Crime and Punishment - I

August 18, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

The first time I was on jury duty, many years ago, I was eager to serve. I wanted to be on a jury and see how the process worked. But I never made it past voir dire. The lawyers would ask some basic questions – age, occupation, neighborhood – maybe something about free-time activities. They’d meet with the judge, sotto voce, and then several jurors would be dismissed. I was always among the rejected.

One afternoon, I happened to bump into the prosecuting attorney whose case I’d been rejected for that morning.
“Why’d you throw me off your jury?” I asked.
“A sociologist?” he said. “You people don’t believe anybody’s responsible for what they do.”
At the time, I didn’t really know how to respond.

I remembered this encounter when I read the following paragraph from an article by economist Glenn Loury, “Why Are So Many Americans in Prison? Race and the transformation of criminal justice.” It was posted on the Internet recently, and several of my friends have sent me the link.

We would, in short, recognize a kind of social responsibility, even for the wrongful acts freely chosen by individual persons. I am not arguing that people commit crimes because they have no choices, and that in this sense the “root causes” of crime are social; individuals always have choices. My point is that responsibility is a matter of ethics, not social science. Society at large is implicated in an individual person’s choices because we have acquiesced in—perhaps actively supported, through our taxes and votes, words and deeds—social arrangements that work to our benefit and his detriment, and which shape his consciousness and sense of identity in such a way that the choices he makes, which we may condemn, are nevertheless compelling to him—an entirely understandable response to circumstance. Closed and bounded social structures—like racially homogeneous urban ghettos—create contexts where “pathological” and “dysfunctional” cultural forms emerge; but these forms are neither intrinsic to the people caught in these structures nor independent of the behavior of people who stand outside them.

What he said.

Doing It In Public (and then doing it again)

August 15, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

“People say they don’t want to read about your cat,” said Jeremy Freese, “but in fact the posts about your cat are the ones that get the most response.” (Or words to that effect.)

Chris Uggen and Jeremy Freese

As Jeremy has pointed out, I got it all wrong. I’m starting over.


At the beginning of the Bloggers session, there was some light banter about blogging trivial, personal subjects – what you had for lunch, your cat, the sort of thing we don’t really want to be thought of as the core of our calling.

The ASA session was Blogs as a Forum for Public Sociology (in “the coveted 8:30 a.m. Tuesday slot” as Kieran Healy put it – or maybe Kieran was quoting someone else).

And that’s the catch: we want our blogs to be public sociology – the sort of thing MainStream Media people turn to when they need a spot analysis of some socially relevant topic. But the audience doesn’t seem to be MSM, at least not right now, and it does seem to have people who want our cat. Or as Jeremy says, “It turns out that, indeed, some people are interested in what you had for lunch, and might even be more interested in that than some serious post you spent a lot of time on.”

Kieran Healy, Eszter Hargittai, Laura Clawson, Kim Scheppele, Chris Uggen

Chris Uggen made a similar point. His own blog is sometimes personal (kids, music, marathons) and sometimes public – accessible reporting and data on prisoners and former prisoners. Excellent stuff. So Chris, along with Michelle Inderbitzin, created a separate blog, Public Criminology, for these more public issues. “And nobody reads it.”

Chris was exaggerating I’m sure. “Nobody” is relative. Relative to Daily Kos (represented on the panel by Laura Clawson), PubCrim’s audience looks like nobody. But that audience may be larger than the readership of, say, this blog. (Yes, reader, you are among a select few – I sometimes think of this website as the unheard tree that falls in the blogosphere – and I wish I could figure out a way to increase that to an audience that is still select, but far more numerous. Unfortunately, I don’t have a cat. I can say, however, that my lunch of Buffalo chicken salad at the Heartland Brewery on 51st St. was truly awful.)

Maybe the best route to a widely heard, public sociology is the collective blog, like Crooked Timber (Eszter and Kieran) or Balkinization, the law blog represented on the panel by Kim Scheppele. That, and a lot of work at linking it to other places so that potential readers might find it.

ASA Bloggers

August 13, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Sociology Bloggers get-together. Considering that it was not listed on the official program, it was well attended and probably one of the most interactive sessions at the ASA meetings as you can see in the photo. (Why is it that Dan Myers gets better photos with his Treo than I get with my Canon Power Shot?) Here’s another with Chris Uggen and Fabio.









I’ll probably learn more at the ASA session on blogging tomorrow, but a quick-and-dirty demographic survey suggests that Northamerican sociology bloggers are predominantly male. (Who are the other women besides Ezster? Should we count Danah Boyd as a sociologist?) Jeremy Freese (who in person doesn’t look a whole lot like that caricature on his blog) tells of trying unsuccessfully to get the chair at Wisconsin to blog. This reluctance is curious, especially considering the sex ratio for Myspace and Facebook, which, according to the Pew research, tilts heavily towards females.

Less curious is the age factor. Blogging, like other Internet participation, is apparently for the young. At the gathering Saturday, the age distribution topped out at 41 (not counting one graying outlier sliding inexorably into geezerdom). Is this just a matter of computer literacy? Yes, the under-forties may see computers as naturally incorporated into the self if not the body, thumbing their Blackberries and cellphones like worry beads. But blogging requires little computer competence. I wonder whether the age difference signals a generational change in notions of private and public even among academics – the kind of change evidenced by the Myspacebook generation.

DEAD TABLOID SIGHTING IN SOCIOLOGY BLOG

August 10, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

PLANE MISSING SINCE 1939 LANDS WITH SKELETON AT THE CONTROLS

The Weekly World News is going under. Not devoured by space aliens or dinosaurs but killed by its parent company because of low circulation (PARENTS KILL; BLAME FAILING PAPER ROUTE!).

Supermarket tabloids nowadays are all celebrity gossip. But back in the day (the day being the 1950s and 60s), that prince of tabloids, the National Enquirer, specialized in stories of the weird, especially blood and gore. I CUT OUT HER HEART AND STOMPED ON IT! is one of its more famous headlines.

In late 1979, the Enquirer’s publisher, Generoso Pope switched it to color. (Legit newspapers didn’t go color until USA Today came along in 1982 and started cutting into tabloid circulation.) With color came the almost exclusive focus on celebrities, diets, and other more timid stories. But Pope apparently had a soft spot in his heart for the old black-and-white presses and the stories of the bizarre, so he created Weekly World News (POPE GIVES BIRTH TO BLACK AND WHITE OFFSPRING – WITHOUT SEX!) to continue the tradition.

In the early days of the Enquirer and even the Weekly World News, the stories had to have at least some basis in reality. Some of them were actually true. Reporters at local newspapers who came upon an incident that was just too gory or gross for their own paper to run would, for a fee, send it on the National Enquirer. Later, the tabloids would require only that someone claimed to have seen or done something. If someone said that he’d seen Elvis in the Dairy Queen or that Bigfoot ran off with his wife, that was good enough. The editor’s motto was “Don't fact-check your way out of a good story.”

Writers embellished stories, adding facts, quotes, and sources, and over time the connection with reality became more and more tenuous and eventually disappeared. Photoshop probably also helped, though faked photographs had long been a staple of the tabloids. By the 1990s, stories were born via parthenogenesis, springing fully-formed directly from the heads of the journalists in the office. As the Washington Post’s obit for Weekly World News, puts it

First, somebody would yell out an idea for a headline, then everybody else would yell out better ideas. The yelling was exceeded only by the laughing. “There were days when I would leave work,” Lind says, “with my stomach and my face hurting from laughing all day at the ideas being kicked around.”

(Lind, by the way, is Bob Lind, for all those of you unfortunate enough to remember his 1966 hit “Elusive Butterfly.”)

SOCIOLOGY LINKED TO WEIRD NEWS!

What does any of this have to do with sociology and thus merit inclusion in a sociology blog? For one thing, we might ask why Weekly World News’s circulation tanked. The Washington Post article blames it on a change in staff. With the news writers acting more like a team of comedy writers, management figured it would do even better by replacing them with real comedy writers. But as one of the ex-writers said, “It’s not just comedy. It’s a different skill set.” (I wonder if he said “skill set” with a straight face.)

On the data analysis front, Weekly World News stories are a data set crying out for content analysis. I recall a contest in New York Magazine long ago (like the Washington Post’s Sunday Style Invitational) that asked for parody tabloid headlines. The winner was BABY BORN WITH WINNING LOTTO TICKET! which gets at two hugely popular themes in tabloid stories – birth anomalies and luck. (HUMAN JELLYFISH BRINGS GOOD FORTUNE AND BIG BUCKS TO OUR READERS: These lucky readers rubbed his belly and won—and so can you!) That’s an actual headline from September 1993. I know because Chip Rowe, among the many funny and inventive things in his career, collected and catalogued a year’s worth of Weekly World News headlines. Space aliens, miracle cures, medical anomalies, marriage, sex, and dieting. A really good story combines at least two of these (GAL WAS SO SHOCKED BY PROPOSAL OF MARRIAGE —HER HAIR FELL OUT!).

We know how these stories got produced. But who was consuming them, and why? What did they get from them? As Kevin Walker, in one sociological article found online put it, “The pleasure from reading any text comes from the interaction of the reader and the text, situated in social and historic context.” Which means that if we are to do this correctly, we have to identify the readers and their social and historical context. Or as the Weekly World News might have put it SOCIOLOGISTS TAKE FUN OUT OF READING TABLOIDS!
(Superfluous note: in this post, italicized sans-serif headlines are my own invention. The others are actual World Weekly News headlines, not that it matters, at least not by tabloid criteria.)