Project One:
Project One:
Current research examines the relation between traumatic stress exposure and various risk behaviors, particularly health risk. To this end, I am presently working on projects that use a trauma-informed framework to study childhood event victimization (ACEs) among U.S. Probation and Pre-trial Services Officers (USPOs) – (n=423). The mixed methods study uses both quantitative and qualitative methods to document the childhood trauma exposure of a group of U,S. Probation and Pretrial Services Officers (FPOs) working in the United States. Data were collected over a period of two months during March and April 2023. Our study explored the following research questions:
- RQ1: How are ACE scores demographically distributed across the sample of officers?
- RQ2: Do the officers support workplace-based trauma informed program interventions?
Whereas the traditional focus of ACE research in community corrections has been on probationers, our study aimed to “flip the script” to look at USPOs. Probation and pretrial services officers have occupational duties that put them into stressful work situations that involve daily sustained direct contact with justice involved persons. In light of this, we wanted to conduct an assessment of their trauma exposure.
The current study conducted hypothesis testing and used a critical trauma-informed framework to call attention to the social inequalities reflected in the ACE score results. We used a validated 10-category ACE questionnaire to assess USPO trauma exposure and compute ACE scores (scored 1-10), while also documenting the officers’ basic demographic information. (Jiang et al., 2022). In addition to this, we assessed the officers’ level of support for workplace-based trauma-informed programming.
Adverse Childhood Experiences (or ACEs) are specific encounters that occur in childhood prior to the age of 18, which researchers consider to be traumatic.
The results of our analyses confirm that that the USPOs in our sample report ACE scores that are higher and are more prevalent on average than the general adult population in the U.S. (FPO mean score is 1.78 (2.1 SD) vs. a U.S. population average of 1.0 documented by previous studies). Put another way, our sample of FPOs indicate scores that are nearly double what has been documented by previous researchers who tested large populations of adults in the United States.
Study findings document significant group disparities are indicated in the ACE score results for the sample of officers. There is no evidence that suggests disparities are the result of simple biological differences between men and women and whites and non-whites. Rather, they are indicative of the interaction between the officers’ social development and complex institutional dynamics (Crenshaw, 1989; Gillborn, 2015).
Findings likewise support the general aims of corrections institutions who may want to implement trauma informed policies and programs. These programs will not only help the officers, they can further serve the larger goal of supporting more humane corrections.
Recommendations
Corrections leaders should consider taking immediate action to develop targeted interventions to support officers who identify as members of vulnerable groups (female officers, officers of color, and especially female officers of color). The research indicates that these officers are at greater risk of experiencing negative health consequences. Interventions for these groups should be informed by ongoing assessments, ideally administered by trained specialists, who can effectively evaluate trauma exposure.
Future Research
We suggest future research that is attuned to measuring not only primary (childhood) exposure but also secondary trauma exposure among law enforcement officers, as this information can be used to help develop evidence-base programs to support officer wellness and mental health initiatives. This work could potentially demonstrate how cumulative trauma exposures might predict problems related to officer morale, employee retention and turnover, and job satisfaction.
Book Project: Undead Histories: Manufacturing Inequality in Pittsburgh’s River Towns looks at social inequality, typified by uneven development and social problems associated with poverty, in the deindustrialized river towns of the Monongahela Valley, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
The book includes data derived from ethnographic observation and qualitative interviews that call attention to social transformations that took place in Pittsburgh since the 1970’s. Analysis examines the the interplay of social dynamics that account for different local trajectories of development, which I argue cannot be explained by the loss of the steel industry alone. Failed economic development strategies combined with failed social welfare policies and political polarization all contributed to producing what now functions as a “political economy of pain and injury.”
Beginning with the time period that predates the era of the Vietnam War, I argue that contentious politics – a combination of antiwar and civil rights politics – were instrumental to shaping the contours of social life in the Mon Valley. The resulting culture wars helped to advance a politics of white grievance that fueled local forms of backlash politics that continue to resonate in the present era, distinguished by the advance of neoliberalism and populist conspiratorial political ideologies typified by “Trumpism.”
The structural changes that transpired here, which developed as a response to global economic changes, are indicative of an aggressive form of biopolitics that fosters death, injury, and self-harm through gun violence and drug taking. Local status hierarchies that imbricate race, class, and gender privilege work together in ways that resist social change as a means to stave off larger-scale structural adjustment imposed by the forces of global capitalism. Put another way, the story of Pittsburgh helps furnish an explanation for what happened in many towns across the United States, where a corporealized politics of illness and injury was rendered “productive” to the U.S. political economy. The result is a city and perhaps a country that is “livable” for some but not for all.
Can you give us a brief history of McKeesport’s rise and decline as an industrial city?
McKeesport, like a lot of cities of it’s kind in the United States, entered a period of rapid decline beginning in the late 1970’s. However, to fully appreciate what happened here, you need to examine these later developments within a larger social context that takes into account the racial ordering of Pittsburgh.. Take, for example, the time period of the 1920’s. During this time, Pittsburgh and its river towns were the nation’s foundry. Home to the largest structural steel plant, rail mill, and wire manufacturing plant, the area produced about one third of the country’s steel output. Boat building, bridge construction, and metal fabricating industries were also important to the economic base of the region.
Pittsburgh further benefitted from the region’s extractive industries like coal mining. Coke, derived from coal, replaced charcoal from wood in the iron and steel making process. The plentiful supplies of bituminous coal that are famously found buried in the ground under the Pittsburgh area made it a top coal producer. At one time here, nearly forty percent of the nation’s coal was extracted and processed within 100 miles of Pittsburgh.
The city of McKeesport played a pivotal role and shared in the region’s prosperity as it was the site of the world’s largest tube and pipe mill. Bear in mind now, these were the same industries and mills that powered the American war machine during WWII. During its war-time peak, McKeesport’s population increased to nearly a hundred thousand residents. After the war was over, countries like Japan, whose industrial infrastructure was destroyed during the war, were eventually rebuilt with the help of the United States. They eventually recovered to the point that during the 1980s they became a major source of global competition to the area’s mills.
The period of the 1980s is when steel production in the Mon Valley saw its steepest decline as part of a chain reaction of global developments. No one, of course, was prepared for what followed. The steel industry’s collapse here reduced not only the need for production workers, it also impacted many white-collar and middle management positions when the labor misery metastasized to non-related industries like retail. McKeesport lost almost all of it’s downtown retail anchor stores by the late 1980’s.
“Main Street” (5th Avenue) shopping district today
That the steel industry collapsed is a development that is attributed to major shifts in global manufacturing and production. These global developments, however, were given a big Federal-level assist by the economic and social policies of Ronald Reagan.
Today, there are slightly less than 18,000 local residents who remain in McKeesport, which represents a population reduction of more than 75 per cent from its former high point. The cataclysmic loss of manufacturing and allied trades jobs created a tear in the social fabric that the town has not yet managed to recover from. The preferred word used by many to characterize these developments is “deindustrialization.” More aptly, this word is merely a a euphemism for what many here experienced as nothing short of a full-blown economic “depression.”
Most Livable City for Who?
There is a narrative that circulates with enthusiasm in Pittsburgh, where locals are quick to celebrate their city for being recognized among the “most livable” in the country. In keeping with this line of thinking, the oft repeated story goes something like this: the modern city of Pittsburgh rose from the ashes of a dirty steel town and transformed itself overnight to become a leader in healthcare, education, medicine, and technology. Put another way, which taps into the spirit of rugged individualism that many Americans are fond of, Pittsburgh pulled itself up by its bootstraps and launched itself to success in new industries. Unfortunately, this particular narrative belies a hard truth, which is that the urban renewal and transformation that is so proudly celebrated was not accomplished through “gumption” and “elbow grease.” Nor was it the result of astute, targeted, environmentally sensitive social planning.
Looking back on all of this, the city of Pittsburgh illustrates how “urban renaissance” and “smokestack nostalgia” were cleverly packaged to advance the plans of developers in the region. Unfortunately, the benefits that accrued to the urban core did not extend to the ring suburbs of the Mon Valley. Cities like McKeesport were disadvantaged from the outset and excluded from major urban redevelopment plans. Which is to say, the highly touted urban revitalization didn’t benefit everyone who lives here in an equitable way. Furthermore, the gains were acquired at a substantial human cost.
The changes that occurred required major restructuring, which resulted in the spatial reorganization of urban and suburban areas. In this instance, change was driven by networks of local, municipal, county, regional, state, and federal planners working in partnership with developers and others in the private sector. Steel production, scrap metal processing, and the environmental impacts that went along with it, including concentrates of air and water pollution, were shifted to the edges of the city. Suburban sprawl was also encouraged, as centrally located steel production and industry eventually gave way to more dispersed production sites and the people followed them. Sprawl, I must point out, is a problem in and of itself. For it is, quite literally, a socially constructed outcome; one that is devised to help some while it excludes others.
Privatize the Benefits; Socialize the Costs
To be clear, cities like McKeesport were not the victims of parties who set out to nefariously undermine the river towns and ring suburbs; urban development merely reflects the financial interests of the people providing the resources. This is why it is naïve to think that development is always undertaken to serve the best interest of the public. Notwithstanding, the general public often lacks even the most basic understanding of the nuances of urban planning, Lacking knowledge and foresight, they confronted the uncertainty of the future by holding fast to a form of magical thinking that was deeply invested in the belief that people with money (bankers and those who own and/or develop real estate) are driven only by straight-forward profit incentives and that they will use that money to serve the interests of those of lesser means. This always was and remains a fantasy.
This basic problem, of course, is one that plays out with regularity across the country. That is, when you center the needs of developers and those with deep-pockets, they tend to get rich while the rest of us end up dealing with a plethora of social problems that their plans created. Some of these problems may not have been conceived at the outset of planning. But that doesn’t mean that it was impossible to to foresee them. Examples of this include: community disinvestment from targeted neighborhoods, residential segregation and redlining, spatially unequal funding for schools, environmental redlining and land use policy that results in exposure to pollution and environmental contaminants, disproportionate access to healthcare, and finally, zoning policies that spatially concentrate certain types of businesses and stigmatized activities into less favored areas (i.e. fast food restaurants, bars, and strip clubs). Development policies that concentrate resources in the downtown area, while encouraging big-box retail in the suburbs are similarly problematic. They provide short-term gains for the people that organize the projects, despite there being evidence that they do long-term damage to local economies and wages.
Once the damage is done, latent problems like increased poverty, increased crime, violence, drug use, distribution, and overdose become entrenched. When this happens, blame is shifted to the people and never the planners. If left unchecked, the resulting social problems face a risk of becoming generational. Likewise, the expense involved to bring things back to an equilibrium tends to multiply exponentially over time, making revitalization appear impossible. Yet to do nothing makes the problems worse.
McKeesport experienced the brunt end of this process. Having lost all of their vital industries, the city’s residents became both spatially and socially isolated; they were left to manage the burgeoning problems associated with growing unemployment, urban deterioration, and an ever-shrinking tax base. As time passed, area residents (especially their children) relocated. Old-time residents died. Population loss was accelerated. With no new industries other than the scrap metal industry, which didn’t employ a large number of people, the prospects for ongoing development, particularly as this relates to employment, were grim to say the least.
The result was a persistent spiral of joblessness and poverty for area residents, which led to the establishment and growth of a perpetual suburban underclass. And by “underclass,” I am referring to people who were consigned to live in isolated, spatially distinct areas known for their high rates of high school dropout, poverty, welfare dependency, disability, addiction, and family disorganization. These social factors are, coincidentally, the major leading indicators of social inequality that not only dispose people to be at higher risk for getting caught up in the criminal justice system, they further expose them to greater health and mortality risk.
Structural abandonment and the abandonment of people typically go hand in hand. Unfortunately, all of this works together to discourage future reinvestment in towns like McKeesport. New employment growth gets directed elsewhere, often towards the outer suburban rings, where those with the means and connections can secure their escape, even as they contribute to suburban sprawl. History instructs us that when work disappears, it is individual people who are left behind and forced to cope with the outcomes of large-scale structural failure. We almost always blame the most powerless people among us without giving much thought to the failed policies and inadequate government planning that very clearly set all of the structural changes into motion.
Education & Social Inequality
As it has already been pointed out, educational inequality is one of the least considered but most predictable outcomes of failed development strategies. When I was living here during the late 70’s and early 80’s, I remember vividly how many of my fellow students gave up on education the day they graduated high school. Young women were acculturated to focus on marriage and children. Getting married and having kids was more important than pursuing advanced education, career goals, and world travel. A variation of this applied to the young men with whom I grew up. This group comprised the first generation of men who were blocked from ascending the opportunity ladders that led to well-paid careers in the steel industry. Advanced education, for many of them, was simply never on their radar screen. Social narratives like “getting a college education is a waste of time,” or “go to trade school,” (there were none), and “real men aren’t respected anymore” were common currency at this time. The result was that many were never able to effectively transition or achieve a stable basis for living. They bounced between low paid temporary jobs and serial unemployment, which was followed by creative efforts to “game the system.” Many from this era that I’ve encountered in my research who are still alive remain traumatized by this experience.
But none of this should come as as a surprise, given how area schools were always calibrated, in terms of curriculum, to produce “workers” for local industries. College preparatory courses were, of course, available, but the schools themselves were designed like factories. They were built to produce blue-collar workers. The assembly line for white collar and service workers had not become fully established in the 70’s and 80’s, as this called for a complete re-tooling of the assembly line that produced high school graduates. The resulting employment and skill “disconnects” that occurred during this time period have had wide ranging and long lasting social implications.
Lethal Nostalgia
Given the nature of forced displacement and adjustment, it is not surprising that many people here take great comfort in nostalgia. There has been quite a bit of writing on the “nostalgia trap” lately. And for good reason: nostalgia narratives are emotionally appealing to people who fear social progress and change.
Another related tendency is to embrace, if not actually celebrate, cultural “sameness.” Consequently, unhealthy suspicion often gets directed toward outsiders as well as others who don’t play by the local rules. Doubtless, small kinship-based social networks also play a role and are further characteristic of a people who, in light of embracing many of these cultural traits, may also have very narrowly defined rigid personal belief systems.
Put another way, what I am saying here is that people who found it difficult to adjust to social change are continuing to actively devise ways to resist social change. All of this contributes to the construction of increasingly isolated local social worlds, where people continue to organize their life in such a way that they rarely encounter others who do not share their beliefs and values. I often encounter people here and in my research who profess belief in things that simply aren’t true simply because (I assume) it makes them feel better. For example, “XYZ mill is going to be hiring again soon.” The failure to adjust combined with insular social norms has had the effect of binding people even closer to social groups that increasingly are being left behind. Yet, instead of taking themselves to task and reflecting on why they have not “kept up” with social changes, many would rather be angry that their way of life is being rejected. And so they wallow in reverie about “back in the day” or they wish for things to be “great again.”
Given the short-falls of the education system, which lacked emphasis on protective controls like helping to foster critical thinking, self-reflection, and an openness to counter-evidence, people here have been rendered easy marks for some of the worst manipulation by others who know better. Bad information in a closed-off system can do quite a bit of damage. Not surprisingly, when you talk to people, you cannot help but be struck by an overriding sense that there are profound trauma-induced contradictions that underlie their thinking. People find it difficult to link social policy (and thus voting) to the problems that are happening all around them. Consequently, there is a tendency to gravitate toward a politics that relies on simple solutions and emotion-based appeals that are calibrated to validate rather than inform world views, which does nothing to help matters. The politics of grievance and hate become a balm that leads them further along the path to their own undoing.
Making the “Takers”
Reagan’s advisors, perhaps more than others, were adept at exploiting the evolving social landscape. By famously employing the language of “colorblind” racism, they managed to convince working class white people that the government and black people (not economic policy) were the real causes of all their problems. Reagan’s infamous tirades against “Welfare Queens” gave working class whites a tangible target against which they could project all their anger and fear. Feelings of social dominance based on racial supremacy proved to be a cheap compensation for the wages and way of life that was taken from them. Nonetheless, it was Reagan’s economic strategies, powered by supply-side economic policies and regressive tax policies, which were the catalyst that managed to wipe out all of the prosperity that many people here had known within the space of a generation.
One outcome of all of this, I noticed, was that people complained (and they continue to complain) about government assistance and “takers” without realizing that these government programs were, in fact, helping to hold them up. Were it not for limited government assistance (it should have been far more robust), the lives of many people here would have fared far worse. All of these contradictions struck me as odd to say the least. I found them disconcerting enough that I became curious to seek out life beyond the social contours of my upbringing. I left the area in 1981 in search of something different. And as it turned out, that proved to be a good instinct.
Things haven’t evolved very much when you compare the history of the past to the history of the present. In my lifetime of living and visiting here, I have borne witness to the impact of what experts document was the largest redistribution of wealth from the bottom and middle to the top of the income scale in U.S. history. This is not a fact that is open to debate; it’s a development that is well understood by leading economists among others and it continues to be discussed in policy circles. The government hasn’t done nearly enough to help the people here, but ironically, that is precisely what many of them voted for over the years.
There can be no mistaking the fact that the United States is an outlier among developed industrialized countries insofar as the country refuses to take care of their own people. More specifically, we force our old people to suffer, often putting them in nursing homes. We kill black people for a list of reasons to extensive to enumerate. And we have found novel ways to criminalize poor and homeless people, where we essentially warehouse them in jails so we don’t have to look at them. We also don’t invest in our children and their schools.
Alternatively, all of the EU countries offer universal free healthcare to cover the needs of all of their citizens. College is free (or almost free). Most enjoy some form of paid family leave and guaranteed vacation time – up to 30 days in many cases. The elderly and children are fully cared for. As for workers, most of them enjoy mandatory paid vacation with a minimum of 4 weeks off (it varies). There are numerous funded programs that are used to help the jobless and the poor; these are what are often termed “social safety net” policies. And in the United State, uniquely, researchers have found that the very people who stand to benefit the most from these types of polices routinely vote for the politicians who won’t deliver them.
The same logic applies to mass incarceration, possession of drugs, and drug overdose. Countries like Portugal have effectively decriminalized drugs. As a result, they saw both their drug and overdose rates go down. That’s because they heeded the research that advises to treat drug addiction like a medical problem and not a crime. Other EU countries offer free college – this is for their own residents and for people who don’t even reside there. Countries like Germany, for example, not only have free college, they let foreign students attend for free – even Americans – and they let them take their courses in English. On top of all of this, EU countries all enjoy cheap, clean, fast, mass transit. It’s easy to use, you’ll find it everywhere, and that means you don’t have to own a car.
Stop Trying to Solve the Wrong Problems
Despite this, average working and middle class Americans remain focused on the wrong problems: they cite things like “wokeness,” “reverse racism” and “entitlement society” as the worst problems affecting the country. Any form of government assistance is criticized as benefitting/encouraging lazy people, who are alleged to be poor because they simply won’t work hard and/or they make bad decisions. The same Americans, ironically, are against taxing wealth, which would easily fund all of the above benefits that other countries have come to standardly enjoy. In doing so, they assume a large proportion of the tax burden for themselves to bear alone.
All of this affects the long-term health and vitality of the society, which shows up in the world rankings, where the U.S continues to not fare well. We have the most expensive healthcare and our people experience some of the worst outcomes. Our people are getting sick and dying at rates that are on par with undeveloped countries. Many among the poor and middle class in the U.S. , who are voting to help maintain the status quo, are unwittingly holding the gun to their own heads and harming their own communities. Why do they do this? What is the animus that motivates this thinking? According to one new survey, the answer may not be what you think. The survey finds that white Americans across the socioeconomic spectrum, including Democrats, are considerably less concerned about both economic and racial inequality (S. Tesfaye, 2017). To unpack this, we have to look deeper into where they lie on the socioeconomic spectrum. In short, it’s not just about education and race; social class also matters and they are all deeply intertwined.
One recent pole that looked at white college-educated Americans (likely middle class) found that they are far less likely to identify poverty as a critical issue to solve — only 37 percent, compared to 47 percent of white non-college-educated Americans and a majority of Hispanic and black Americans (at 52 and 69 percent, respectively). The PRRI pole further identified that white college-educated Americans are also less likely than non-college whites to cite children living in poverty as a critical problem (49 percent as opposed to 60 percent). Additionally, only 36 percent of college educated whites state that a lack of well-paying jobs is a major problem facing American communities. Poverty, child poverty, and wage rates are all major problems in McKeesport, which in turn, feed into other problems. When people chose to ignore problems like this, they don’t miraculously go away on their own. What accounts for the empathy gap among people who have benefitted from higher education that we would like to assume should know better?(S. Tesfaye, 2017).
Sadly, it these sentiments are not confined to matters of economic opportunity. White college-educated respondents, when asked questions about domestic violence, demonstrated a considerable lack of compassion for people afflicted by this problem. A mere 33 percent of white college-educated respondents said that domestic violence was a critically important issue (compared to 47 percent of whites with no college, and 63 percent of black respondents)(S. Tesfaye, 2017).
Alternatively, white respondents without a college degree were more likely to be in agreement about the social importance of access to equal opportunity; they tended to support economic policies that address issues of equity, even as they denied that social factors like “racism” were contributory to structuring social inequality. These findings were more pronounced in the Southeast and Southwest, where 64 of whites without a college degree, including self-identified Democrats, reported that discrimination against white people has become as big a problem as discrimination against blacks and other minorities. If that is not eye-opening enough, more than 40 percent of young white people (under the age 30) in these regions confirmed that discrimination against whites is as big a problem as discrimination against nonwhites (S. Tesfaye, 2017).
Make no mistake, these general sentiments are shared by many Americans across the country, including places like McKeesport, where people are willing to deny their communities enhanced government services and benefits if it means that people they don’t like or people they feel are “unworthy” might also derive benefit. Lacking the ability to relate policy solutions to social problems, Americans are forcing their cities and towns to go it alone in confronting the massive fallout from large-scale structural economic changes. To be sure, there has been limited progress in some places, but this is not the norm. The pace of progress, if it happens at all, is downright glacial. Again, I ask: why?
How Would You Solve McKeesport’s Problems?
A lot of time has passed since I embarked on the path that led me away from Western Pennsylvania. McKeesport is now known more for its persistent low wages, high levels of serial unemployment and disability, multi-generational poverty, drug use/abuse, and gun violence than manufacturing. Not long ago, I returned to work in the local community as a college professor for Penn State. The area, of course, is far more deteriorated compared to how it was when I grew up here. And, of course, all of this is sad to witness. It’s distressing to take stock of what happened and even more disturbing to see the deterioration persist, when I know that things don’t have to continue to be like this.
Whereas there were unprecedented structural economic changes that were responsible for setting into motion a wide range of events contributing to the downfall of McKeesport, these events do not account for why it continues to remain deteriorated. For this we must turn to another explanation, which can be found in a recent PRRI survey. The study findings offer quite a bit of insight into what is happening in McKeesport and places like it: social problems are now driven by a toxic combination of American exceptionalism rooted in tribalism. In short, traditional identity politics have become fused with racial, ethnic and religious identity and this has a major impact on how people understand as well as relate to problems in their communities and country.
Specifically, the researchers note how the Republican Party has increasingly become the party of white evangelical Protestants, while the Democratic Party is increasingly the home of ethnic minorities and the religiously unaffiliated (S. Tesfaye, 2017). So it’s not a matter of simple racism or the old canard of “economic anxiety” that explains these findings.
Apparently, there are large numbers of white people who are invested in the idea that barriers to success in the U.S. are better understood in economic than in social terms, while another group of white people are unable (and perhaps unwilling) to empathize with the suffering of others. Note: this includes those people who also happen to look like them (S. Tesfaye, 2017).
This would go a long way in explaining how McKeesport’s social problems have festered and become deeply entrenched over the years. To fix it, there is only one solution: go bold or go home. Nothing short of a massive investment of capital coupled with a cultural turnaround, in terms of how people understand their community fellows, will make a difference. This turnaround must be supported by a turn toward innovative, evidence-based, problem solving. There is no point in debating these things. To say “I disagree” is the same as saying “I reject data and evidence.” So let’s be clear. If this sounds like you, we are not disagreeing. You are rejecting data and these two things are not the same, so don’t conflate the two. Without widespread community support, the current state of affairs will not only not change, things will get progressively worse. With that being said, I can offer some suggestions here, as someone who is both and insider and outsider, though I am limited to some extent by the format.
On the policy front, the major policies that affect residential quality of life have to be addressed: that includes housing, police, access to medical care and other social services, including child care, access to healthy food, education, employment, and recreation. There are, of course, myriad ways that you can go about addressing these policies with numerous choices to be made. Taking an evidence-based approach to problem solving, however, is paramount. Not relying on developer-led solutions will also be key to success. Instead, community leaders need to center the needs of the community and look for partners who can provide solutions to problems without their first concern being how to line their own pockets and generate a profit. When the community as a whole is positioned to benefit first everyone wins.
Also important, people need to stop relying on “gut feel” and “how things used to be” as the the primary litmus test they use to judge success. Times have changed and the old days are never coming back. To get back on track, rather than reinventing the wheel, McKeesport should look to other communities who have struggled with similar problems and implement what works, according to evidence-based research. This might sound simple but it’s not. Far from it. Evidence and the pesky facts that comprise evidence are not always easy to stomach. They tend not to be emotionally satisfying compared to the feelings that people get from emotion-driven appeals.
For example, crime rates have nothing to do with police funding and they have everything to do with community resources. If you undermine community resources, either by directing funds away from community-based services, or by simply not funding services at all, you are going to end up with crime problems. The safest communities are not the ones with the most cops and the toughest crime policies, they’re the ones that have the most resources. You can’t simply jail your way out of social problems.
Address the wage issue. You can’t sustain a community on the backs of residents who are either disabled/not working or working for minimum wage. Give up simple slogans like “no one wants to work anymore.” Honestly, there is nothing more frustrating than listening to a retired old union guy complain that people don’t want to work for slave wages and be treated miserably. Supporting legislation to increase wages would be a great first step, but that’s not going to be enough. Don’t rely on/incentivize big-box franchises to be the primary employers. Incentivize entrepreneurship, invest in your own people, and help them to set up businesses that pay a living wage to their employees.
Decriminalize drug use and overdose. While that may take some work on the legislative front, local leaders can begin by adopting a care-centered model that takes a harm reduction approach to addressing problems in connection with drugs. Prioritizing police investigations and punishment over care means the problem will never go away, it will get worse, and will become more expensive to deal with in long-run. Recognize that you don’t just have a drug problem, you have a long-term trauma problem that owes to your unique history. Effective community-based solutions need to acknowledge that this history makes fixing the problem more complex.
Notwithstanding, there are multiplier affects to take into account here too. No doubt, drug use is related to drug crime; however, if you can take away the market for drugs (reduce the number of users) this can help undermine local drug markets. Keep in mind, the kind of people that you want to live (or remain living) in your community don’t want to live around drug addicts. They will leave your town. You will lose your tax base. And the latter, of course, affects everything. This is why you can’t keep investing in approaches that ultimately don’t solve the drug problem. Look to the research and evidence that documents how towns not unlike McKeesport successfully dealt with these types of problems and mirror them. And give up being mad at people who take drugs.
Increase access to healthcare and social services. When people put off dealing with their health issues, they get progressively more expensive to deal with. And they die. A large part of the McKeesport population relies on Medicare and Medicaid, however, there are many who aren’t able to access key benefits, especially those that address mental health and substance abuse. People without benefits often use the hospital emergency room as their primary point of care. This is expensive for providers like UPMC, who should be able to recognize there are mutual interests at stake and that perhaps working with city leaders to help solve these problems is in everyone’s best interest.
Lastly, stop voting for politicians and their financial backers who don’t care about you. Your enemies are not the “woke mob,” “CRT,” “people who don’t respect the flag,” “single mothers,” “drug addicts,” “people on welfare,” and people who are powerless in general. The real enemy is not having the foresight and/or the courage to see that you can and should demand better from your leaders. Instead of blaming poor people for bad decisions, people who are doing a bit better themselves need to redirect their focus upward to people with the power and money who can make a difference. Staying angry with poor people as a way to signify “I am not like that,” might feel good, but it’s not smart politics. It’s also a recipe for continued decline.
Never forget that what happened to McKeesport was deeply structural; it’s deterioration was never the fault of the good people who lived there. However, the ongoing marginalization of the town and its people is another matter. To address head-on problems that have structural underpinnings, you have to effectively dismantle some if not all of those enabling structures. And by this I mean the big structures: white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism to a great extent, because capitalism thrives on the maintenance of social divisions that are demarcated by hierarchical structures of power.
Traditionally, white people have been able to rely on a wide range of tools and social mechanisms to maintain the status quo social and economic order. Of course, one of those tools has been to deny that whiteness and white racial politics are significant social factors at all. By insisting on a theoretically neutral operating landscape, where white privilege does not exist, while further denying the salience of hundreds of years of law-making, policing, and other institutional practices structured opportunities to benefit whites as opposed to blacks, indigenous and people of color, whites have been able to effectively run the table. In doing so, they have denied people access to basic opportunity as well as their individual agency. And of course, many of those people reside together in the same communities.
Quick aside: stop being angry that someone said the words “white privilege” in a sentence. It doesn’t mean you are racist; it doesn’t mean your life has been easy or that you didn’t face struggles in your life. Rather, it simply means your life was not made harder because of your race/skin color. This is where empathy needs to come into the picture. Problems don’t always have to be about you. I know it’s hard. I worked my way through this a long time ago and you can too.
The historic record is clear: even when white people were not wealthy or were not considered “high status” individuals, they did not always suffer the worst social outcomes solely because of their race. Racialized social structures have been planned, perpetuated, and maintained by people at all levels of society, often through force and violence. The result has been racial disparities in education, housing, health, and wealth. Ironically, late stage capitalism is revealing that it is far less concerned with racial oppression, as it has proving to be an adept purveyor of equal opportunity exploitation. Now whites, in numbers that are even larger than blacks and others, are getting caught up in systems of oppression and social control, which are having a major impact on their life and livelihood.
The good news is that all of this can be fixed. Your past doesn’t have to determine who you are; though, it can prepare you for what you might become. With that, find a way open up to empathy (it feels good), consider cutting your neighbors some slack, and join in what will be no doubt be hard work to implement social policies that can make a difference. This won’t be easy. But it requires a change of heart as much as it does a change in policy direction and focus.
Sources
White People Lack Empathy Across the Socioeconomic Spectrum, New Study Reveals: We can’t keep attributing Trump’s rise to economic anxiety, by Sophia Tesfaye, Salon, 2017.
Military Field Research
In addition to my academic work on guns and violence, I have worked as an advisor to the U.S. Army, where I performed program evaluation research on social science field research methods used in counterinsurgency operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. I have held various government security clearances and am currently clearance eligible.
Penn State research assistant works at the firing range
Other Research Interest
Historical analysis of the relations between war, violence, and digital and/or photo, video technologies, and other social, cultural, and/or political practices; the intersections of various media (film, television, photography) with infrastructures, histories, flows, audiences and/or content; geopolitical “border crossings” and articulations; relations of power and pleasure, sensation and embodiment, and violence in virtual and material worlds. New media “publics” and “privates,” spatialities and temporalities; media convergences and divergences, expansions and immersions.
Contribution
My research program is grounded in the vibrant tradition of the sociological imagination that challenges scholars to situate everyday life in the complex structures of history and social power.
Research Publications
Violence studies informs an interdisciplinary literature. Consequently, I find my work speaks to an audience of readers in Politics, Criminology, Sociology, Anthropology, Cultural Studies, and Disability Studies. With that, my research led to me being invited to edit as well as contribute to Social Text for a special issue on war and violence: Always At War: Economy, Labor, Life, and Blood. My article, “Mayberry R.F.D. Will Not Be Presented Tonight,” was published as part of this series. Another article, “War and Disability,” was published by The Feminist Wire.
“Knowledge is for Cutting: Waging War on the Human Terrain.” is an article addressed to research methods in the social sciences and the evolutionary history that it shares with war, which was published in a special edition of a Polish journal. Forthcoming is an article for Security Dialogue entitled: Mutilating Milieus, which looks at violence through the lens of population politics and political economy.
My Penn State Advanced Criminology Theory class visits Eastern Penitentiary in Philadelphia