Special Victims

April 13, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

An op-ed, by Glenn McGovern in the Wall Street Journal (here but behind a paywall) says that attacks on prosecutors are on the rise.  McGovern begins with the recent shootings of district attorneys in Texas.  Then he says,

Each year in this country, well over 100 police officers are killed in the line of duty.

That number is correct in a technical sense, but since McGovern is writing entirely about “attacks” on law enforcement officials, it’s misleading. Most police officers who die on the job – usually about 60% – are killed in accidents. 

 The number of lethal attacks on police never gets close to 100.

As for attacks on prosecutors, according to McGovern, the number for this decade, as of April 1, 2013, is 15.  By comparison, as of the same 44-months-into-the-decade* of the 1990s and 2000s, only six such acts of violence had been recorded in each of those periods.  He finds no “geographical logic” or other demographic patterns in these attacks.  But with a total of only 27 attacks over a 23-year period, differences would show up only if they were extreme. 

The 543 killings of police officers in the last decade do indeed show regional difference.

(Click on the graphs for a larger view.)

Both in absolute numbers and rates per population, cop-killing is most prevalent in the South.  My first guess was that this had to do with the greater prevalence of guns in the South.  It’s no surprise that guns, especially handguns, are the most frequent weapon when cops wind up dead.

But when it came to choice of weapons, differences between regions were minimal and in an unexpected direction.  In the South, about 3.5% of the weapons used in nonlethal attacks on the police were guns (not including “personal weapons,” i.e. fists and feet).  For the Northeast percentage of guns was slightly higher – 4%.  Yet the South kills far more police.  So if it’s not the choice of weapon, we are left the Southern culture-of-violence explanation: When Southern men feel they have been seriously wronged, they are more likely to use violence to defend their honor. 

It’s in the South that we are most likely to find “stand your ground laws” allowing the deadly defense against the intrusions of other people.  It’s also where we’re more likley to hear anti-gun-control arguments based on the idea that guns are necessary to defend against the intrusions of government. 

This explanation should hold for attacks on prosecutors as well.  As McGovern says, the prosecutor must almost inevitably denigrate the honor of the defendant:

For hours and hours over many days and weeks, under the glaring eyes of a defendant seething with anger, these prosecutors argue to a judge or jury that this person should be locked away for life, or even forfeit his life.

The number of incidents is too small to reveal patterns of regions of urban vs. small town.  Let us hope that it remains that way.  Sometimes a small n is just what we want.
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*I’m not sure how April 1 is 44 months into the decade rather than 39. 

AKD 2013

April 10, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Last week, seventeen Montclair students were officially inducted into AKD, the sociology honor society.   We were glad to have so many, especially since we raised the GPA bar this year. 

(Click on the picture for a larger view.)

Left to right.

• Lisa Kaiser
• Desiree Velez
• Keri Anne Hart
• Tom Rorke
• Jackie Cano
• Rachel Druker
• Luis Bernal
• Kristine Nemec
• Jamie Sommer
• Liz Sondej
• Joseph Della Fave
• Rachel Lyn Matthews
• Armita Haghshenas
• Victoria Sirianni

Not in the picture:

• Jovo Bjelcevic
• Kelly Orosz 
• Sean Wilkinson

We even managed to get students and faculty together for a photo op.

Front row: Yong Wang, Chris Donoghue, Sangeeta Parashar, Yasemin Besen-Cassino, Faye Allard, George Martin, Arnie Korotkin

Second row: (faculty/staff only):  Janet Ruane, Jay Livingston, Susan O'Neil, Bob Podhurst

Our speaker was Paul Hirschfield of Rutgers who has been looking at school bullying, focusing the cases that ended in suicide (“bullicide”). He pointed out the obvious shortcomings of purely psychological explanations.  Whatever the common traits of bullies or of victims, these don’t explain why bullying increases in prevalence or intensity in some schools and not others.  He had a similar criticism of the explanation that focuses on culture.  “Lazy sociology,” was his term for it.  Instead, he looks at social structure, particularly status hierarchies.  Among kids, hierarchies can promote and sustain bullying.  Among teachers, those at the top of the status hierarchy – the more senior teachers – may take an old-school non-interventionist, non-alarmist view.  Younger teachers who might want to intervene “risk making powerful enemies” (high-status students).  In his review of 50 bullicide cases, Paul noticed that teachers were especially less likely to challenge anti-homosexual bullying.

We had a pretty good turnout.

And faculty and students could get together.

Drunk as a Lord

April 6, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Like Andrew Gelman, I’m puzzled by Tyler Cowen’s assertion about alcohol:

There is an elite which has absolutely no problems handling the institution in question, but still there is the question of whether the nation really can have such bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else.

Do the elite really have no problem handling alcohol?  I guess it comes down to definitions of problem and handling.  Despite examples like Ted Kennedy, most drunks don’t kill people.  More to the point, Kennedy’s elite status insulated him from the worst consequences of his fatal drunken driving.  It’s good to be the king.  Or a Kennedy.*  No doubt, many among the elite can’t handle liquor, but they don’t have a problem.  Even for middle-class people with less economic and social capital, drunkenness and even alcoholism need not be a problem. 

As long as the drug is the sole preserve of the elite, it’s not a problem for society either.  But what happens when a drug becomes democratized? Until the 1980s, cocaine had, thanks to its cost, been confined mostly to the elite. Then, in its inexpensive form, crack, it became widely available to the masses.  Suddenly, it was a social problem.  In typical fashion, US policy-makers defined the problem as criminality and dealt with it by enacting more and more draconian punishments. 

Those new laws amply illustrate what Tyler Cowen refers to as “bifurcated social norms, namely one set of standards for the elite and another set for everybody else,” except that these weren’t norms, they were laws. The sentence for selling  5 grams of crack was the same as for selling 500 grams of cocaine. As for that other set of more punitive norms for “everybody else,” guess who“everybody else” was.  Mostly Black people. 

The changing demographic for cocaine and the reaction to that change paralleled what happened in the “gin crisis” in England only a few hundred years before. [I am now going to recycle some paragraphs and a jpeg from a post I did five years ago.]

Up until the 1730s, only the wealthy, propertied classes could afford distilled spirits, mostly brandy. It’s not that they didn’t drink to excess – the phrase “drunk as a lord” dates back to the mid-1600s – but their drinking wasn’t a social problem.

Then came cheap gin and the democratization of drunkenness. The lower classes had the tuppence to get drunk as a lord. But they lacked the means to keep the drunkenness from becoming a problem. I suppose it didn’t really matter if the lords were too drunk to work; their wealth insulated them, their families, and the society against the drawbacks of drunkenness. Not so the inhabitants of Hogarth’s Gin Lane.

What followed were the gin laws of 1736, so discriminatory that they provoked riots. That may be the main place where the parallels between gin and crack diverge. It’s hard to imagine people taking to the streets over the 100-1 cocaine-to-crack law in the way that lower-class Londoners rioted to protest the gin laws. But then, lower-class Londoners did not have the vote; the streets may have been their only avenue for political action. In any case, the gin laws were not very effective (back to the parallels with crack), but after fifteen or twenty years, the crisis had run its course, and lower-class drinking was no longer a threat to the integrity of society.

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* As Clone High viewers know, nothing bad ever happens to the Kennedys. (HT: Max)

Social Science Evidence and the Court

April 4, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston

Doug Hartman at The Society Pages  is upset about Justice Scalia’s casual and inaccurate summary of social science data.   During the oral arguments on DOMA, Scalia said 

There’s considerable disagreement among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not.

This is a bit like saying that there’s considerable disagreement among climate scientists as to whether the earth climate is getting warmer. 

Doug Hartman concludes:

 For Scalia and his ilk, there is no real knowledge in the social sciences, no authority. Not even any real data or useful information. Just a lot of disagreement and differences of opinion.

The title of his post is “Scalia Takes It from ‘Bad’ to ‘Really Bad.’” That still may be understating things.  It’s not just that Scalia sees social science as mere opinion.  But even when the scientific conclusions are irrefutable, Scalia finds social science knowledge irrelevant.  At least when that knowledge is inconvenient for his argument.

The case I have in mind is McCleskey v. Kemp, decided in 1987.  Scalia is the only member of that Court still on the bench. He didn’t write the opinion, Justice Powell did, but Scalia was apparently in full agreement. 

McCleskey was a Georgia death penalty case.  McCleskey, a Black man, had killed a White man.  The defense presented the findings of a careful study by David Baldus on race and the death penalty in Georgia.  He had looked at 2500 murder cases and concluded, even after adjusting for dozens of other variables, that race made a difference in capital sentencing.  In cases with Black defendants, prosecutors were slightly more likely to seek and win the death penalty.  The race of the victim weighed even more heavily. When the murder victim was White, prosecutors were four times more likely to seek the death penalty.  Unsurprisingly, the cases most likely to bring a death sentence were those like McCleskey’s – Black defendant, White victim.

The underlying assumption of prosecutors and perhaps jurors seems to have been that White lives were more valuable than Black lives.*  The taking of a White life, whether by an individual or by the state, was a much more serious event.

Regardless of the accuracy of the Baldus findings, in the majority opinion, they were irrelevant.  The study may have shown a general bias in the system.  But that didn’t mean that the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applied to this particular case. 

The statistics do not prove that race enters into any capital sentencing decisions or that race was a factor in petitioner’s case. [emphasis in original]

To win his case, McCleskey would have to show that the prosecutors in his particular case were acting on racial prejudice.  If the racism was unconscious, that would be an impossible task.  And even if prosecutors were aware that they valued White lives above Black and were acting on the basis of that evaluation, it’s unlikely that they would have been writing memos revealing their prejudice.

The majority did have a point.  You can’t use aggregate data to establish a connection in any single case.  That’s the ecological fallacy.  But the Court could have said that Goergia’s death penalty system was so tainted by racial prejudice that it would have to be suspended.  Instead, the court said,

At most, the Baldus study indicates a discrepancy that appears to correlate with race. Apparent disparities in sentencing are an inevitable part of our criminal justice system.

The Court had moved far from its weighing of social science evidence in Brown v. Board of Ed.  In that case too, as my colleague Jessica Henry reminds her students, the Court could have said, after reviewing the data, “Apparent disparities in education are an inevitable part of the school system.”  Instead, it said that those disparities were in violation of the Equal Protection clause and that school systems must reduce those disparities by desegregating. 

The message in McCleskey was much different, the Court tossing the data aside and saying in effect, “It’s racist, it’s unfair.  Get over it.”  I doubt that Scalia’s relation to social science data is any different today.

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* There’s a quotation often attributed to an unspecified 19th centurty Southern prosecutor or judge:  “If a Black man kills a White man, that’s capital murder.  If a White man kills a Black man, that’s justifiable homicide.  And if a Black man kills a Black man, that’s just one more dead nigger.” The quote may be apocryphal.  The sentiment and cognitions it expresses were real then; they were real at the time of the Baldus study; and they may still be real today.