A young man named Michael Brown has been killed by police officers in St. Louis, Missouri. According to eyewitness accounts, Michael was walking (unarmed) to visit his grandmother when witnesses saw an officer approach Brown and have some sort of confrontation with him. One witness states that she saw the police officer attempt to put…
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Racism, fear of crime, and punitive public policy.
This Slate article is all over my Facebook news feed this week. It’s an article reporting on the results of a study by Stanford University psychologists Rebecca Hetey and Jennifer Eberhardt. According to Slate, the researchers conducted two different experiments, one in San Francisco and one in New York City. You can read the details of…
American Society of Criminology Annual Meeting 2014: Preliminary Program Available
The preliminary program for the 2014 meeting of the American Society of Criminology (ASC) is now available on the organization’s website. The ASC annual conference is one of the highlights of the academic year. Even though it was always a significant financial burden to attend as a student (even with partial funding through my department),…
John Oliver’s “Last Week Tonight”: Wealth Gap
It is impossible — or it should be impossible, at least — to talk about crime and justice without discussing economic inequality. It is a key concept in numerous criminological theories, appearing under the guise of poverty, blocked opportunities, relative deprivation, concentrated disadvantage, and many other closely-related concepts. Income and wealth translate into social and political power,…