans, on average, are going to be killed by guns every year?

Sources

Pew Study – “Key Takeaways on Americans’ Views of Guns and Gun Ownership,” by Ruth Igielnik and Anna Brown, June 2017.

“America’s Passion for Guns: Ownership and Violence by the Numbers,” by Tom McCarthy, Lois Beckett, and Jessica Glenza, October 2017.

“America’s Made-Up Culture of Guns,” by Paul Waldman, March 2018

“Firearm Acquisition Without Background Checks: Results of a National Survey,” by Matthew Miller, MD, ScD; Lisa Hepburn, PhD; Deborah Azrael, PhD, February 2017.

“Military Faces Growing Scrutiny Over How It Reports Domestic Violence Convictions,” by Miller and Jeltsen, The Huffington Post, 2017.

“Study: 70 Million More Firearms Added to U.S. Gun Stock Over Past 20 Years,” by Greg St. Martin

Learning to Need Guns, by Shapira, Harel. “Learning to Need a Gun”. Qualitative Sociology (0162-0436), 41 (1), p. 1. 01/01, 2018.

“New Study Finds 1 in 5 U.S. Gun Owners obtained a Firearm Without a Background Check.” by Greg St. Martin

“Female Firepower: Women Take a New Role in Gun Sales,” by EJ Schultz, September 26, 2017

“Different laws and databases affect gun background checks,” by Lisa Marie Pane, The Washington Post, November 2017.

“White Men and Their Guns,” by Leonard Steinhorn, The Huffington Post, 2014.

“The US gun stock: results from the 2004 national firearms survey,” published by Hepburn, Miller, and Hemenway, The Injury Prevention Journal, 2007.

“Background Check Law Let Dylan Roof Buy a Gun, F.B.I. Says,” by Michael Schmidt, July 2015.

“The Gun the Orlando Shooter Used Was a Sig Sauer MCX, Not an AR-15. That Doesn’t Change Much,” by Thomas Gibbons-Neff, The Washington Post, June 2016.

“Omar Mateen Had a Modern ‘Sporting Rifle,’ “ by Justin Peters, Slate Magazine, June 2016.

“A Brief History of the Assault Rifle,” by Michael Shurkin, The Atlantic, June 2016.

“Knowledge Wars: Firearms, College Students, and Social Identity,” Paper Presented at the American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, Pa, by Sandra L. Trappen, 2017.

Girls With Guns: Firearms, Feminism, and Militarism, by Francine Widdance Twine, 2013.

Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era, by Michael Kimmel, 2015.

Masculinities. Second Edition, by R. W. Connell, (1995) 2005.

“The Las Vegas Shooter’s Accessories,” by Miles Kohrman, 2017

“Your Guns Are A Fetish,” by Tim Wise

“The Second Amendment Allows for More Gun Control Than You Think,” by Joseph Blocher and Eric Rubin, 2018.

Discussion Questions (none of this information is being used for research purposes and you may answer anonymously using a pseudonym/nom de plume)

How do you identify yourself – man, woman, nonbinary? Middle class or working class?

What political party to you most identify with? Is this the same or different from how your parents identify?

Did you grow up in a household with guns or have you lived in a house at some point in your life where there were guns?

Have you ever owned a gun? If you own a gun, what does owning a gun mean to you?

Have you ever fired a gun? If so, what does it feel like to fire a gun?

Do you own or would you like to own an AR-style weapon? If so, what do you like (or not like) about them?

Would you feel like your second amendment rights are being taken away if you were told you could not buy/own an AR-style weapon?

Are owning/shooting firearms important to the way you define and express yourself?

Military men and women generally live in accordance with restrictions on their access to firearms. Do you think civilians should have more/easier access to weapons than members of the military?

If you served in the military, how does your military experience influence your perspective on firearms? What did the military teach you about firearms that you think civilians might not know?

The Current State of Affairs

Eleven states currently permit some form of gun carrying/possession on college campuses. They include Arkansas, Wisconsin, Colorado, Idaho, Kansas, Mississippi, Oregon, Tennessee, Texas, Georgia, and Utah.

The first states to legalize campus carry was Colorado in 2003 followed by Utah in 2004. Subsequently, a debate ensued across the United States as students and administrators at various universities throughout the country as well as state legislators took up questions in regards to how or if this would enhance student safety.

“Campus Carry,” as it is conventionally known, refers to state laws that make provision for the carrying of firearms on the campuses of public colleges and universities.

Pennsylvania

Students on some of Pennsylvania’s college campuses might be carrying more than books. Pennsylvania is among the states that allow individual colleges or universities to decide if they’ll ban concealed weapons on campus, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. While Pa state law does not prohibit the carrying of weapons, individual institutions make their own rules in regards to where weapons are permitted (USA Today).

Because of changes in Pennsylvania’s concealed weapons law in 2012, one of the two major public Higher Education Systems became concerned that they might not be able to constitutionally prohibit concealed weapons permittees from carrying guns on campus.

There are two major public Higher Education Systems in Pennsylvania:

1) The Commonwealth System of Higher Education (CSHE), which oversees Penn State, Pittsburgh, Lincoln Univ, and Temple

2) The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PSSHE) oversees the other 14 state colleges.

In 2012, PASSHE’s Chairman, Guido Pichini, stated the following:

“PASSHE universities have the ability to prohibit weapons, including legally registered firearms, in academic buildings, student residence halls, dining facilities, student union buildings, athletic facilities and recreation centers or while attending a sporting, entertainment or educational event on university property or sponsored by the university. However, PASSHE’s policies also must be consistent with Pennsylvania law, which allows individuals who are properly permitted to carry a firearm ‘on or about one’s person or in a vehicle throughout the Commonwealth.’

As a result, PASSHE’s schools changed their policies to allow concealed carry permittees and the ability to carry weapons on certain parts of their campuses.

The PASSHE guidelines do not impact private colleges or the other public colleges and universities in Pennsylvania, including Penn State, Pittsburgh, and Temple.

But why are these schools different?

The important distinction here is that these particular schools receive a state appropriation each year, even though they are not owned by the state of Pennsylvania. Penn State, the University of Pittsburgh, etc. are in this manner state-supported but not state-run. In light of this, they are free to make their own decisions about the prohibition of weapons on campus. The only exceptions are for students who hunt or shoot recreationally; they are permitted to store them with police.

Penn State Policy – “University policy prohibits the use, possession, or carrying of firearms while on University-owned or controlled property, or at University sponsored or supervised activities. Likewise, keeping a firearm in any locker or storage area of any building of the University is prohibited. The use, possession or carrying of explosives, fireworks, bows, and arrows, slingshots, knives or other dangerous weapons while on University-owned or controlled property or at University-sponsored or supervised activities is prohibited. Violators of this policy will face disciplinary action via the University discipline system. In certain circumstances (e.g. carrying a loaded firearm concealed in a motor vehicle without a valid concealed firearms permit, possession of an enumerated firearm under the Federal Crime Bill, etc.) such possession may subject the student to criminal prosecution under Commonwealth of Pennsylvania or federal statutes. Any weapon found in violation will be seized and will be returned to the student under proper court order.”

Briefly put, if you are carrying a gun at Penn State, you may have committed a crime and will likely be expelled if you are discovered and/or reported.

Firearms That Require a License in Pennsylvania

Pistol or revolver with barrel less than 15 inches
Shotgun with a barrel less than 18 inches
Rifle with a barrel less than 16 inches
Any firearm with an overall length of less than
26 inches
“Loaded” – ammunition in the chamber, nondetachable
magazine, cylinder, or detachable
magazine IF the magazine is with the firearm

“Open Carry” in Pennsylvania

No one needs a special license to “open” carry in Pa, but if you enter a vehicle with a firearm w/o the proper license to carry you committed a crime. Any person who carries a firearm, where it is concealed on or about his person, except in his place of abode or fixed place of business without a valid and lawfully issued license commits a felony of the third degree.

Concealed Carry in Pennsylvania

To lawfully carry a concealed firearm in Pennsylvania, a person must either:

1 – possess a valid Pennsylvania License to Carry Firearms (LTCF),
2 – maintain residency in, and possess a valid license/permit to carry a firearm from a state with which Pennsylvania has a current reciprocity agreement or
3 – fall within the applicable exceptions in 18 Pa. C.S. §6106(2)(b) as listed above, including §6106(2)(b)(15) regarding licenses/permits to carry a firearm recognized under Pennsylvania law without a formal reciprocity agreement.

Vehicle Carry in Pennsylvania

Car carry in Pennsylvania is governed in part by 18tC Pa.C.S.A. § 6106. In many states, it is no problem to have a firearm (meaning a handgun) in your vehicle whether you have a license to carry a firearm or not. In Pennsylvania, this is not the case. The minute you enter your vehicle with your firearm, however, it becomes covered under 6106.

Under §6106, “any person who carries a firearm in any vehicle or any person who carries a firearm concealed on or about his person, except in his place of abode or fixed place of business, without a valid and lawfully issued license under this chapter commits a felony of the third degree.”

In Pennsylvania the issuance of a “License to Carry Firearms” allows individuals to carry a firearm concealed on or about their person or in a vehicle throughout the Commonwealth. No person, even the holder of a license to carry a firearm, may carry a loaded long gun or handgun in a vehicle.

Pennsylvanians are not breaking the law if they have non-NFA regulated shotguns or rifles (regulated National Firearms Regulated weapons include machine gun, short-barreled rifles (SBR), short-barreled shotguns (SBS), any other weapons AOW or concealable weapons other than pistols or revolvers and silencers) in their car, provided they are not loaded.

Handguns are more tricky (Giaramita). Absent a LTCF, you may only have a handgun in your vehicle if:

You’re driving a car which belongs to you, your spouse, or your parent and the gun belongs to a parent or spouse who holds a valid LTCF; or
It’s unloaded and you’re transporting it
- to or from target practice
- to or from a Federal Firearms Licensee

Penn State students are never permitted to open carry or carry and store any weapons on campus and/or in their vehicles. They must be stored with the police.

Georgia

The state of Georgia, as of June 2017, is the most recent state to permit guns on campus (new law not reflected on above map). This was done in spite of the results of a survey conducted by Georgia Tech’s Student Government Association, which revealed that a majority of students oppose concealed handguns on campus.

According to Georgia officials and House Bill 280, the law leaves it up to the person carrying the gun to know what the rules are and to follow them. This includes whether they are entering a place on campus where guns are banned or if they are taking a class with a high school student — a situation that would also bar them from carrying their weapon.

Georgia law requires anyone seeking a state permit to carry a concealed gun to be at least 21 years old. They must be fingerprinted and pass a background check. No signs will be posted on campus identifying which areas are off-limits. Everyone has been told they are not allowed to ask whether someone is legally carrying a gun.

Guns are supposed to be concealed, carried in a fashion that does not attract attention. Campus police will be responsible for administering the law.

Football game day exceptions: people will be allowed to carry their weapons in tailgating areas where alcohol can be consumed, but not inside athletic facilities.

Storage problems: there remains a question of what to do with firearms when owners are not carrying them if, for example, they live on campus. No campus in Georgia will provide gun storage facilities. Existing state law allows weapons to be locked in cars if the permit holder comes onto campus.

Student advocates at the “Cocks Not Glocks” protest against Texas’s “campus carry” law was held on the first day of classes in 2016 at the University of Texas at Austin, which spearheaded resistance to the law from students and faculty members at colleges in the state.

Texas

In 2015, Texas law was changed to permit the carrying of concealed handguns by license holders in public university buildings, classrooms, and dorms. Handgun licenses are available to anyone at least 21 years of age (18 for military service members). Applicants must pass a classroom and gun range training course. Restrictions may be applied to convicted felons and people charged with felonies, high-level misdemeanors, as well as people with a history of mental illness.

The law allows guns in buildings, classrooms, and dorms, but each campus makes its own rules about where weapons are permitted. By law, campuses must map out where guns are banned. At the University of Texas at Austin, for example, faculty members can declare their offices as gun-free zones. Students residing on campus can have their guns in common areas, including cafeterias and student lounges, but they are not permitted to keep their weapons in their rooms because there is no place to store them. Alternatively, guns are allowed in dorm rooms at Texas A&M University in College Station, where faculty must seek permission to ban guns from their offices.

Private schools, including Baylor, Rice, Texas Christian University and others, retained the option of banning or allowing weapons. Amberton University, which doesn’t allow students under 21 and has a total enrollment under 2,000, was the first private school that opted to allow guns.

Texas state law still bans weapons campus-operated hospitals and school sporting events.

In one incident that occurred, a Texas Tech University police officer was fatally shot. A student was subsequently arrested for the killing. The student, Hollis A. Daniels, was 19 years old at the time and was not in compliance with the law that required him to register the weapon with Texas Tech, which is required under the state’s campus carry law. Daniels was also not 21 years old (IHE).

The law in Texas, it should be pointed out, was adopted against the wishes of higher education leaders in the state, who argued that colleges are safer when police officers are the only ones armed (IHE).

In the first year since the law went into effect, at least 20 Texas universities had no gun-discharge incidents or reports of intimidation with a firearm, the Chronicle’s review found. More than a dozen had at least one gun-related report, including aggravated robbery and an accidental discharge in a dorm (IHE).

Campus Safety

The debate is classically polarized around safety concerns, with different views about how to keep people safe. There are those who believe that allowing students to carry would allow them to protect themselves. Following the same logic, they claim that if college campuses are put on a list of venues where guns are prohibited they will become targets for attacks. Alternatively, others say that allowing students to carry would be dangerous because there would be more guns on campus grounds and that this poses a distraction to learning. These arguments, however, have tended to break down and lead nowhere—particularly in states like Texas and Georgia with strong traditions that embrace gun culture and firearms ownership.

Adrienne O’Reilly, Oklahoma Director for Students for Concealed Carry on Campus, carries an empty gun holster on the Oklahoma State University campus in Stillwater, Okla. (AP Photo/The Tulsa World, James Gibbard).

Anxiety + Fear = A Potentially Lethal Cocktail (re-post from Ian Bogost, The Atlantic)

According to an Atlantic journalist Ian Bogost, there is a “deep and pervasive unease” that already pervades college campuses, and safety and speech worries are just instances of a more general and more universal anxiety.

“Today’s college students,” he says, “are beset by unease. And it’s no wonder why—their whole lives have been lived bathed in vague and constant threat. Today’s 21-year-old students were born in 1995. They were kindergarteners on 9/11, and their whole childhoods were backgrounded by forever war. Their primary and secondary schooling took place under the supposed reforms of No Child Left Behind, which meant an education designed around lots of high-stakes testing and the preparation necessary to conduct it.

They entered high school just after the 2008 global financial crisis, after which declines in the tax base led to billions of dollars of funding cuts to primary, secondary, and postsecondary public education. Here in Georgia, the lottery-funded HOPE Scholarship, which had paid full college tuition for students who kept a 3.0 average, increased its achievement requirements for full tuition and eliminated support for books and fees. Meanwhile, tuition rose precipitously—35 percent over the last five years at Georgia Tech—as funding declined. And as state funding has waned, flagships like UGA and Georgia Tech have increasingly pursued more lucrative out-of-state enrollments, while increasingly relying on gifts, endowments, grants, and contracts as state funding has become a minority contributor to institutional budgets.

Getting into college also became harder. In the arms race to raise test scores and thereby rankings, admissions have pushed average SAT scores at Georgia Tech up from 1420 in 2013 to 1449 in 2015, only adding to the anxiety of admission. Twenty-five points doesn’t sound like much, but because of the way the SAT is scored, it might amount to a difference of as few as one or two incorrect answers on the exam. A couple answers might measure a differential in academic performance and potential, but it might also represent the accident of a cold testing facility or a stressful commute into the exam. Every aspect of these kids’ lives are drawn taut. One badly timed sneeze can spell disaster.

Once enrolled, college campuses are brimming with new anxieties and newly trenchant versions of old ones. The issues of preparation, access, and affordability to create an environment in which mere survival overwhelms learning—let alone indulgences like free speech. Then someone like me comes along and teaches the same class I would have taught five or 10 or 15 years ago, only to find that students are falling apart from the stress rather than from the materials. No wonder they fantasize about kidnapping my family.

Even the successful students still must contend with a much worse economic lot than their cohorts did in the past. At Georgia Tech, even students who pursue “practical” degrees in areas of supposed economic growth, like computing, still face massive competition and pressure for jobs. I have students who have filed hundreds of applications and endured five or 10 separate interviews for a single entry-level job, including time-consuming cross-country trips to all-day interviews, before finally receiving an offer. The only greater motivator than fear is debt.

A concealed-carry campus becomes a campus in which everyone carries a potential gun. And the potential gun is far more powerful than the real gun, because it both issues and revokes a threat all at once. Made habitual and spread atop an already apprehensive base, that sort of mental anguish is nothing short of terrorism.”

What Does the Research Say?

Researchers at Johns Hopkins University (Bloomberg School of Public Health) released a study that argues the campus-carry movement is based on flawed assumptions about the relationship between civilian gun use, violent crime and mass shootings, including several killings on college campuses. The higher likelihood for college-aged people to engage in reckless behavior — binge drinking, drug use, fighting, suicide — heightens the danger, they said (NBC News).

The Hopkins researchers criticized much of the research cited in the pro-carry movement, saying that it was difficult to corroborate incidents in which gun owners claimed to thwart shootings — both mass shootings and smaller-scale attacks. The researchers also said that emerging research on concealed carry laws contradicted prior studies that concluded that such measures prevented violent crime. They said their data showed that right to carry laws are correlated with increased violence; that most fatal mass shootings occur in places where guns are allowed, and people with guns rarely are able to stop them (NBC News).

Alternatively, economist and author John Lott, whose work is often cited by the National Rifle Association, argues that concealed-carry laws make the public safer because they put guns in the hands of people who are more law-abiding than the general public. The Hopkins researchers also disputed this claim – a central claim of the gun-rights movement – that concealed-carry permit holders are far more law-abiding than the general population. The claim does not hold in states with law-abiding loose gun laws, the researchers said. “Many states relaxed restrictions on concealed and open carrying of firearms based on claims that such policies reduced violent crime,” the authors wrote. “But the best available evaluations of these policies indicate that these right-to-carry laws increase violence” (NBC News).

Daniel Webster, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research and one of the report’s authors, said in an interview that he hoped the study would be read by policymakers who are in the middle of the debate about campus-carry laws (NBC News).

A Harvard Study found that access to firearms increases the risk of suicide among populations of students, who are already vulnerable. Ecologic studies that compare states with high gun ownership levels to those with low gun ownership levels find that in the U.S., where there are more guns, there are more suicides. “The higher suicide rates result from higher firearm suicides; the non-firearm suicide rate is about equal across states” (Harvard)

Another study (Miller 2007) used survey-based measures of state household firearm ownership (from the CDC’s Behavioral Risk Factor Surveillance System) while controlling for state-level measures of mental illness, drug and alcohol abuse, and other factors associated with suicide. The study found that males and females and people of all age groups were at higher risk for suicide if they lived in a state with high firearm prevalence. This is perhaps most concrete when looking not at rates or regression results but at raw numbers. The authors compared the 40 million people who live in the states with the lowest firearm prevalence (HI, MA, RI, NJ, CT, NY) to about the same number living in the states with the highest firearm prevalence (WY, SD, AK, WV, MT, AR, MS, ID, ND, AL, KY, WI, LA, TN, UT). Overall suicides were almost twice as high in the high-gun states, even though non-firearm suicides were about equal (Harvard)

Grossman (2005) found that while the risk of youth suicide is lowest in families with no firearms at home, among gun-owning families, youths living in homes in which all firearms are stored unloaded and locked are at lower risk for suicide than those living in homes in which firearms are stored less securely (Harvard).

It may be worth noting here that gun-rights advocates have helped block federal research into gun violence for years.

Common Arguments Against Guns on Campus

Those against carrying guns on college campuses believe that having more firearms around makes gun crime more likely. They oppose the campus-carry campaign as an extension of broader efforts to allow people to carry concealed weapons in other public areas, which they say raises the risk of violence.

Critics also argue that apart from safety concerns, permitting guns to be carried on campus will have chilling effects on free speech. College classrooms might be censored as a result, as faculty and students might not be inclined to discuss contentious issues in the open without fear that students, absent rhetorical skills, might pull a gun to prove their point.

In an active shooter situation, the likelihood of another gun-carrying student diffusing the situation safely and responsibly is slim. Heroic notions that promote fighting bullets with bullets, ultimately putting more students in danger and increasing the likelihood of injury by increasing the number of guns on campus.

The question remains – what happens when a licensed gun owner who is permitted to carry a concealed firearm is the person who becomes the danger to other students?

Common Arguments For Guns on Campus

Those in favor of carrying guns on college campuses argue that those who have proper permits are being denied the ability to defend themselves by having to comply with state and campus gun restrictions.

Gun-rights advocates including Students for Concealed Carry — a group launched in the wake of Virginia Tech —maintain that an armed campus is a safer campus because police typically can’t respond quickly enough to stop a mass shooter in the act (USA Today).

A Compromise?

If exercising the right to carry a weapon on campus is a deal breaker for a given individual, perhaps attending a university campus where the activity is welcome is a better choice for that person. In spite of the recent spate of mass-shootings and a high-profile shooting on a college campus (VA Tech), college campuses are, for the most part, not social spaces characterized by violent activity. Some people derisively refer to them as “safe spaces” and in this they are not altogether incorrect (sexual assault is another issue).

Though rules can be broken, research and evidence suggest it is better to have rules that keep weapons away from campus than to remove stricter rules and open the door to a greater potential for violence.

Sources

Pennsylvania State Police, Carrying Firearms in Pennsylvania

The Armed Campus in the Anxiety Age, by Ian Bogost

Campus Carry In the Spotlight, by Nick Roll, Inside Higher Education (IHE)

More Guns on Campuses Won’t Make People Safer, Researchers Say, by Jon Schuppe, NBC News

Harvard Public Health Study

Baxley F, Miller M. Parental misperceptions about children and firearms. Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine. 2006;160(5):542-7.

Grossman DC, Mueller BA, Riedy C, et al. Gun storage practices and risk of youth suicide and unintentional firearm injuries. JAMA. 2005;293(6):707-14.

Helpful Information on Pennsylvania vehicle carry provided by Mike Giaramita’s Pennsylvania Law Abiding Gun Owner Blog.

Discussion Questions (none of this information is being used for research purposes and you may answer anonymously using a pseudonym/nom de plume)

What do you think about your university’s policy on the concealing and carrying of guns, firearms, and weapons on campus?

Do you know anyone who conceals/carries on campus? Do you know more than one person who conceals/carries on campus?

If you knew that a classmate was carrying a prohibited concealed firearm, how would feel about it?

Does the idea of other students carrying weapons on campus make you feel safe? Does it make you feel unsafe?

Would you want to conceal carry on the Penn State campus if the rules were changed? If so, why?

Do you agree or disagree with the statement: colleges are safer when police officers are the only ones armed.

Do you feel that owning and/or carrying a gun is essential to your personal freedom?

Do you feel that attempts to regulate firearms represent an infringement on your personal freedom?

Do you think gun violence is a problem in the United States?

Have you ever known anyone who has been shot?

Do you think gun access should be restricted? Or do you think nothing should be done?

Finally, if you don’t know anyone that conceals and carries a firearm on campus, you can simply share any other thoughts you might have on the subject that are not covered by these questions.

Is Masculinity in “Crisis?”

According to scholar Roger Horrocks, patriarchal masculinity is killing men. That is to say, men are vulnerable to the particular ways manhood is idealized that require them to engage in deeply self-destructive behaviors (Horrocks, 1994). The movie “Fight Club,” though perhaps a bit dated as it were, illustrates this crisis in action.

In Fight Club, men are portrayed as having been effectively neutered by capitalism. The protagonist, played by Edward Norton, embodies this type of man, as the plot reveals his “split” personality in tortured by conversations with his idealized self – the character played by Brad Pitt.

So what is this crisis and where did it come from? There are no simple answers. A good place to start looking may be the post- World War II era, as developments in connection with the war fostered major changes in the economy, which in turn brought about changes at home and at work. Relations between men and women during this time were radically reformulated. The breadwinning role of the family patriarch, who worked a blue collar job – “Joe Lunchbox” – was destabilized and income responsibility increasingly shifted toward women.

Pointing to what he calls “masculinity at the end of an era,” gender scholar Michael Kimmel cites that men are generally unhappy with changes that occurred in American society over the past 30 years. According to Kimmel “meritocracy sucks when you are suddenly one of the losers.”

The War on Masculinity

By the late 1960’s, the post-World War II economic boom that launched a wave of consumerism to help secure lifestyles for working-class men began to give way. The “American Dream” that is so often idealized gave way to the American nightmare, where the stable employment of many working-class and middle-class white men started to crumble.

Anger and resentment over the President Johnson’s Great Society programs, the Vietnam War, the Watergate scandal, and Civil Rights legislation all helped bring about a strong anti-government sentiment. During this time period, office work replaced stereotypically masculine heavy industry occupations that had been the mainstay of previous generations. In the world of work, the newfound egalitarianism brought about by these social changes and through force of necessity (two household incomes instead of one were now required) was as not always celebrated. Income precarity called into question male claims to power based on their “breadwinner” status. Men were, in many respects, emasculated. Their factory jobs, once a source of pride, became outdated and “feminized.”

The “real man” of days gone by – the powerfully built working-class muscle man – was no longer the ideal. Hollywood and Madison Avenue effectively replaced him with a leaner, cleaner, and more highly stylized “new man.” This new ideal is now typified by the well-groomed, slight built, chiseled, underwear model.

But surely these are not real men? Far from it. They’re feminized “gay” men – men who are, for all intents and purposes, neutered and domesticated.

Not surprisingly, it is this post-war time period, the time of the 1950’s, which is forever ensconced in the minds of many men, old and young alike, as a “golden era.” For it is perceived to be the last uncontested time that men were truly happy – where their place at the top of the social hierarchy was unchallenged and they could still be “real men.”

Race relations were also renegotiated. The success of the Civil Rights movement meant that the secure jobs white men once claimed to themselves without competition from more than 50% of the population were no longer “off limits” to women and racialized others. Diversity and multiculturalism increasingly ruled the day. To add insult to injury, the “greed is good” Wall Street ethic increasingly came to define what was applauded as “breadwinning” in contemporary society. As a result, narratives about who deserves social rewards, who works hard, who is on welfare, and who is privileged (or not) started to coalesce and form the basis of a new form of contentious populist politics that were (are) imbued with strong racial undercurrents.

Labor relations were also put to the test. Union wages that formed the basis of a comfortable life for such men and their families were put under pressure during this time period. So much so that the percent of jobs reflecting union pay dropped from 30% to the barely 10% where it stands today (census citation…source income stats). Working class men with high school diplomas shouldered the brunt of these changes, as many were among the first generation that economists point to as having become “downwardly mobile.” And by this, it is implied that this group was statistically more likely to not be as economically successful and secure as their parents before them.

These developments not only called into question what it means to be a man, they left many men feeling hopeless, adrift, and unsure of their place in a world – a world that, by almost every measurable and symbolic indicator effectively left them behind. What does it mean to be masculine? What can a man do? What would it take to make men “great again?” These are the questions that many men struggle to answer.

Violence Fixes Everything

As Fight Club seems to argue, aggression and violence fix everything. Fisticuffs, as evidenced by a clarifying hard punch in the face, is all takes to get a man woke to the power of his masculine identity. One question we might ask here points to another dimension of the problem – how is the production of masculine identity, male power, and violence bound up with male sexuality?

Organized sports and military service both emphasize rugged individualism within a framework of male bonding. Buying, collecting and shooting guns, especially guns that are evocative of military weaponry – a bonus for men who either didn’t find time to serve, were busy making money (or maybe they just couldn’t “man up”). Men find familiarity in these structures. Consequently, any threat to these institutions (NFL protests) represents a potential death blow to the last means of escape men who resort to them to simulate the feeling of life that is all but gone.

Politicians have taken notice of the crises and have cleverly exploited it to advance the careers of political men who have themselves, in many respects, failed to live up to these ideals. They have cleverly managed to harness the power of toxic rhetoric to mobilize the legions of “lost boys” in order to get them to vote. In the process, however, they set off a chain reaction of self-righteous anger, which has had spill-over effects in the society at large.

By telling men you’re going to bring the old jobs back and reinstall them to their rightful place on top of the social hierarchy (the way it was in the good old days), everyone gets to feel great again. The question is, what will happen when empty promises don’t produce jobs? What will happen when men are left with only their anger to comfort them?

Into the Education Factory

American men are clearly shooketh. Changes on the economic front now force many young men, who would not typically seek to acquire a college degree, to enroll in college. Some of these men may see themselves as hostages of a broken system they don’t like and confined to social spaces where they don’t fit in. This new group of college men may be less interested in “higher learning” and the wisdom espoused by liberal professors than they are simply amassing credits to get a credential that keeps them from working at Walmart.

And herein lies a problem: “credential seeking” when it is uncoupled from “knowledge seeking” within a higher education system that was never designed to be “vocational school” is going to produce a lot of frustration and even failure. Potentially, this creates status and achievement anxiety for students, who may struggle to find their way, while institutions scramble to meet the needs of the new “customer.”

Outside of the education factory walls, young men may seethe with resentment, having been effectively excluded from new economy opportunities (often for lack of education). They may be bitter about economic and social changes that have left them behind and seek communities of like-minded others in online forums, where they can connect with people who share their pain. These are the men that have “failed to adjust” (Kimmel).

In the old days, college wasn’t a mandate. Getting a job was simply a matter of walking into a union hiring hall, meeting your dad’s friends, and conveying a willingness to work hard. The trouble is now that the failure to achieve credentials can produce acute levels of anxiety and social exclusion, which we have seen in many cases becomes a pathway to violence.

What Is Toxic Masculinity?

The concept of “toxic masculinity” is used in the social sciences to describe male behavior that exceeds conventional and normative masculine behavior. When you think of the directives “Be a Man,” “Man up,” and “Sack up” you may be close to understanding how contemporary social mandates dictate the way “real men” are supposed to behave as they pursue a particular sense of self. I like to think of it as masculine praxis, or masculinity in action. Unfortunately, it is a form of self-identity that is harmful to both men and women.

Toxic masculinity is masculinity on steroids. Sadly and predictably, it produces profoundly negative social and psychological effects, as it is often violent if not deadly.

For a conceptual definition, we might look to Eric Mankowski, who is the head of Portland State University’s Gender and Violence research team. He argues that the concept of toxic masculinity has 4 components: suppression of anything stereotypically feminine, suppression of emotions related to vulnerability (i.e. fear, sadness, helplessness), male domination over women and other men, and aggression. It is from these 4 expectations that we get attitudes and behaviors, like “I deserve to have access to women’s bodies” (Mankowski). When masculinity is under threat, for reasons as diverse as poor economic prospects and loss of social privilege and power, this is when toxic masculinity tends to reveal itself.

Toxic masculinity upholds a patriarchal belief system that males must dominate in relationships, particularly the household, at work, and throughout public life. To be “manly” is indistinguishable from being dominating. Behavior tends to be aggressive and hyper-sexual. Often there is an aim to assert control over other people.

Put another way, toxic masculinity espouses classically misogynistic views that understand and naturalize masculine/male qualities as inherently superior to feminine/female qualities. Stereotypically, we might conceptualize the disposition as one that promotes stoicism and “quiet strength” – an aversion towards being emotionally expressive (considered feminine).

As the sociologist, Lisa Wade writes in her article “Confronting Manhood After Trump,” toxic masculinity doesn’t work for all men:

“Poor and working-class men, old men, queer men, trans men, men of color, immigrant men, and men with disabilities disproportionately lose [from toxic masculinity]. So do men who find no pleasure in domination. Ironically, this is often why men who are failing in this macho competition—the economically struggling, the unmanly nerds, and even sometimes gay men—are among the most obviously sexist. They may be at the bottom of a hierarchy of men, they reason, but at least they’re not women.”

Toxic masculine behaviors, unfortunately, are not always problematized in American culture. Even worse, they are often celebrated; they are understood to be “natural” and universal. Domination of women and lust for power combined with physical displays of brute strength are sadly admired and are abundant.

Take, for example, Hollywood executive Harvey Weinstein. Weinstein was well-known for being a bully. He yelled at and demeaned everyone around him, including other men (Valenti). In spite of this, he was widely admired, counting former Presidents as friendly associates.

It is important to note that Weinstein’s hyper-aggressive sexual assault of the women whose careers he controlled was not simply about sex; it was always about power. In the media coverage of his sex crimes, there is one troubling narrative emerges: people treat him as an “exceptional” example of bad behavior. Yet as journalist and author Jessica Valenti points out, his behavior is not really exceptional at all:

“For too long,” she says, “we’ve lauded men’s domination and aggressiveness as a sign of leadership rather than possible red flags. When men talk over everyone else in a room, we call it confidence rather than entitlement. If they berate others in meetings, we call them powerful and passionate, not bullying. And when they treat women at work differently than they do men, we’re told that they’re not sexist – they’re just “old-school.”

Instead of venerating men who exhibit domineering attitudes at work, what if we saw their behavior as a warning sign? After all, experts and research tell us that harassers and sexual abusers often adhere to tradional gender roles, that they’re likely narcissists, and that they exhibit behaviors consistent with particular kinds of over-the-top masculinity.

In other words, we have a pretty good idea of what a harasser might act like at work. So why not do something about it?” (Valenti)

Feminist Epistemology: Patriarchy & Hegemonic Masculinity

Scholars in gender studies point to the term “hegemonic masculinity,” conceived in R. Connell’s gender order theory. Hegemonic masculinity is defined here as the current configuration of practice that legitimizes men’s dominant position in society and justifies the subordination of women and other marginalized ways of being a man (R. W. Connell, 2005). In what is a significant development, Connell’s theory doesn’t point to one essential masculinity; but rather identifies that there are “multiple masculinities” which can vary across space, time, and individuals.

The sociological concept hegemonic derives from a theory originally articulated by the Italian Marxist theorist, Antonio Gramsci – cultural hegemony. Hegemonic in this case refers to the cultural dynamics by which a social group claims and sustains a dominant position within a social hierarchy. The following figure illustrates the circular/cyclical pattern of how hegemonic masculinity is produced, reproduced, and perpetuated. Gramsci’s theory has wide-ranging applications, as it might be used to describe social dynamics in criminology, education, gender relations, media, and industrial organization.

Not unlike toxic masculinity, hegemonic masculinity refers to a culturally idealized form of manhood; one that is traditionally focused on bread-winning and embodied performances that exude dominance (psychic as well as hierarchically). Personal qualities that are suggestive of a brutish, even violent, physicality are prized. This produces men who, not surprisingly, are anxiety-ridden, crisis-prone, and sometimes inclined toward violence, which is seen as a socially acceptable means to maintaining their deserved dominant social position.

The concept of hegemonic masculinity was further influenced by psychoanalysis and the work of Sigmund Freud. Freud produced the first analytic biographies of men and showed how adult personality was a system that was dynamic and constantly under tension.

Other work that we might look to that adds additional explanation includes Erich Fromm and Judith Butler, who both explore psychological themes in their work. Whereas Fromm explores the role of social class and material concepts in an individual’s psychic character development in connection with violence, Butler calls attention to the idea of gender as a performance.

Fromm’s work is particularly applicable here, to the extent that his theories integrate Freudian psychoanalysis with Marxist historical materialism, although he differs from them both in very significant ways. By making freedom the cornerstone of his theory, he allows people to escape the biological determinism of Freud and the social class determinism of Marx. Going one step further, Fromm develops a personality theory, where he argues that each socioeconomic class fosters a particular character, which is governed by ideas that justify and maintain it. Social character, to use his words, orients the individual toward tasks and actions that will assure the perpetuation of the socioeconomic system.

More recent social science research has explored how these psychological landscapes may play out in practical and material ways. Michael Kimmel’s Angry White Men looks at the roots of violent masculinity among downwardly mobile white men. He uses the term “aggrieved entitlement” to characterize how some men (white men in particular) are angered to the point of violence. These works can help us begin, as Mankowsky says, “to deconstruct how masculinity is socialized as a performative task rather than a biological imperative” (Mankowski).

“You Will Not Replace Us” (the Jews Will Not Replace Us)

Fear of “replacement” has for a long time been a rallying cry for the European alt-right youth movement, Generation Identity. But in this case, we’re not only talking about a crisis of masculinity but a specific type of masculinity; one that is white and Christian and opposed to ethnic diversity and multiculturalism.

Other American identarian movements have picked up on this refrain and they are quite literally carrying a torch for it, as was demonstrated in Charlottesville Virginia. So it’s not just masculinity that is perceived to be in crisis…this is a problem of Western civilization as a whole, where male identity, racial identity, and religious identity are revealed to be inseparable and deeply intertwined.

According to the French writer, Renaud Camus, “people don’t want other people to come in their territory, in their country, and change their cultures and their religions, their way of living, their way of eating, their way of dressing. It’s a worry that is central to the very essence of being human. To be human is to not be replaceable. That is, a human being is not an object, not a thing.” So to some degree, these feelings should not surprise us. But is violence the solution?

Normalizing Violence

Toxic masculinity uses violence and coercion to enforce hierarchical social relations, where masculinity is positioned over and above femininity. In doing so, it normalizes violence that too often results in the degradation and outright murder of women. But it doesn’t stop here.

Violence can and often is directed at any opportune target that fails to conform to the norms of toxic masculinity. And this includes men too – “lesser men” – men who are poor, working-class, nerds, old, queer-bodied, trans, men with disabilities, as well as immigrants – in other words, any man whose embodiment and behavior falls outside standards upheld by American and European models of masculinity.

Following the same logic, it includes men who fail to embrace norms that call for the domination of others – “Cucks” and “Soy Boys” are the trendy monikers of late that describe the men of late who are driving the contentious politics of the contemporary moment.

Data reported by Brandwatch

The advertisement depicts the bolt of a rifle; the implication being that if you don’t have familiarity and expertise with guns you are not a real man; you are a woman.

Capitalism & Masculine Performance – A Strain Theory of Masculinity

For a long time, American men have bought into the idea of what is a classically liberal notion – the idea of the “social contract.” Setting aside Hobbes and Rousseau for the moment, we might say simply that this idea is understood within the American imaginary as a belief that all one has to do is “work hard” and everything will be okay. This always was and remains a fantasy for all but a few.

The basic problem that many never recognized (and continue not to recognize) is that the deck was always stacked in their favor. America, the land of “equal opportunity” was never really equal; some were more equal than others (i.e. white men), as discrimination against women and ethnic outsiders was inherently built into the system.

Robert Merton’s strain theory was advanced to elaborate on Emile Durkheim’s strain theory, where he articulated his concept of “anomie” – a feeling characterized by anxiety and alienation, where one is cast adrift due to profound changes in values and social ideals. Merton, of course, added an important economic component to Durkheim’s theory and offered a model to explain how people might react to economic strain. But what if we were to elaborate this theory even further to address the crisis in masculinity, where we took a more intersectional approach? We might look at Merton’s theory in connection with Connell’s masculinity theory, taking care to look at the confluence of social identities brought about by gender, race, and social class dynamics.

Economic discrimination and social inequality make it difficult for males who are not white to attain levels of economic success that put them on equal footing with their white male counterparts. In light of this, there may be social pressure for men of color to assert social dominance (which they lack) – to project power and claim status – by acting hypermasculine. They make up for their lack of economic success as well as their perceived lack of masculinity by engaging in exaggerated social performances in order to reclaim it.

Why Is It Always the White Guy?

The socialization of males in American society (which varies considerably based on one’s race and class), as has been shown here, relies in no small measure upon the encouragement of men to achieve self-definition, independence, strength, and a sense of purpose through violence.

Military service represents the paragon of this ideal, however, the dynamic is similarly prevalent in occupations like policing, as well as in sports and fitness. All of these interlocking fields of what has traditionally been male endeavor participate to some extent in the social reproduction of what is essentially a sanctioned “cult of violence;” one that confers honor and status upon men that can establish dominant status over weaker men and women as well as those who are members of defined racial/ethnic groups. Real men bring the pain. Women are pain.

Sociologists have gone to considerable lengths to study issues like domestic violence and gang violence. But very little work looks at violence specifically in connection with white men as a social group. Michael Kimmel’s work, as I have already pointed out, takes up the issue of American anger within the context of male entitlement (what he calls “aggrieved entitlement” and criminologist Mike King calls “aggrieved whiteness – the notion that white Americans have become oppressed victims of politically correct multiculturalism).

Wasting Their Whiteness

Kimmel’s work alludes to a social-psychic phenomenon that was first identified by W.E.B. Du Bois. Writing in Black Reconstruction in America, Du Bois called attention to labor dynamics that pitted white workers against newly freed blacks. Preserving Southern racial hegemony after the Civil War was recognized to be as crucial to the profits of Northern capitalists as it was for counterparts in the South. To maintain their profits, capitalists exploited a key dynamic of white psychology – paying these workers poorly, they capitalized on the power of white supremacist racial ideologies, which had the effect of securing for poor whites a privileged spot in the racial hierarchy. The low wages of poor whites were supplemented by a “psychological wage” of social superiority. This ultimately proved more attractive to them than maintaining solidarity with black workers.

Not much has changed since this time. If history proves anything, it’s that the most effective strategy for capitalists has been to weaponize racial antipathy to pit laborers against each other. Being poor in American was then and remains now better than being equal to blacks.

It stands to reason, however, that not all white men have been able to achieve the economic success they thought was theirs for the taking. Interestingly, this is where the ideology of white supremacy is revealed to be the con that it is. Struggling to get by and not feeling particularly “privileged” as they are so often told, they get angry when life doesn’t produce the rewards they were told they could expect. That is to say, they worked and did their “part” but hard work didn’t pay off. Forced to take work that is often perceived to be beneath them, working for money that fails to measure up to their socially ordained worth and value, all while being told how to talk, behave, and dress….this set the stage for contemporary social discontent.

Escaping the “Man Box”

The concept of a “Man Box” was first popularized by American activist Tony Porter. Porter uses it to draw attention to stereotypical expectations of male behaviors, including heterosexuality, not expressing weakness or fear, acting tough and aggressive, not asking for help, and viewing women as objects (McCool). In England, volunteers working for a charity called The GREAT Initiative operationalized the concept of the Man Box through their work in schools, where they set up workshops to train young boys (age 9) about gender issues. The purpose of the workshop was to point up stereotypical ways of thinking with the end goal being to help boys to rebuild their understanding of masculinity so they can feel empowered without hurting others. By the end of the workshop, the boys write about their vision for a masculine ideal. Some wrote things like: “asking for help shows strength not weakness”, “treat everyone as equal” and the ready-made protest slogan “object 2 objectifying” (McCool). The program offers one example of what might be done in American classrooms to help undo the damage of masculine stereotypes.

Another U.S. based program, Rethink Masculinity, helped organized a class for men (the pilot project was a partnership between the Washington, D.C., Rape Crisis Center, Collective Action for Safe Spaces, and ReThink, an organization that works to prevent sexual assault). This particular program billed itself as a class where men “learn how social constructs of masculinity harm them and the people around them and work to construct healthier masculinities.” Or, as one participant put it, “It was eight weeks of guys discussing how they can address their actions with better self-awareness and less toxicity.” Other programs include the Men’s Project at the University of Wisconsin, Masculinity 101 at Brown University, and the Duke Men’s Project at Duke. The goal, with all of these programs, once again, is to help men examine their own biases and behaviors in order to cut down on misogyny and gender-based violence (Campbell).

Where Do We Go From Here?

So what do we do now? How do we address the damage that is, as Kimmel argues, the result of when men fail to adjust? Can men unlearn toxic masculinity?

The good news is the answer is yes. Anything that is socially constructed can be “deconstructed.” Which is to say, if we made men this way, we can unmake those things that contribute to toxic behavior and social identity. Ultimately, there is no choice in the matter. For it is not only men but also women who suffer when men feel compelled to live up to unrealistic ideals imposed on them by a society that glorifies and rewards toxic masculinity. We have to be willing to recognize that we all are not powerless and keep working on it – and everyone has to do their part.

Sources

“It’s No Accident That Sexual Harassers Rise Up in the Ranks,” by Jessica Valenti, The Guardian.

“I Went to a Feminism Class for Private School Boys,” by Alice McCool, October 2016.

“Confronting Manhood After Trump,” by Lisa Wade, January 2018.

“Masculinity in Crisis,” by Roger Horrocks, Self & Society, Vol 22, No.4, September 1994.

“The Men Taking Classes to Unlearn Toxic Masculinity,” by Olivia Campbell, 2017.

R. W. Connell, Masculinities. Second Edition. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, (1995) 2005.

Study by Brandwatch

Discussion Questions

Eastern State Penitentiary was once the most famous and expensive prison in the world. Today, it stands today in ruin; its grounds offer glimpses into a haunting world of crumbling cellblocks and empty guard towers. The lonely corridors and vaulted sky-lit cells at one time held many of America’s most notorious criminals, including “Slick Willie” Sutton and “Scarface” Al Capone. The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1965.

History

Eastern Penitentiary quickly became a model for more than 300 prisons worldwide. As news of its notoriety spread, foreign dignitaries that included the famous writer Charles Dickens as well as the French General Lafayette.

Originally designed by John Haviland, Eastern State opened on October 25, 1829. Considered to be the world’s first true penitentiary, its revolutionary system of incarceration, dubbed the “Pennsylvania system” or “separate system” encouraged separate confinement (the warden was legally required to visit every inmate every day, and the overseers were mandated to see each inmate three times a day) as a form of rehabilitation.

The Pennsylvania System was opposed contemporaneously by the Auburn system (also known as the New York system), which held that prisoners should be forced to work together in silence, and could be subjected to physical punishment (Sing Sing prison was an example of the Auburn system). Although the Auburn system was favored in the United States, Eastern State’s radical radial floor plan and system of solitary confinement became a model for prisons worldwide.

Inmates were housed in cells that could only be accessed by entering through a small exercise yard attached to the back of the prison; a small portal, just large enough to pass meals, opened onto the cell blocks. This design proved impractical, and in the middle of construction, cells were constructed that allowed prisoners to enter and leave the cell blocks through small metal doors that were covered by a heavy wooden door to filter out the noise (like the one pictured above).

Saving Souls

It was no coincidence that the halls of Eastern State were designed to evoke the feeling of being in church. Vaulted ceilings, arched windows, and light portals that filtered light into the prisoners’ cells were all designed with this purpose in mind.

Some believe that the doors were small so prisoners would have a harder time getting out, minimizing an attack on a security guard. Others have explained the small doors forced the prisoners to bow while entering their cell. This design is related to penance and ties to the religious inspiration of the prison. The cells made of concrete featured a single glass skylight that represented the “Eye of God,” which was intended to suggest to the prisoners that God was always watching them.

Cell accommodations were advanced for their time, as each included a faucet with running water over a flush toilet. Curved pipes along part of one wall served as central heating during the winter months where hot water would be run through the pipes to keep the cells reasonably heated. Toilets were remotely flushed twice a week by the guards of the cellblock.

The original design of the building was for seven one-story cell blocks, but by the time cell block three was completed, the prison was already over capacity. All subsequent cell blocks had two floors. Toward the end, cell blocks 14 and 15 were hastily built due to overcrowding. They were built and designed by prisoners. Cellblock 15 was for the worst behaved prisoners, and the guards were gated off from there entirely. Inmates were punished with the “individual-treatment system.” At the time this form of punishment was thought to be most effective. They would be separated from others and housed in an area that some might refer to today as solitary confinement.

Pep the Cat-Murdering Dog

In 1924, Pennsylvania Governor Gifford Pinchot allegedly sentenced Pep “The Cat-Murdering Dog” – yes, he was a real dog – to a life sentence at Eastern State. Pep allegedly murdered the governor’s wife’s cherished cat. Prison records reflect that Pep was assigned an inmate number (no. C2559), which is seen in his mug shot. However, the reason for Pep’s incarceration remains a subject of some debate. A contemporary newspaper article reported that the governor donated his own dog to the prison to increase inmate morale.

Famous Escapes

On April 3, 1945, a major escape was carried out by twelve inmates (including the infamous Willie Sutton), who over the course of a year managed to dig an undiscovered 97-foot (30 m) tunnel under the prison wall. During renovations in the 1930’s an additional 30 incomplete inmate-dug tunnels were discovered.

End of an Era

The prison was closed in 1971. Many prisoners and guards were transferred to Graterford Prison, located about 31 miles northwest of Eastern State. During the abandoned era (from its closing until the late 1980’s) a “forest” grew in the cell blocks and outside within the walls. The prison also became home to many stray cats.

In 1988, the Eastern State Penitentiary Task Force successfully petitioned Mayor Wilson Goode to halt plans for commercial redevelopment. Later, in 1994, Eastern State opened to the public for historic tours.

Documentary Film

Follow the link to watch a documentary on the prison – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=010-AI3YUAM

Discussion Questions

Have you ever visited Eastern State Penitentiary and if so what did you think?

Photo Gallery (photo credit Sandra Trappen)

Penn State Berks students getting an overview of the prison design, November 2017

Hospital operating room, where approximately 300 surgeries were conducted every year.

Al Capone’s prison cell

Life is a Factory

Let’s be honest – Karl Marx was a bit long-winded in his efforts to explain to every-day people how capitalism organized life around the factory system. Marx was also writing in the middle of the 1800s, he had boils on his face, and he looked like Santa Clause. What could he have possibly known then that would apply to our present day? As it turns out – quite a lot!

Fast forward to the future. Firms like Google, Facebook, Amazon, Netflix, and Twitter have pushed the boundaries of capitalism into new territory. The factory is everywhere, resulting in what Shoshana Zuboff calls “surveillance capitalism” (see her article attached below). Everything we do can be reduced to a data point that can, in turn, be sold and repurposed for profit. The tools of the trade – cell phones, laptops, and cameras, are in the process of changing our relationship to each other as well as our relationship to everything around us. We are the human resources of these new industries; extraction by distraction, the manipulation of affect, and the dispossession of our data are what makes us so valuable. Collectively, our thoughts, feelings, “likes,” and dreams are being monetized for profit. This behavioral data represents a boundless form of wealth accumulation, the limits of which are unthinkable. Every domain of social life is a potential target.

What we have here, in other words, is a new economic model. One whose goal, according to Zuboff, is “the harvest of behavioral surplus from people, bodies, things, processes, and places in both the virtual and the real world,’ so that this can be transformed into profits and power. Crucial to these efforts are ubiquitous surveillance systems built on computer systems infrastructures – digital platforms – which provide for the mass siphoning of public information.

Capitalism, as Marx was fond of arguing, is constantly changing. There are always new Modes of Production. Consequently, as Zuboff argues, we see that were once profits flowed from goods and services, this was eventually replaced by financial speculation. Today, surveillance and the monetization of mass behavioral data are fueling the economy. As a result, the predictive sciences – even prediction itself – has become the product, as companies compete for and sell our attention with the hope that they might alter our behavior.

Facebook Is Not Your Friend

Surveillance capitalism is not a conspiracy theory. To make sense of it, we might recall the eighteenth-century philosopher and social reformer, Jeremy Bentham, who designed the model panopticon as a prison to serve as an effective means of “obtaining the power of mind over mind, in a quantity hitherto without example.”

The Panopticon was envisioned as a type of institutional building. Bentham’s design concept idealized a single watchtower, whose watchman might observe (opticon) all (pan) occupants of the facility without them ever being able to discern whether or not they were being watched. This was, ideally, a circular structure with an “inspection house” where the management of the institution, stationed on a viewing platform, could watch people (prisoners, workers, children…students). Bentham conceived his basic plan as one that was equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, daycares, and asylums, but he devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a Panopticon prison, and it is this prison that we most identify with the use of the term. In Bentham’s panopticon, prisoners are a form of menial labor. Not much has changed more than 150 years later.

The French philosopher Michel Foucault would later in his work, Discipline & Punish, point to the Panopticon as a metaphor to describe how disciplinary power functions in society. The key here, which Foucault distinguishes, is that people at some point learn to internalize the watchful gaze of the watchers. “Compulsive visibility” is a price we pay to live in modern society. This is what keeps everyone in line and maintains individuals as disciplined bodies and subjects. Think about this next time someone tells you “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to hide,” as this is but one example of how people have come to internalize the panopticon to such an extent they can no longer see they have been overcome by the logic of the system.

Now that you can distinguish this, if you look hard enough, you will find the panopticon is everywhere. But the panopticon has evolved. Domination is no longer physical and doesn’t have to be achieved through confinement-based observation; it operates in ways that are more diffuse, where the target of the watchers gaze actually participates in the terms of their own domination.

For example, think about Facebook and the ascendance of the “like” clicks as a way to control human behavior. Your compulsion to click on a digital object here derives not from a physical and external power exerted on your body, but rather through your manufactured consent. Your participation in socially medicated digital surveillance produces data so that you might, in turn, be controlled by a system that manipulates your emotions and desires to “share” with others.

Alternatively, we might apply the concept to an understanding of how our contemporary government might function as a police state, where round-the-clock surveillance, authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and militarization work together to functionally weaponize technology. The end result is relentless mass marketing and groupthink, all of which have become pervasive in society to such an extent that people have come to passively accept their lot in life as a inmates/prisoners of the system – a system of their own making.

Facebook collects a lot of data from people and admits it. The recent Facebook/Cambridge Analytica revelations offer proof of this. People are collecting your data, storing it, and selling it every day in unforeseen ways. But people are also being recruited to inform on each other. Think about it: teachers are being turned into prison guards; students are monitoring and reporting on teachers with smartphones. People are being publically evaluated all the time (Yelp, Uber, Airbnb). Fill out this survey and let me know how I did! Our devices are reporting our vital personal information even when we think they are not, as often this occurs with/without our knowledge and understanding. And no one seems to care, so long as they can watch cat, puppy, and goat videos on their phone.

A smartphone user shows the Facebook application on his phone in this photo illustration. Facebook Inc’s mobile advertising revenue growth has continued to explode over the years, though it recently posted enormous losses in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica disclosures (REUTERS/Dado Ruvic).

Apart from the obvious dangers posed by a government that feels both justified and empowered to spy on its people, using technology to monitor and control them, we may be approaching a time where we will be forced to choose between obeying the demands of government—i.e., the law, or whatever a government official deems the law to be—and maintaining our individuality, integrity, and independence.

These developments, furthermore, have enormous implications for social inequality to the extent that the new economic model/surveillance state is not being run for the benefit of all its citizens to pursue life, liberty, and happiness. Rather, it is aimed at serving the profit motives of people who control the technology to benefit of those with wealth and power.

We Are All Prisoners. Everything is Jail

As was stated above, Foucault theorized the Panopticon as a “mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form” According to Foucault, the panopticon automatizes & disindividualizes power. Consequently, it doesn’t matter who exercises the power. Power produces homogeneous effects in populations to the extent that it creates a cruel but ingenious cage. At the same time, it creates populations of people who develop an affinity for their imposed as well as self-made prisons and the information ties that bind them.

Americans, in particular, are prone to boast and claim emphatically that they are “free.” They like to point to their guns and the second amendment as the ultimate guarantors of their freedom. But to what extent are you really free if your every movement can be monitored, uploaded, stored, and recalled for any reason?

Here are some additional questions to ponder:

How have you become accustomed to you social “chains” (in whatever form that takes)?

How have you allowed your comfort and your acquired false sense of security to render you powerless to resist?

How does technology, absent the physical coercion of interrogation tactics, torture, and hallucinogenic drugs, perhaps engage in softer forms of mind control, identity theft, dream manipulation, and other forms of social conditioning and indoctrination, “persuade” us all to comply and subjugate ourselves to the will of the powers-that-be?

How does one maintain their freedom in a society where prison walls are disguised within the trappings of technological and scientific progress, national security and so-called democracy?

Does standing for the national anthem at a sporting event, “thanking” soldiers for their service, suggest that a citizenry and a people are free? Or do these things merely offer the comforting illusion of freedom, all while functioning like a prison, where people have essentially become inmates of a system that controls, monitors, and disciplines them?

Police Panopticon

The American police state in many ways functions like a metaphorical panopticon. That is, American society is a circular prison, where “inmates” are monitored by virtual watchman situated in a central tower. Because the inmates cannot see the watchman, they are unable to tell whether or not they are being watched at any given time and must proceed under the assumption that they are always being watched.

As a case in point, the New York City Police Department has the largest police budget in the United States. In light of this, they have one of the largest budgets to conduct surveillance operations on citizens. After the 9/11 attacks, the NYPD purchased and deployed a fleet of mobile surveillance towers to monitor what were deemed to be “hot spots” – in high crime areas – throughout the city. The Mobile Utility Surveillance Towers (M.U.S.T) are self-contained, mobile units, that have a surveillance platform that extends from a conversion van. These vans have been used to monitor NATO summit protests in places like Seattle and Chicago and they are sometimes found on the Texas-Mexico border, but their deployment in New York marks the first time they’ve been employed by the NYPD.

NYC residents are less than enthusiastic about the towers and beefed-up security presence. East Village residents criticized the deployment of the M.U.S.T. units and demanded that the NYPD get rid of the ones they erected in Tompkins Square Park. Instead of round-the-clock surveillance, they want foot patrols, where “officer friendly” walks a beat — not Big Brother spying from a surveillance tower.

In addition to the towers, the NYPD is making use of what is referred to as “Stingray” technology, which enables them to track citizens’ cell phones without warrants. Since 2008, it was estimated that the NYPD tracked cellphones over 1,000 times, according to public records obtained by the New York Civil Liberties Union. As of now, they do not have a policy guiding how police can use the controversial devices (McCarthy).

The way the stingray devices work is that they mimic cell tower signals and track a cell phone’s location at a specific time. Law enforcement agencies can use the technology to track people’s movements through their cell phone use. Stingrays can also detect the phone numbers that a person has been communicating with, according to the NYCLU. The devices allow law enforcement to bypass cell phone carriers, who have provided information to police in the past. Moreover, they can track data about bystanders in close proximity to their intended targets (McCarthy).

Mariko Hirose, the NYCLU attorney who filed the records request, said the records reveal knowledge about NYPD’s stingray use that should have been divulged before police decided to start using them. “When local police agencies acquire powerful surveillance technologies like stingrays the communities should get basic information about what kind of power those technologies give to local law enforcement” (McCarthy).

The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism

Re-blog article by Shoshana Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism.”

You have probably noticed it already. There is a strange logic at the heart of the modern tech industry. The goal of many new tech startups is not to produce products or services for which consumers are willing to pay. Instead, the goal is to create a digital platform or hub that will capture information from as many users as possible — to grab as many ‘eyeballs’ as you can. This information can then be analyzed, repackaged and monetized in various ways.

Recently, Google surpassed Apple as the world’s most highly valued company in January for the first time since 2010 (back then each company was worth less than 200 billion – now each is valued at well over 500 billion.) While Google’s lead lasted only a few days, the company’s success has implications for everyone who lives within the reach of the Internet. Why? Because Google is ground zero for a wholly new subspecies of capitalism in which profits derive from the unilateral surveillance and modification of human behavior. This is a new surveillance capitalism that is unimaginable outside the inscrutable high-velocity circuits of Google’s digital universe, whose signature feature is the Internet and its successors.

While the world is riveted by the showdown between Apple and the FBI, the real truth is that the surveillance capabilities being developed by surveillance capitalists are the envy of every state security agency. What are the secrets of this new capitalism, how do they produce such staggering wealth, and how can we protect ourselves from its invasive power?

“Most Americans realize that there are two groups of people who are monitored regularly as they move about the country. The first group is monitored involuntarily by a court order requiring that a tracking device be attached to their ankle. The second group includes everyone else…”

Some will think that this statement is certainly true. Others will worry that it could become true. Perhaps some think it’s ridiculous. It’s not a quote from a dystopian novel, a Silicon Valley executive, or even an NSA official. These are the words of an auto insurance industry consultant intended as a defense of “automotive telematics” and the astonishingly intrusive surveillance capabilities of the allegedly benign systems that are already in use or under development. It’s an industry that has been notoriously exploitative toward customers and has had obvious cause to be anxious about the implications of self-driving cars for its business model. Now, data about where we are, where we’re going, how we’re feeling, what we’re saying, the details of our driving, and the conditions of our vehicle are turning into beacons of revenue that illuminate a new commercial prospect. According to the industry literature, these data can be used for dynamic real-time driver behavior modification triggering punishments (real-time rate hikes, financial penalties, curfews, engine lock-downs) or rewards (rate discounts, coupons, gold stars to redeem for future benefits).

Bloomberg Business Week notes that these automotive systems will give insurers a chance to boost revenue by selling customer driving data in the same way that Google profits by collecting information on those who use its search engine. The CEO of Allstate Insurance wants to be like Google. He says, “There are lots of people who are monetizing data today. You get on Google, and it seems like it’s free. It’s not free. You’re giving them information; they sell your information. Could we, should we, sell this information we get from people driving around to various people and capture some additional profit source…? It’s a long-term game.”

Who are these “various people” and what is this “long-term game”? The game is no longer about sending you a mail order catalogue or even about targeting online advertising. The game is selling access to the real-time flow of your daily life –your reality—in order to directly influence and modify your behavior for profit. This is the gateway to a new universe of monetization opportunities: restaurants who want to be your destination. Service vendors who want to fix your brake pads. Shops who will lure you like the fabled Sirens. The “various people” are anyone, and everyone who wants a piece of your behavior for profit. Small wonder, then, that Google recently announced that its maps will not only provide the route you search but will also suggest a destination.

You Are Being Measured

You probably don’t give it much thought, but you are constantly being measured. This occurs even when you are doing mundane things like driving your car and walking down the street. License plate numbers are being harvested en masse, alongside the faces in the cars that are attached to them. The data is typically stored and there is very little regulation currently on the books to govern who and how someone might access it. For more on this, check out the article “Algorithmic Regulation.”

The goal: change people’s actual behavior at scale

This is just one peephole, in one corner, of one industry, and the peepholes are multiplying like cockroaches. The Chief Data Scientist of a much-admired Silicon Valley company that develops applications to improve students’ learning once told me, “The goal of everything we do is to change people’s actual behavior at scale. When people use our app, we can capture their behaviors, identify good and bad behaviors, and develop ways to reward the good and punish the bad. We can test how actionable our cues are for them and how profitable for us”.

The very idea of a functional, effective, affordable product as a sufficient basis for economic exchange is dying. The sports apparel company Under Armour is reinventing its products as wearable technologies. The CEO wants to be like Google. He says, “If it all sounds eerily like those ads that, because of your browsing history, follow you around the Internet, that’s exactly the point–except Under Armour is tracking real behavior and the data is more specific… making people better athletes makes them need more of our gear.” The examples of this new logic are endless, from smart vodka bottles to Internet-enabled rectal thermometers and quite literally everything in between. A Goldman Sachs report calls it a “gold rush,” a race to “vast amounts of data.”

The assault on behavioral data

We’ve entered virgin territory here. The assault on behavioral data is so sweeping that it can no longer be circumscribed by the concept of privacy and its contests. This is a different kind of challenge now, one that threatens the existential and political canon of the modern liberal order defined by principles of self-determination that have been centuries, even millennia, in the making. I am thinking of matters that include, but are not limited to, the sanctity of the individual and the ideals of social equality; the development of identity, autonomy, and moral reasoning; the integrity of contract, the freedom that accrues to the making and fulfilling of promises; norms and rules of collective agreement; the functions of market democracy; the political integrity of societies; and the future of democratic sovereignty. In the fullness of time, we will look back on the establishment in Europe of the “Right to be Forgotten” and the EU’s more recent invalidation of the Safe Harbor doctrine as early milestones in a gradual reckoning with the true dimensions of this challenge.

There was a time when we laid responsibility for the assault on behavioral data at the door of the state and its security agencies. Later, we also blamed the cunning practices of a handful of banks, data brokers, and Internet companies. Some attribute the assault to an inevitable “age of big data,” as if it were possible to conceive of data born pure and blameless, data suspended in some celestial place where facts sublimate into truth.

Capitalism has been hijacked by surveillance

I’ve come to a different conclusion: The assault we face is driven in large measure by the exceptional appetites of a wholly new genus of capitalism, a systemic coherent new logic of accumulation that might be thought of as surveillance capitalism.

Capitalism has been hijacked by a lucrative surveillance project that subverts the “normal” evolutionary mechanisms associated with its historical success and corrupts the unity of supply and demand that has for centuries, however imperfectly, tethered capitalism to the genuine needs of its populations and societies, thus enabling the expansion of market democracy.

Surveillance capitalism is different; it’s a novel economic mutation bred from the clandestine coupling of the vast powers of the digital with the radical indifference and intrinsic narcissism of the financial capitalism and its neoliberal vision that have dominated commerce for at least three decades, especially in the Anglo economies. It is an unprecedented market form that roots and flourishes in lawless space. It was first discovered and consolidated at Google, then adopted by Facebook, and quickly diffused across the Internet. Cyberspace was its birthplace because, as Google/Alphabet Chairperson Eric Schmidt and his co-author, Jared Cohen, celebrate on the very first page of their book about the digital age, “the online world is not truly bound by terrestrial laws…it’s the world’s largest ungoverned space.”

While surveillance capitalism taps the invasive powers of the Internet as the source of capital formation and wealth creation, it is now, as I have suggested, poised to transform commercial practice across the real world too. An analogy is the rapid spread of mass production and administration throughout the industrialized world in the early twentieth century, but with one major caveat. Mass production was interdependent with its populations who were its consumers and employees. In contrast, surveillance capitalism preys on dependent populations who are neither its consumers nor its employees and are largely ignorant of its procedures.

Internet access is a fundamental human right

We once fled to the Internet as solace and solution, our needs for effective life thwarted by the distant and increasingly ruthless operations of late twentieth-century capitalism. In less than two decades after the Mosaic web browser was released to the public enabling easy access to the World Wide Web, a 2010 BBC poll found that 79% of people in 26 countries considered Internet access to be a fundamental human right. This is the Scylla and Charybdis of our plight. It is nearly impossible to imagine effective social participation ––from employment, to education, to healthcare–– without Internet access and know-how, even as these once flourishing networked spaces fall to a new and even more exploitative capitalist regime. It’s happened quickly and without our understanding or agreement. This is because the regime’s most poignant harms, now and later, have been difficult to grasp or theorize, blurred by extreme velocity and camouflaged by expensive and illegible machine operations, secretive corporate practices, masterful rhetorical misdirection, and purposeful cultural misappropriation.

Taming this new force depends upon careful naming. This symbiosis of naming and taming is vividly illustrated in the recent history of HIV research, and I offer it as analogy. For three decades scientists aimed to create a vaccine that followed the logic of earlier cures, training the immune system to produce neutralizing antibodies, but mounting data revealed unanticipated behaviors of the HIV virus that defy the patterns of other infectious diseases.

HIV research as analogy

The tide began to turn at the International AIDS Conference in 2012, when new strategies were presented that rely on a close understanding of the biology of rare HIV carriers whose blood produces natural antibodies. Research began to shift toward methods that reproduce this self-vaccinating response. A leading researcher announced, “We know the face of the enemy now, and so we have some real clues about how to approach the problem.” The point for us is that every successful vaccine begins with a close understanding of the enemy disease. We tend to rely on mental models, vocabularies, and tools distilled from past catastrophes ( i.e. the twentieth century’s totalitarian nightmares or the monopolistic predations of Gilded Age capitalism). But the vaccines we developed to fight those earlier threats are not sufficient or even appropriate for the novel challenges that we face today.

An evolutionary dead-end

Surveillance capitalism is not the only current modality of information capitalism, nor is it the only possible model for the future. To be sure, however, its fast track to capital accumulation and rapid institutionalization has made it the default model of information capitalism.

A cure depends upon many individual, social, and legal adaptations, but I am convinced that fighting the “enemy disease” cannot begin without a fresh grasp of the novel mechanisms that account for surveillance capitalism’s successful transformation of investment into capital. This has been one focus of my work in a new book, Master or Slave: The Fight for the Soul of Our Information Civilization, which will be published early next year. In the short space of this essay, I’d like to share some of my thoughts on this problem.

Fortune telling and selling

New economic logics and their commercial models are discovered by people in a time and place and then perfected through trial and error. Ford discovered and systematized mass production. General Motors institutionalized mass production as a new phase of capitalist development with the discovery and perfection of large-scale administration and professional management. In our time, Google is to surveillance capitalism what Ford and General Motors were to mass-production and managerial capitalism a century ago: discoverer, inventor, pioneer, role model, lead practitioner, and diffusion hub.

Specifically, Google is the mothership and ideal type of a new economic logic based on fortune telling and selling, an ancient and eternally lucrative craft that has exploited the human confrontation with uncertainty from the beginning of the human story. Paradoxically, the certainty of uncertainty is both an enduring source of anxiety and one of our most fruitful facts. It produced the universal need for social trust and cohesion, systems of social organization, familial bonding, and legitimate authority, the contract as formal recognition of reciprocal rights and obligations, and the theory and practice of what we call “free will.” When we eliminate uncertainty, we forfeit the human replenishment that attaches to the challenge of asserting predictability in the face of an always-unknown future in favor of the blankness of perpetual compliance with someone else’s plan.

Only incidentally related to advertising

Most people credit Google’s success to its advertising model. But the discoveries that led to Google’s rapid rise in revenue and market capitalization are only incidentally related to advertising. Google’s success derives from its ability to predict the future – specifically the future of behavior. Here is what I mean:

From the start, Google had collected data on users’ search-related behavior as a byproduct of query activity. Back then, these data logs were treated as waste, not even safely or methodically stored. Eventually, the young company came to understand that these logs could be used to teach and continuously improve its search engine.

The problem was this: Serving users with amazing search results “used up” all the value that users created when they inadvertently provided behavioral data. It’s a complete and self-contained process in which users are ends-in-themselves. All the value that users create is reinvested in the user experience in the form of improved search. In this cycle, there was nothing left over for Google to turn into capital. As long as the effectiveness of the search engine needed users’ behavioral data about as much as users needed search, charging a fee for service was too risky. Google was cool, but it wasn’t yet capitalism –– just one of many Internet startups that boasted “eyeballs” but no revenue.

Cambridge Analytica

Shift in the use of behavioral data

The year 2001 brought the dot.com bust and mounting investor pressures at Google. Back then advertisers selected the search term pages for their displays. Google decided to try and boost ad revenue by applying its already substantial analytical capabilities to the challenge of increasing an ad’s relevance to users –– and thus its value to advertisers. Operationally this meant that Google would finally repurpose its growing cache of behavioral data. Now the data would also be used to match ads with keywords, exploiting subtleties that only its access to behavioral data, combined with its analytical capabilities, could reveal.

It’s now clear that this shift in the use of behavioral data was an historic turning point. Behavioral data that were once discarded or ignored were rediscovered as what I call behavioral surplus. Google’s dramatic success in “matching” ads to pages revealed the transformational value of this behavioral surplus as a means of generating revenue and ultimately turning investment into capital. Behavioral surplus was the game-changing zero-cost asset that could be diverted from service improvement toward a genuine market exchange. Key to this formula, however, is the fact that this new market exchange was not an exchange with users but rather with other companies who understood how to make money from bets on users’ future behavior. In this new context, users were no longer an end-in-themselves. Instead, they became a means to profits in a new kind of marketplace in which users are neither buyers nor sellers nor products. Users are the source of free raw material that feeds a new kind of manufacturing process.

While these facts are known, their significance has not been fully appreciated or adequately theorized. What just happened was the discovery of a surprisingly profitable commercial equation –– a series of lawful relationships that were gradually institutionalized in the sui generis economic logic of surveillance capitalism. It’s like a newly sighted planet with its own physics of time and space, its sixty-seven hour days, emerald sky, inverted mountain ranges, and dry water.

A parasitic form of profit

The equation: First, the push for more users and more channels, services, devices, places, and spaces is imperative for access to an ever-expanding range of behavioral surplus. Users are the human nature-al resource that provides this free raw material. Second, the application of machine learning, artificial intelligence, and data science for continuous algorithmic improvement constitutes an immensely expensive, sophisticated, and exclusive twenty-first-century “means of production.” Third, the new manufacturing process converts behavioral surplus into prediction products designed to predict behavior now and soon. Fourth, these prediction products are sold into a new kind of meta-market that trades exclusively in future behavior. The better (more predictive) the product, the lower the risks for buyers, and the greater the volume of sales. Surveillance capitalism’s profits derive primarily, if not entirely, from such markets for future behavior.

While advertisers have been the dominant buyers in the early history of this new kind of marketplace, there is no substantive reason why such markets should be limited to this group. The already visible trend is that any actor with an interest in monetizing probabilistic information about our behavior and/or influencing future behavior can pay to play in a marketplace where the behavioral fortunes of individuals, groups, bodies, and things are told and sold. This is how in our own lifetimes we observe capitalism shifting under our gaze: once profits from products and services, then profits from speculation, and now profits from surveillance. This latest mutation may help explain why the explosion of the digital has failed, so far, to decisively impact economic growth, as so many of its capabilities are diverted into a fundamentally parasitic form of profit.

Unoriginal Sin

The significance of behavioral surplus was quickly camouflaged, both at Google and eventually throughout the Internet industry, with labels like “digital exhaust,” “digital breadcrumbs,” and so on. These euphemisms for behavioral surplus operate as ideological filters, in exactly the same way that the earliest maps of the North American continent labeled whole regions with terms like “heathens,” “infidels,” “idolaters,” “primitives,” “vassals,” or “rebels.” On the strength of those labels, native peoples, their places and claims, were erased from the invaders’ moral and legal equations, legitimating their acts of taking and breaking in the name of Church and Monarchy.

We are the native peoples now whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own behavior. They are erased in an astonishing and audacious act of dispossession by surveillance that claims its right to ignore every boundary in its thirst for knowledge of and influence over the most detailed nuances of our behavior. For those who wondered about the logical completion of the global processes of commodification, the answer is that they complete themselves in the dispossession of our intimate quotidian reality, now reborn as behavior to be monitored and modified, bought and sold.

The process that began in cyberspace mirrors the nineteenth-century capitalist expansions that preceded the age of imperialism. Back then, as Hannah Arendt described it in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “the so-called laws of capitalism were actually allowed to create realities” as they traveled to less developed regions where law did not follow. “The secret of the new happy fulfillment,” she wrote, “was precisely that economic laws no longer stood in the way of the greed of the owning classes.” There, “money could finally beget money,” without having to go “the long way of investment in production…”

“The original sin of simple robbery”

For Arendt, these foreign adventures of capital clarified an essential mechanism of capitalism. Marx had developed the idea of “primitive accumulation” as a big-bang theory –– Arendt called it “the original sin of simple robbery” –– in which the taking of lands and natural resources was the foundational event that enabled capital accumulation and the rise of the market system. The capitalist expansions of the 1860s and 1870s demonstrated, Arendt wrote, that this sort of original sin had to be repeated over and over, “lest the motor of capital accumulation suddenly die down.”

In his book The New Imperialism, geographer and social theorist David Harvey built on this insight with his notion of “accumulation by dispossession.” “What accumulation by dispossession does,” he writes, “is to release a set of assets…at very low (and in some instances zero) cost. Overaccumulated capital can seize hold of such assets and immediately turn them to profitable use…It can also reflect attempts by determined entrepreneurs…to ‘join the system’ and seek the benefits of capital accumulation.”

Breakthrough into “the system”

The process by which behavioral surplus led to the discovery of surveillance capitalism exemplifies this pattern. It is the foundational act of dispossession for a new logic of capitalism built on profits from surveillance that paved the way for Google to become a capitalist enterprise. Indeed, in 2002, Google’s first profitable year, founder Sergey Brin relished his breakthrough into “the system”, as he told Levy,

Honestly, when we were still in the dot-com boom days, I felt like a schmuck. I had an Internet start-up— so did everybody else. It was unprofitable, like everybody else’s, and how hard is that? But when we became profitable, I felt like we had built a real business.”

Brin was a capitalist all right, but it was a mutation of capitalism unlike anything the world had seen. Once we understand this equation, it becomes clear that demanding privacy from surveillance capitalists or lobbying for an end to commercial surveillance on the Internet is like asking Henry Ford to make each Model T by hand. It’s like asking a giraffe to shorten its neck or a cow to give up chewing. Such demands are existential threats that violate the basic mechanisms of the entity’s survival. How can we expect companies whose economic existence depends upon behavioral surplus to cease capturing behavioral data voluntarily? It’s like asking for suicide.

Google “Home”

More behavioral surplus for Google

The imperatives of surveillance capitalism mean that there must always be more behavioral surplus for Google and others to turn into surveillance assets, master as prediction, sell into exclusive markets for future behavior, and transform into capital. At Google and its new holding company called Alphabet, for example, every operation and investment aims to increasing the harvest of behavioral surplus from people, bodies, things, processes, and places in both the virtual and the real world. This is how a sixty-seven hour day dawns and darkens in an emerald sky. Nothing short of a social revolt that revokes collective agreement to the practices associated with the dispossession of behavior will alter surveillance capitalism’s claim to manifest data destiny.

What is the new vaccine? We need to reimagine how to intervene in the specific mechanisms that produce surveillance profits and in so doing reassert the primacy of the liberal order in the twenty-first century capitalist project. In undertaking this challenge we must be mindful that contesting Google, or any other surveillance capitalist, on the grounds of monopoly is a 20th century solution to a 20th century problem that, while still vitally important, does not necessarily disrupt surveillance capitalism’s commercial equation. We need new interventions that interrupt, outlaw, or regulate 1) the initial capture of behavioral surplus, 2) the use of behavioral surplus as free raw material, 3) excessive and exclusive concentrations of the new means of production, 4) the manufacture of prediction products, 5) the sale of prediction products, 6) the use of prediction products for third-order operations of modification, influence, and control, and 5) the monetization of the results of these operations. This is necessary for society, for people, for the future, and it is also necessary to restore the healthy evolution of capitalism itself.

A coup from above

In the conventional narrative of the privacy threat, institutional secrecy has grown, and individual privacy rights have been eroded. But that framing is misleading, because privacy and secrecy are not opposites but rather moments in a sequence. Secrecy is an effect; privacy is the cause. Exercising one’s right to privacy produces choice, and one can choose to keep something secret or to share it. Privacy rights thus confer decision rights, but these decision rights are merely the lid on the Pandora’s Box of the liberal order. Inside the box, political and economic sovereignty meet and mingle with even deeper and subtler causes: the idea of the individual, the emergence of the self, the felt experience of free will.

Surveillance capitalism does not erode these decision rights –– along with their causes and their effects –– but rather it redistributes them. Instead of many people having some rights, these rights have been concentrated within the surveillance regime, opening up an entirely new dimension of social inequality. The full implications of this development have preoccupied me for many years now, and with each day my sense of danger intensifies. The space of this essay does not allow me to follow these facts to their conclusions, but I offer this thought in summary.

Surveillance capitalism reaches beyond the conventional institutional terrain of the private firm. It accumulates not only surveillance assets and capital, but also rights. This unilateral redistribution of rights sustains a privately administered compliance regime of rewards and punishments that is largely free from detection or sanction. It operates without meaningful mechanisms of consent either in the traditional form of “exit, voice, or loyalty” associated with markets or in the form of democratic oversight expressed in law and regulation.

A profoundly anti-democratic power

In result, surveillance capitalism conjures a profoundly anti-democratic power that qualifies as a coup from above: not a coup d’état, but rather a coup des gens, an overthrow of the people’s sovereignty. It challenges principles and practices of self-determination ––in psychic life and social relations, politics and governance –– for which humanity has suffered long and sacrificed much. For this reason alone, such principles should not be forfeit to the unilateral pursuit of a disfigured capitalism. Worse still would be their forfeit to our own ignorance, learned helplessness, inattention, inconvenience, habituation, or drift. This, I believe, is the ground on which our contests for the future will be fought.

Hannah Arendt once observed that indignation is the natural human response to that which degrades human dignity. Referring to her work on the origins of totalitarianism she wrote, “If I describe these conditions without permitting my indignation to interfere, then I have lifted this particular phenomenon out of its context in human society and have thereby robbed it of part of its nature, deprived it of one of its important inherent qualities.”

So it is for me and perhaps for you: The bare facts of surveillance capitalism necessarily arouse my indignation because they demean human dignity. The future of this narrative will depend upon the indignant scholars and journalists drawn to this frontier project, indignant elected officials and policymakers who understand that their authority originates in the foundational values of democratic communities, and indignant citizens who act in the knowledge that effectiveness without autonomy is not effective, dependency-induced compliance is no social contract, and freedom from uncertainty is no freedom.

Sources

Shoshana Zuboff, “The Secrets of Surveillance Capitalism.”

The NYPD has Tracked Citizens’ Cellphones 1,000 Times Since 2008 Without Warrants, by Ciara McCarthy, 2016 (originally published in The Guardian)

Discussion Questions

Does having your personal data harvested and stored and potentially sold to future employers concern you on any level?

Do you think it is possible to have a system of social organization like capitalism without the negative aspects asserting themselves in such a dominant way (i.e. exploitation, aggressive policing, total surveillance)?

How might you draw from both Goffman and Foucault’s theoretical frameworks to explain these contemporary developments?

Will surveillance capitalism become the dominant logic of capital accumulation in our time, or will it be succeeded by yet another mode of capitalist accumulation?

What is the solution? What might you as an individual begin to do differently with regard to limiting the exposure of your personal data?

Santa Clause is Watching You…and So Is His Friend, the “Elf on the Shelf”

We have already discussed the perils of living in a world where we are always exposed to different surveillance methods, whether it takes the form of smartphones, remote cameras, or behavior management applications on devices like watches. How might these seemingly innocuous and even “helpful” devices also be threatening our collective understanding of privacy?

The Elf on the Shelf doll, based on the popular Elf on the Shelf children’s book, has become a full-blown cultural phenomenon in recent years. Yet while for some people, the doll has become a family tradition – one that reminds children to be on their best behavior before Christmas – others, like University of Ontario Institute of Technology Digital Technology Professor Laura Pinto, find that the Elf on the Shelf is “a capillary form of power that normalizes the voluntary surrender of privacy, teaching young people to blindly accept panoptic surveillance and” [deep breath] “reify hegemonic power” (Holley, 2014).

In case you are not familiar with Elf, he started out as a book and now is an actual doll that is used in homes and in schools. The elf story and toy were introduced by Chanda Bell, a onetime Atlanta reading teacher, who wrote a Christmas-themed story to explain how Santa Claus keeps tabs on who is naughty and who is nice (Holley, 2014). The book further describes how the elf hides as he watches them and then later files a report with Santa, who is “the boss.” Over time, the traditional narrative changed to include the hiding, surveillance and back-and-forth travel, aspects of the toy.

Elf is typically posed mischievously in different locations of a child’s house every day. It is through this means of both playful and stealthy monitoring that he encourages children to be on their best behavior. Parents have even gone so far as to litter their social media feeds with photos that depict the elf in different and often strange places (Pinto, 2015).

Alternatively, we might think of the smiling “Elf” as being a bit of a creeper. He’s there to remind us that Santa is coming to town with his bag full of helpers, who are always watching and reporting your behavior to an old white man with unaccountable authority who judges you and manipulates you with largesse or neglect” (Beschizza, 2015).

In the words of Pinto:

“The gaze of the elf on the child’s real world (as opposed to play world) resonates with the purpose of the panopticon, based on Jeremy Bentham’s 18th-century design for a model prison… What is troubling is what The Elf on the Shelf represents and normalizes: anecdotal evidence reveals that children perform an identity that is not only for caretakers, but for an external authority (The Elf on the Shelf), similar to the dynamic between citizen and authority in the context of the surveillance state. Further to this, The Elf on the Shelf website offers teacher resources, integrating into both home and school not only the brand but also tacit acceptance of being monitored and always being on one’s best behavior–without question.

By inviting The Elf on the Shelf simultaneously into their play-world and real lives, children are taught to accept or even seek out external observation of their actions outside of their caregivers and familial structures. Broadly speaking, The Elf on the Shelf serves functions that are aligned to the official functions of the panopticon. In doing so, it contributes to the shaping of children as governable subjects.”

Normalizing Surveillance

So what’s the deal? Are we overreacting here? Not really. If you can manage to exercise even a modicum of critical thinking you’ll find “Elf” operates in such a way that he normalizes the idea of surveillance for parents as well as children. In doing so, Elf helps make future restrictions on our privacy become more easily accepted (Beschizza, 2015).”

Philosopher and cultural theorist Michel Foucault warned of a future in which society is under constant surveillance. He used the concept of the “panopticon” — a model prison watch system designed by 18th-century political philosopher Jeremy Bentham — which he pointed to as a symbol of the way modern societies use surveillance as a form of disciplinary control.

Bentham’s design incorporated a central tower in a circular structure; one that was surrounded by individual prison cells that made it impossible for prisoners to know if they were being watched.

“The whole thing with panopticonism under the Jeremy Bentham structure,” Pinto said, “is that you never quite knew if you were being watched or not and that forced you into behaving in a certain way. The elf is the same way.”

And so it follows that children don’t know if their behavior will be caught by the elf, the possibility is always there and it, therefore, influences their behavior at all times.

“Elf on the Shelf presents a unique (and prescriptive) form of play that blurs the distinction between playtime and real life. Children who participate in play with The Elf on the Shelf doll have to contend with rules at all times during the day: they may not touch the doll, and they must accept that the doll watches them at all times with the purpose of reporting to Santa Claus. This is different from more conventional play with dolls, where children create play-worlds born of their imagination, moving dolls and determining interactions with other people and other dolls. Rather, the hands-off “play” demanded by the elf is limited to finding (but not touching!) The Elf on the Shelf every morning, and acquiescing to surveillance during waking hours under the elf’s watchful eye.

The Elf on the Shelf’s mythos controls the parameters of play, puts the observation of play expressly beyond the child’s control, and defines who gets to touch what during play and who knows about it; it ultimately attempts to dictate the child’s behavior outside of time used for play. It is a very creepy toy!” – Pinto

The Elf on the Shelf, in this manner, “contributes to the shaping of children as governable subjects” If the children are the subjects, then Santa is Big Brother, and his elves are the Ministry of Truth (Pinto).

Briefly put, Pinto’s concern with the Elf on the Shelf phenomenon is that the children see the surveillance, not as a play, but instead accept it as normal and real.

“Elf on the Shelf presents a unique (and prescriptive) form of play that blurs the distinction between playtime and real life.” “Children who participate in play with The Elf on the Shelf doll have to contend with rules at all times during the day: they may not touch the doll, and they must accept that the doll watches them at all times with the purpose of reporting to Santa Claus” The children are at all times subject to an authoritative “elvish gaze” — “similar to the dynamic between citizen and authority in the context of the surveillance state” (Pinto).

“What is troubling,” writes Pinto and her co-author “is what The Elf on the Shelf represents and normalizes: anecdotal evidence reveals that children perform an identity that is not only for caretakers but for an external authority (The Elf on the Shelf). This is similar to the dynamic between citizen and authority in the context of the surveillance state.”

The social conditioning occasioned by Elf sets up children (who grow up to be college students) for the uncritical acceptance of policing and surveillance structures. But who really knows? Elf could also just be a toy. What do you think?

Sources:

Huffington post article, featuring the work of Dr. Laura Pinto, professor of digital education at the University of Ontario Institute Of Technology.

“The Elf on the Shelf is Preparing Your Child to Live in a Future Police State, Professor Warns,” by Peter Holley, 2014.

Discussion Questions:

How does social media function in ways that mimic the “watching eyes” of the elf? Does social media surveillance make you feel safe or suspicious? Does the idea that media companies are watching you/tracking you cause you to change and/or modulate your behavior?

Do you make use of surveillance technology anywhere in your home?

What do you think about the concept of privacy? Do you feel entitled to privacy? Are you willing to trade privacy rights for security?

How do you define social space in terms of “public” vs. “private?” For example, do you consider the streets to be public? What about your email or information contained on your cell phone?

photo credit: my student, Kate Dawson, York College, City University of New York

According to ProPublica, who analyzed federal data on fatal police shootings between 2010 and 2012, young Black males were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than young White males (Gabrielson, Jones, and Sagara, 2014). So how can this be happening? Do we have a problem with only the police or does this reflect a problem in our culture and society as a whole?

Race is as powerful as it is polarizing in the American social experience. Consequently, and while this might be difficult to look at, we all are to some extent a little bit racist….and probably sexist, ableist, and classist. Sadly, many of us are socialized that way. To understand how this works, we can turn to an entire sub-literature in sociology and psychology that addresses what are termed “in-group” and “out-group” social relations.

Research has demonstrated that we all tend to gravitate toward, socialize, and judge others based on our primary in-group relations (friends & family) – the people we define as “us.” Racial identities are a big part of this process. This kins od social group identification occurs at the same time as we are prone to infer negative judgments about people who are not “us” – people who are “them.” The first step in changing this is recognizing that we all might have a bit of a problem. Only then can we begin to make progress.

What Is Implicit Bias?

“Implicit bias” occurs when someone ( a discriminator) is not consciously aware of his/her own bias. It’s different from “explicit” bias, which is when a discriminator is able to consciously own up to/recognize their own bias (Greenwald & Banaji, 1995). The term implicit bias has even become fashionable beyond academic circles with members of the law enforcement community. This is most likely the result of how our nation’s attention has been captivated by the numerous high-profile police killings of unarmed African American men. As numerous research studies have found, there are likely numerous social and psychological reasons that underlie how and why this occurs. But even still, implicit bias can be difficult to detect. For it is the implicit nature of cultural and racial stereotypes that impedes our ability to recognize how prevalent they are – not just among police but all Americans.

Are the Police Racist?

According to a ProPublica study, which looked at fatal police shootings, young black men were 21 times more likely to be killed by police than their white male counterparts (Gabrieldson, Jones, & Sagara, 2014). Given these racial imbalances, it’s only natural that many people, including researchers, are asking: Are the Police Racist? The research on implicit bias, while not conclusive, says – maybe.

Can A Black Cop Be Biased Against Their Own Racial Group?

Neill Franklin is a black man. But he’ll admit that after decades of working at the Baltimore Police Department and Maryland State Police, he harbored a strong bias against young black men. Franklin, now executive director of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, which opposes the war on drugs, explained, “When I’d see a young black male in a particular neighborhood, or his pants were sagging a little bit, or he walked a certain way … my first thoughts were, ‘Oh, I wonder if he’s selling drugs'” (Lopez).

As the media has increased its scrutiny of police killings of black men, some of the cases have involved black police officers. In the case of Freddie Gray, in Baltimore, for example, three of the six police officers charged for Gray’s death are black. This has led to some questions about whether racial bias is really at play — can a black cop be racist against his own racial group? (Lopez)

But social psychologists and criminal justice experts say this question fundamentally misunderstands how institutional racism affects everyone, regardless of race. Racial bias isn’t necessarily about how a person views himself in terms of race, but how he views others in terms of race, particularly in different roles throughout his everyday life. And systemic racism, which has been part of the US since its founding, can corrupt anyone’s view of minorities in America (Lopez).

In the case of police, all cops are dealing with enormous cultural and systemic forces that build racial bias against minority groups. Even if a black cop doesn’t view himself as racist, the way policing is done in the US is racially skewed — by, for example, targeting high-crime neighborhoods that are predominantly black. And these policing tactics can actually create and accentuate personal, subconscious bias by increasing the likelihood that officers will relate blackness with criminality or danger — leading to what psychologists call “implicit bias” against black Americans. Combined, this means the system as a whole as well as individual officers, even black ones, by and large act in ways that are deeply racially skewed (Lopez).

“The culture of policing is one that’s so strong that it can overwhelm individual racial differences,” L. Song Richardson, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, School of Law, said. “People are cops first, and they’re their race second” (Lopez).

Racially Biased Law Enforcement

A lot of US police work is inherently racially biased. Cops are told to patrol predominantly poor, crime-ridden neighborhoods that are so segregated that most of the residents are black. And since police are mostly present in these neighborhoods, most of the arrests and actions they take end up impacting a disproportionate numbers of black people.

“When departments concentrate enforcement efforts, for example, in high-crime areas, those areas are likely to be areas with disproportionate numbers of minority residents,” David Sklansky, a law professor at Stanford Law School, said. “That means minority residents of the community are getting policed more intensely than people that live in other neighborhoods that have smaller proportion of minority residents and lower crime rates.”

The problem is police aren’t just deployed in predominantly black neighborhoods; they’re also encouraged to arrest and ticket as many people as possible while on the job. Until 2014, a federal grant program financially incentivized local police departments to make as many arrests as possible for drug crimes. Many police departments also use numbers of arrests as a measure for evaluating individual police officers for raises and promotions. Coupled with deployment in certain areas, these incentives effectively encourage cops to arrest minority residents in large numbers.

“Our criminal justice system and different aspects of our criminal justice system are racist in application,” Franklin, the retired police major, said. “Even if there was no intent in the design for racism, we’ve gotten to a place where it’s the result of our policies.”

Take, for instance, policing in Chicago. This map from Project Know, a drug addiction resource center, shows drug arrests were concentrated in the Windy City’s low-income neighborhoods, which are mostly black, between January and October 2014:

The disproportionate enforcement in black neighborhoods helps explain broader disparities across the US justice system. For example, black Americans are much more likely to be arrested for drug crimes, even though they’re not significantly more likely to use or sell drugs. By many estimates, white and African Americans use marijuana at roughly the same rate, yet African Americans are 4X more likely to be arrested for its use and possession.

Franklin, echoing findings from a Sentencing Project report from earlier this year, said the reason for higher drug arrests among black people is linked to how people in poorer, urban areas use and sell drugs, which makes it easier for police officers to catch them in the act. “Drug selling and use among whites tends to be more indoors, among friends, word of mouth, and there’s generally no violence associated,” Franklin said. “But overall, the drug selling and dealing in black communities tends to be in outdoor areas, because of the urban design and the [economic] competition that’s involved in a community with blight, poverty, and a lack of jobs.”

Dennis Parker, director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Racial Justice Program, said this type of racially disparate enforcement is what caused so many problems in Ferguson, Missouri, where a scathing Justice Department investigation uncovered a pattern of racial bias in the local police force following the police shooting of Michael Brown.

By instructing local police (and now more recently federal prosecutors) to crack down on marijuana-related crimes, governing authorities are putting their full weight behind a key aspect of what, in terms of practice, is a racist drug policy.

In Ferguson, cops were pressured by their city government to raise as much revenue as possible by ticketing residents. Since police were most active in neighborhoods that are predominantly black, these residents were targeted at hugely disproportionate rates: Ferguson is about 67 percent African-American, but from 2012 to 2014, 85 percent of people stopped, 90 percent of people who received a citation, and 93 percent of people arrested were black. “It’s not necessarily what’s happening with one police officer,” Parker said. “There are structural reasons for this happening.”

What’s worse, Sklansky said this type of disproportionate enforcement can create “a vicious cycle” in which black residents are fearful of police, making them more likely to display discomfort around cops, which in turn makes officers more likely to perceive black residents as suspicious. “Part of the way police patrol is to look for people who look like they’re acting suspicious,” Sklansky said. “So even a police officer who tries not to be racist can wind up giving more of his attention and having more of his suspicion directed to members of minority groups than to white citizens.”

Cops (and many of us too) are Conditioned to Discriminate – Implicit Bias

Of course, racism can and often does show up at the individual level. Some of this may be explicit — like in North Miami Beach, Florida, where police officers used mug shots of black people as target practice. But as researchers have shown, very often racism culminates at the implicit level, where people’s subconscious biases guide their choices even when they’re not fully aware of it. In this case, people’s thought and actions may be conditioned by “implicit bias.” The term refers to what happens when, despite our best intentions and without awareness, racial stereotypes and assumptions creep into our minds and affect our actions. Jenée Desmond-Harris explained. “Thirty years of neurology and cognitive psychology studies show that it (implicit bias) influences the way we see and treat others, even when we’re absolutely determined to be, and believe we are being, fair and objective.”

Research on Implicit Bias

A review of the research on implicit bias, conducted by researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and California State University Northridge, found police officers possess this type of subconscious bias, although it’s less pronounced than the general public’s bias in use-of-force simulations.

Josh Correll, a psychology professor at the University of Colorado Boulder, tested these biases through a video game simulation in which people were tasked with quickly identifying whether virtual suspects possessed a weapon and should, as a result, be shot. The results: subjects of all races were quicker to shoot black suspects compared with white ones.

Correll explained to Vox’s Jenée Desmond-Harris, “We think this represents an awareness of a cultural stereotype — not that our participants believe necessarily that black men are more dangerous than white men, but by virtue of movies they watch, music they listen to, etc., they’re getting the idea that black male goes with violent. The group and the idea are linked together in their minds whether they agree with that stereotype or not.”

It is also possible that being a police officer and integrating into the culture of the job could make a cop, even a black one, racist. Adam Waytz, who is a social psychologist at Northwestern University’s Kellogg of School of Management, calls attention to the concept of “de-individuation,” which says that people lose their sense of self-awareness while in groups. This changes the self-identity of all police officers, regardless of race. So black cops may think of themselves as members of the police department rather than members of a certain race while on duty, making it easier for them to act in ways that discriminate against members of their own race.

“When you’re talking about police interactions, in many ways the color blue becomes more important than black and white,” Parker of the ACLU said. “People identify more with their role as a police officer and all of the cultural things that entails more than their race.”

But the very idea of this, no matter how well-established by empirical research, is still controversial. People don’t like to think they could be racist; they prefer to divide the world into a binary of “racist” or “not racist,” with themselves in the latter category. But that makes it a lot harder to address the effects of implicit bias, which impact everything from hiring to police conduct.

In the case of police officers, they are perhaps more likely, due to the nature of their job, to be over the course of time conditioned toward implicit bias. So for example, when cops are thrown into situations every day in which black people are viewed as criminal suspects, they begin to see race as an indicator of crime and danger.

“Just by virtue of watching the news every night you learn the unconscious bias, because you will always see young black men being connected to criminality,” Richardson of the UC Irvine School of Law said. “Police officers are engaging in proactive policing in urban neighborhoods that may be majority nonwhite. And as a result, they’re constantly practicing the association of nonwhite with crime.”

But it can get even more complicated, Richardson said, because stops of innocent people can still reinforce implicit bias. “If [a cop] were to frisk someone and find no evidence of criminal activity, what he’s likely to say to himself is, ‘Oh, well, this guy’s guilty, he just got away with it this time,’ thereby strengthening the association and affecting his memory of the event later,” she said. “In that messed-up way, he actually strengthens his unconscious bias.”

San Bernardino Police Department Officer Darren Sims drives his patrol car at sunrise on the graveyard shift.

No Perfect Solutions

The bottom line is when we tell people about implicit bias, what they hear very often is an accusation of racism that they feel the need to deflect. Acknowledging on some level that we all potentially operate according to these frames that condition our behavior would go a long way in helping to address the issue and solve problems. Given how deeply ingrained racism has been in America throughout history, none of these problems will likely go away in the foreseeable future. But there are things police departments can do to diminish the effects of racial biases.

Awareness can go a long way by forcing police officers to consider and try to control their own biases. Waytz pointed to research that found National Basketball Association referees became less racially biased once their propensity to call more fouls on black players were exposed by previous studies and widespread media coverage. This indicates, Waytz said, that racial bias can be diminished through awareness.

But awareness can also backfire. Richardson of the UC Irvine School of Law pointed to what’s called “stereotype threat,” which can lead people to act out in dangerous ways if they’re nervous about reinforcing stereotypes attributed to a group they belong to. Preliminary results from unpublished studies, she said, have found that if a cop is aware of the stereotype that cops are racist, he may get nervous about reinforcing that stereotype during encounters with black suspects — and that increased anxiety may make him more likely to use force.

As another step, Richardson suggested that police officers may be able to diminish their own implicit biases by taking greater steps to engage and interact with the community in ways that aren’t inherently confrontational. If police are exposed to the daily lives of black residents in a very personal way, they may come to realize — particularly at a subconscious level — that they shouldn’t associate blackness with crime or danger.

Training could also help diminish some racial biases. But Richardson emphasizes that this training shouldn’t just focus on split-second decisions about whether to use force, but rather more slow-taking decisions about whether a police officer should make a stop that could lead to a use-of-force scenario. For example, in the case of Michael Brown in Ferguson, better training may have pushed former police officer Darren Wilson to not stop Brown for a petty crime like jaywalking — and, as a result, avoid the escalating circumstances that led Wilson to shoot Brown to death.

“The time frame that I want to look at is how that interaction began in the first place,” Richardson explained. “So if they’re about to stop and frisk someone, maybe they should slow down first and ask themselves, ‘Would I find this behavior suspicious if the person were a young white man instead of a young black man?'”

Creating more diverse police forces can also help police departments build trust, according to Sklansky of Stanford University. “There’s less likely to be an us-and-them attitude between police and the community,” he said. “A diverse department can still have problems keeping the trust or even gaining in the first place the trust of minority communities, but it’s likely to have fewer problems than a department that’s monolithically white or doesn’t reflect the demographics of the community.”

More broadly, new policies and reforms could help address the problems that lead to systemically skewed enforcement. Policies could be reformed to put less emphasis on arrests for petty crimes, which could help diminish some of the day-to-day harassment black communities experience at the hands of police. And businesses and lawmakers could do more to invest in impoverished neighborhoods to address the socioeconomic issues that make certain places more prone to crime.

But while all of these ideas could all lead to improvements, they most likely won’t eliminate all racial biases in police departments.

“Nothing solves racism completely,” Sklansky said. “Racism, in general, is a deeply entrenched problem in all societies, including America’s. We’ve made enormous strides in the United States in confronting that problem in some ways but not in others.”

Jennifer Eberhardt

Jennifer L. Eberhardt is a social psychologist and associate professor at Stanford University and a 2014 MacArthur fellow. She studies the mechanisms, effects of racial biases in criminal justice. Eberhardt’s research investigates the subtle, complex, largely unconscious yet deeply ingrained ways that individuals racially code and categorize people and the far-reaching consequences of stereotypic associations between race and crime. She is particularly interested in how race influences visual processing – our perception of objects and physical spaces, how objects and physical spaces influence how we think about race, and how race changes how we see people – and how such perception may influence institutions such as the criminal justice system. While her work was originally focused to the laboratory, where she worked with brain-scanning machines, it has evolved to encompass police precincts, where she now advises police officers about the different ways their mental processing and thinking conditions their policing practice, which can put them (and fellow citizens) in dangerous territory.

According to Eberhardt, “most people know that African Americans are associated with crime and that they’re stereotyped as criminal — in fact, it’s one of the strongest stereotypes of blacks in American society.” “My work focuses on how that association might matter at different points in the criminal justice system and how this association can then affect us in surprising ways.” These perceptions matter, because people can transfer those associations from people to objects and places.

Eberhardt’s research demonstrated that when white people were shown flashing images of black faces, they were able to visually recognize the fuzzy outline of a gun more quickly than peers who were exposed to white faces. Later, when she reversed the experiment, she discovered that the association between blacks and crime moved the other way. In this instance, she exposed subjects to crime-related objects, which were quickly followed by a longer-lasting screen showing a black face and a white face. At this point, subjects were asked to identify where a dot flashed on a blank screen. Their reactions were documented to be quicker when the dot appeared on the side of the screen where the black face was shown. The same findings were documented when police officers were given the test and shown crime-related words such as “capture” or “pursue” instead of images of weapons.

Her documentation of these visual perceptions suggests that they may infect the judicial system with bias. As her studies have statistically demonstrated, having stereotypically black facial features correlates with tougher jury verdicts, longer prison terms, more death sentences and erroneous identifications by police.

There are a number of different Implicit Association Tests (IATs) available online, which test for implicit bias. You might try this one from Harvard.

Sources:

Parts of this article are excerpted from a 2015 Vox article, “How Systemic Racism Entangles All Police Officers — Even Black Cops,” by German Lopez. Last accessed Feb 2016.

“A Black Police Officer’s Fight Against the NYPD,” by Saki Kinafo. Last accessed Jan 2018.

Discussion Questions:

Do you find you sometimes harbor bias towards different racial and ethnic groups due to cultural stereotypes, where you understand some people to be more dangerous than others?

If you can go so far as to “own” your own bias, what do you attribute to be the source of the bias? Is it the result of your own direct experience or cultural representations?

What do you think about policing patterns in general, either from the perspective of what you see represented in the media or from your own experiences on the street?

What do you think about the idea of people being biased toward members of their own racial group?

There is perhaps no other topic that generates public controversy and divisive opinion than that which pertains to the question: What is the proper role of police?

Doubtless, the criminal justice system has undergone massive change over the course of the last 20 years in the wake of the 9-11 tragedy in New York. World events have caused many Americans to question what they want their policemen and women to do on a daily basis. Should they, for example, be public servants, who “Serve & Protect?” Or should they be soldiers, policing the homeland to fight the war on terror? Do we want them to be exclusively focused on drug crimes, leaving violent crime, white collar crime, and other offenses to languish without resources and attention? Or perhaps we want them to be social workers, who just so happen to carry a gun to work every day?

Policing Evolution or Revolution? The New Military Urbanism

Authors Stephen Graham and Radley Balko both argue in their respective books, “Rise of the Warrior Cop:The Militarization of America’s Police Forces” (Balko) and “Cities Under Siege:The New Military Urbanism,” (Graham) that a shift is underway, where military doctrine, battlefield tactics, and methods of population control are increasingly being integrated into urban police forces. These developments, according to Graham, “dramatically blur the juridical and operational separation between policing, intelligence, and the military; distinctions between war and peace; and those between local, national, and global operations.” The end result of this process is what he calls the “new military urbanism.”

Aggressive police practice, while not new, is getting increased attention due to the proliferation of social media and organizations dedicated to calling attention to high profile incidents of police crime and violence.

Normalizing Police Violence: Order Maintenance Policing

As we have discussed in class, the military equipment associated with SWAT operations and the military mentality that the use of such equipment apparently breeds is not confined to those special operations units. Increasingly, they’re permeating all forms of policing.

In the recent time period, since the turn to the 21st century, the two dominant models of policing have been the Community Policing Model and the Order Maintenance Policing Model. In terms of what we see put into practice (despite a lot of “happy talk” to the contrary) the Order Maintenance Model has apparently won out. This has occurred despite overwhelming research and evidence that demonstrates community policing models are more effective – Order Maintenance models potentially create more problems than may have existed in the first place. The Order Maintenance Model is a model that appears to be built for police militarization, with its emphasis on harsh counterinsurgency tactics.

Community Policing – officers wear traditional uniforms on foot patrol in Philadelphia

Karl Bickel, a senior policy analyst with the Justice Department’s Community Policing Services office, observes that police across America are being trained in ways that emphasize force and aggression. The dominant model in police training today is a stress-based regimen that aspires to mimic military boot camp. This model has replaced the more relaxed academic setting that a minority of police departments still employ. The result, in his view, is that young officers become acculturated to an idea of policing that privileges “kicking ass” rather than working with the community to make neighborhoods safe. Likewise, we increasingly see police departments adopting different versions of the military battle-dress uniforms (BDUs) for patrol officers. These militaristic, typically black or olive-drab jumpsuits, according to Bickel, make them less approachable and possibly also more aggressive in their interactions with the citizens they’re supposed to protect.

Oddly enough, the authoritarian approach stands in opposition to the dominant philosophy that distinguished twenty-first-century American police thinking: community policing. This model of policing was intended to emphasize “keeping the peace” by creating and maintaining partnerships of trust in the communities served. The community policing model, which also happens to be the official policing philosophy of the U.S. government, sees officers as protectors that are also problem solvers; they’re supposed to care who lives in their community and about how their community see them. According to this model, officers don’t command respect, so much as they earn it. Rather than aiming to instill fear, officers are supposed to work to foster trust.

Police Recruiting

Police recruiting videos (like those from California’s Newport Beach Police Department and New Mexico’s Hobbs Police Department) don’t play up the community policing angle, but rather emphasize military adventurism and aim to attract young men with the promise of Army-style high-tech toys. Policing, as depicted in videos like the one shown here, isn’t about calmly solving problems; it’s about the boys “getting their war on” and breaking down doors in the middle of the night.

Now compare this video to a recruitment video produced by a New Zealand police department. Can you see a difference? Compare and contrast the two approaches. What themes do you see being are emphasized in American and New Zealand videos and how are they different? How do you think the two approaches might result in different types of people being recruited and hired for police work? In which of the two examples do you see future officers being taught to operate as a domestic occupying army, where citizens are potentially viewed as enemy combatants? Which police force would you rather work for?

A small research project at Johns Hopkins University appears to back up Bickel’s claims. People were shown pictures of police officers in their traditional uniforms and in BDUs. Respondents in the survey indicated they would much rather have a police officer show up in traditional dress blues. Perhaps like this?

Summarizing the survey findings, Bickel writes, “The more militaristic look of the BDUs, much like what is seen in news stories of our military in war zones, gives rise to the notion of our police being an occupying force in some inner-city neighborhoods, instead of trusted community protectors.”

This is consistent with other research undertaken by researchers in criminology, who have concluded that the order policing model is deeply implicated in the rise of the new military urbanism. This model stands at odds with the community policing model – the “serve and protect” model – that many assume to be the dominant policing model.

Militarizing Childhood

Research on the interaction between police departments and children is presently lacking. Judging from the photos below, efforts to instill a military mindset appear to start early.

Drill Instructor, Asbury Park NJ Youth Police Academy

Summer camp for kids run by the Cumberland, MD police department.

Police Militarization Doesn’t Affect Me

Unfortunately, despite the torrent of photo/video evidence that has become commonplace in today’s fluid media environment, this is not enough to foster meaningful change in the way we deploy police officers in our communities. Absent action at the policy level or the grassroots level, where individual citizens organize and agitate for change, we are left to continue to speculate how long it will take to remove what we are told are simply “a few bad apples.” The images have become almost an entertaining source of “outrage” consumption, but again it’s not bringing about changes in practice.

For many of us (perhaps college students in particular), the brutality depicted in the video clips is not likely to touch our lives (or so we think). Police violence is quickly becoming normalized in U.S. culture and this is a problem. The vast majority of citizens don’t have regular police encounters, given that the focus of policing tends to be in poor minority communities, where the residents are poor, assumed to be violent, and are judged as deserving of the added police attention.

In light of all this, if you are still not disturbed by any of this, if you are not concerned about socializing children into a culture of violence (not simply firearms used for hunting) but more, and/or you simply don’t think police militarization is a problem for society, then it’s unlikely additional evidence or research will convince you otherwise. Perhaps at some point in the future, if you are subject to an accidental no-knock raid on your home that kills your dog or maims your child (it’s okay, it was an innocent mistake), you might arrive at a different understanding. But until then, you’re good.

Okay. Let’s take a different approach, since caring about the physical, emotional, and inhumane trauma inflicted upon your fellow citizens is not a priority; let’s look at how this hits you in your wallet. Consider the following statistics as a taxpaying citizen:

- San Diego paid $5.9 million to compensate for sexual assault against multiple women by one officer.
- A city southwest of Tucson AZ spent $3.4 million to pay for one deadly SWAT raid.
- Boston settled a single case of police brutality for $1.4 million that left a man with permanent brain injury.
- Scottsdale AZ paid $4.25 million for the fatal shooting of an unarmed man.
- Baltimore paid $5.7 million in private settlements plus an additional $5.8 million in legal fees for police brutality.
- Minneapolis paid close to $21 million since 2003
- Oakland CA paid $74 million from 1990 to present
- Los Angeles paid $54 million in 2011 alone; recently they paid $1.5 million on a single case of a California Highway Patrol officer beating a homeless woman senseless at a traffic stop.
- Chicago paid $521 million over the past decade; $84.6 million in 2013 (includes court and legal fees).

Pepper spraying cop goes to Kent State

And the King of them all ……

The New York City Police Department spent nearly 1 billion dollars on settlements in connection with police brutality; 964 million from 2000 – 2010; $765 million in 2012. The New York figure is expected to reach $815 million by 2016.

Keep in mind, most of these city-wide figures do not always take into account the legal costs of cases that are processed through the “justice” system, where violent police officers are excused and victims are left with nothing. It doesn’t count the money individuals who are not compensated must spend to take care of medical expenses (like the parents of the baby hit by the flash-bang grenade, who were recently told by their local municipality that there was no evidence of wrongdoing and that no damages would be awarded).

Discussion Questions:

What do you think about concerns as this pertains to the militarization of police? Do you think this is a problem?

Do you think police forces should patrol their neighborhoods like soldiers or should they interact with the public in a different way?

What if lawsuits and settlements were taken directly out of police budgets (instead of taxpayer funds)? Do you think that would have an impact decreasing police violence and brutality?

What if individual police officers were required to obtain the equivalent of malpractice insurance? [this is a standard practice for attorneys, medical doctors, and other professionals]

When you reflect on your own encounters with police, do you think of them as civil servants who “serve and protect,” or do you see them as agents of repression and/or “revenue generators” whom you regard as potentially hostile?

Do you think there may be links between socio-cultural factors, where people raised in a culture that glorifies gun ownership and violence may be prone to see police violence as a natural and just response to crime?

Do you think violence is “normal” within police culture (not a simple matter of a few bad apples) or do you think we can easily weed out the bad actors through disciplinary action?

How do you think police training might contribute to the problem of police brutality and violence?

When you see videos like the ones depicted here, do you think incidents of police violence are increasing, or are we finding that social media combined with aggressive reporting has simply increased visibility of a problem that has always existed?

Italian Police. Not bad.

Sources

Some of the content for this post appears in an article written by Matthew Harwood, entitled “To Terrify and Occupy: How the Excessive Militarization of the Police Is Turning Cops Into Counterinsurgents.” You can find the full content of the article posted here.

Labeling Theory

primary deviance → others label act as deviant → actor internalizes deviant label → secondary deviance

Social Disorganization Theories

What is Criminology and Criminal Justice?

Criminological Theory – The Classical Age

Man and the State of Nature

Punishment in Society

Ethics of Punishment

Implications

Criminological Theory – Early Positivism

Criminology & Medical Anthropology

Research Methods in Criminology

Contemporary Sociological Theories of Crime

Social Media & Crime

How Much Do You Know About Gun Violence in America?

What Is the Crime Rate?

Guns & Social Identity

73%

70%

127

71%

38%

3%

Campus Carry U.S.A.

Pennsylvania Panopticon: Eastern State Penitentiary

The “Santopticon”

Implicit Bias & Policing