The End of Gangs

From Pacific Standard

Los Angeles gave America the modern street gang. Groups like the Crips and MS-13 have spread from coast to coast, and even abroad. But on Southern California’s streets they have been vanishing. Has L.A. figured out how to stop the epidemic it set loose on the world? 

In 2007, when housing prices were still heated, factory worker Simon Tejada put his home on the market. It was a well maintained three-bedroom in the Glassell Park district of Northeast Los Angeles, and the structure was appraised at $350,000. (Tejada had bought it for $85,000 in 1985.) But only one offer came in: $150,000. “Your house is fine,” the guy told Tejada. “The neighborhood’s awful.”

I met Tejada a few months later. I had been writing about gangs in Los Angeles since 2004, when, after 10 years as a writer in Mexico, I’d returned home to take a job with the Los Angeles Times. My reporting took me into scores of working-class neighborhoods and cities within Southern California, places like Pacoima, Watts, Azusa, Hawaiian Gardens, Florence-Firestone, and Harbor Gateway. 

Gangs ravaged all these locales. Walls were covered with graffiti. Shootings were constant. In many of these neighborhoods, Latino gangs had taken to attacking and killing random black civilians, turning themselves into the leading regional perpetrators of race-hate crime...

...Read the rest here.

Untangling the relationship between mental illness and crime

From MinnPost

After graduating from Grinnell College in 2003 with a degree in sociology, Jillian Peterson went right into the heart of the beast: She took a job as an investigator for the Capital Defender Office in New York City with the task of documenting the bio-psycho-social histories of men facing the death penalty.

The St. Paul native and Central High School alum said she was expecting “to meet Hannibal Lecter types, to be afraid, to feel threatened,” she said. “And I didn’t.”

Instead, she said, she began to see the humanity in these “very immature, very young” offenders who were “products of the lives they had led. And there was always mental illness, often a laundry list of diagnoses if you went way back.”

Peterson, who got her Ph.D. in psychology and social behavior at the University of California Irvine and now teaches at Normandale Community College in Bloomington, spent the next decade seeking to more deeply understand the relationship (if any) between mental illness and criminal behavior...

...read the rest of the article here.

& find the full study here.

Most Ex-Inmates Arrested Within Three Years of Release, Says New Federal Study

From The Crime Report, April 22

An estimated two-thirds of prisoners released in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within three years, the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics said today in the first major federal study of recidivism in nearly two decades.

More than three-quarters (77 percent) were arrested within five years.

The study covers 405,000 prisoners released by 30 states in 2005. More than one-third (37 percent) were arrested within six months of their release from prison, and more than half (57 percent) were arrested by the end of the first year. That corresponds with earlier research indicating that the highest chances of rearrest are soon after a prison release.
 

Read more here.

Local homicide rate increases cause more elementary students to fail school

WASHINGTON, DC, April 16, 2014 — A new study finds that an increase in a municipality's homicide rate causes more elementary school students in that community to fail a grade than would do so if the rate remained stable.

"This finding is a source of concern because exposure to environmental violence is highly prevalent in contemporary societies and is unequally distributed along socioeconomic lines," said study co-author Florencia Torche, an associate professor of sociology at New York University. "To the extent that children living in poverty are more likely to experience environmental violence, its effect on early educational achievement will contribute to the intergenerational reproduction of poverty."

Titled, "Exposure to Local Homicides and Early Educational Achievement in Mexico," the study, which appears in the April issue of Sociology of Education, relies on data on all elementary schools in Mexico from 1990 to 2010 merged with the annual homicide rate in the municipality where each school is located.

Read the rest here
& the full study available here.

Opinion: Employing Former Felons Will Improve the Economy and Public Safety

Excerpt from Pacific Standard - April 7

Lawmakers in 10 states and over 50 cities have already enacted Ban the Box policies, eliminating the check-box that asks about an applicant’s criminal record. It’s time for Congress to follow suit.

Seven years ago, I hired Ron Sanders, an unemployed, single dad with a felony record, to work in a community health center. Like the majority of those who are incarcerated, Ron had been addicted to drugs and homeless. But even when those days were long over and he had completed a college certificate program to become a community health worker, he still couldn’t get a job. He couldn’t even get an interview.

An overwhelming 65 million Americans with criminal records face significant barriers to employment each day. Most applications for employment include a box that asks, “Have you ever been convicted of a crime?” Check the box, and nowadays, the application most likely goes to the trash. In 2009, a team of Princeton and Harvard researchers found that having a criminal record in New York city reduced the likelihood of a callback or job offer by nearly 50 percent. It doesn’t matter if you finished serving your time, committed a crime decades ago, or whether the crime would impact the quality of your work.

Read the rest, here.

Crime and punishment: psychology and book bans

Post excerpted from the Guardian by Dean Burnett:

Chris Grayling, UK justice minister, recently imposed a blanket ban on prisoners in England and Wales being sent books in the mail. Obviously the decision has been defended, being explained as part of a new regime of rewards and punishments (or is it to cut drug smuggling?) but many still see it as a needlessly harsh and unmotivated punishment for prisoners, so it has still backfired somewhat.

The suddenness of it does suggest that not a lot of thought has gone into this. Perhaps the policy is the result of some other factors? Is there a rumour going round that paper and ink are crucial ingredients in a type of moonshine? Has there been a dramatic rise in lethal paper-cuts in prisons? Maybe the policy was meant be the somewhat-obvious but well-meant “under no circumstances should prisoners receive bombs”, but an overzealous autocorrect caught the last word, and they decided to press ahead without proofreading?

Read more here.

'Dying Art?': Forensic Sketch Artists Face a Digital Future

From NBC News: 

The stranger wore scrubs when she plucked the 3-day-old newborn from a Texas hospital and hid her in a handbag. Lubbock police, with the aid of the infant’s family and surveillance, created a computer composite of the suspect for the public.

Then, a call came in. A witness who was there that early March morning in 2007 said the composite was wrong. Police summoned Suzanne Lowe Birdwell, a forensic sketch artist with the Texas Rangers, to help get it right.

“The woman said she was there in the maternity waiting room. She said the image they put on the television, the computer composite, looked like a white woman,” Birdwell recalled.

The suspect — later identified as Rayshaun Parson, who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for the kidnapping – was black. She had been caught within 24 hours of Birdwell’s sketch going out.

When digital devices fail to deliver, police still turn to the organic alternative of paper, pencil and a personal touch that a forensic sketch artist offers. It’s a skill that artists say has been drawn on less and less in a world where surveillance and cellphone cameras are ubiquitous, and computer programs can be cost-saving measures.

Read more here.

3 inventions that can catch you committing a crime

From Aljazeera's TechKnow Blog

To learn more about innovative crime scene investigation technology for this week’s “TechKnow,” contributor Crystal Dilworth visited John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City. Founded as the only liberal arts college in the U.S. with a criminal justice and forensics focus, students and professors at John Jay are developing and working with technological innovations that are the future of forensic investigation.

“This is the place to get educated in the field of criminology,” says “TechKnow” producer Mark Teague. “The college not only trains the crime fighters of the future, but their professors develop technologies and processes which law enforcement agencies will certainly use in the future.”
Here’s a look at some of the technology we got to see up close:

[1.] Panoramic 3D cameras
Panoramic 3D cameras are used to photograph the crime scene to capture every detail for further analyses.

...Find the rest here.

Study: Police see black children as less innocent and less young than white children

In a new study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers asked college students and police officers to estimate the ages of young children who they were told had committed a crime (both misdemeanors and felonies). In both groups, respondents were far more likely to overestimate the ages of young black boys than young white boys; they were also less likely to view black children as innocent.

“Children in most societies are considered to be in a distinct group with characteristics such as innocence and the need for protection,” study author and professor of psychology at UCLA Phillip Atiba Goff said of the study. “Our research found that black boys can be seen as responsible for their actions at an age when white boys still benefit from the assumption that children are essentially innocent.”

Read the rest of the article for Salon Magazine here.


Full study available here.

Climate change may mean more crime

(Story excerpted from the Boston Globe) 

As the global climate changes around us, the potential effects tend to be discussed in familiar environmental terms: warmer average temperatures, changing rainfall patterns, rising seas.

But it can be difficult to imagine how exactly this altered climate will affect day-to-day life—how it might change the social fabric of, say, a relatively prosperous American city like Boston.

Increasingly, researchers are trying to draw out those scenarios, including ones that could come from a rise of just a few degrees in temperature. And a new study by an economist in Cambridge suggests that, even without utterly upending the world as we know it, projected climate change could have very concrete social effects indeed.

 Read the rest here.