1,720,961 research outputs found
Carceral (im)mobilities: theorizing mobility crises and state control
No full textThis submission should replace a similar and previous transmission, which was sent yesterday (June 30, 2020). Thank you
Marijuana legalization: comparing recent ballot initiatives
No full textMedical marijuana is now available in 23 states, and its growing acceptance has paved the way for the legalization of recreational marijuana. This article examines four recent campaigns to legalize recreational marijuana–two failures and two successes. Using data from newspaper sources, interviews with key players, and some other sources, we examine the factors that influence whether a ballot initiative succeeds or fails. We identify similarities and differences between the four measures, the social forces shaping the debate, their claims and counterclaims, and a set of factors that appear to increase the odds that a recreational marijuana ballot measure will be successful.Peer reviewe
Food fraud and the Partnership for a ‘Healthier’ America: a case study in state-corporate crime
No full textAt a moment of heightened public concern over food-related health issues, major corporations in the food industry have found their products and practices under scrutiny. Needing to be understood as socially responsible, these corporations have established partnerships with the state to construct a positive, proactive, and cooperative public image. One major public-private partnership that evolved from former First Lady Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move initiative—the Partnership for a Healthier America (PHA)—serves as a case study in this paper, which analyzes the opportunity costs and social harms perpetuated by a public health campaign bound by the imperative to maximize profit. By using trusted state actors to deliver accurate but deceptive claims about food companies’ commitment to public health, this public-private partnership actively misleads the public and potentially exacerbates public health challenges, warranting a skeptical revision of how we understand corporate social responsibility and neoliberal governance on issues of health and nutrition. As a form of fraud, these attempts to mislead the public go beyond the actions of public sector individuals or members of corporate boards, but are structurally incentivized by the legal rights, regulatory privileges, and profit-related incentives central to the modern corporate form. While conventional criminological research tends to underemphasize state and corporate harms, we make use of a critical criminological perspective to analyze state-corporate partnerships in the space between food industry practices and public health policy.Peer reviewe
Legalizing recreational marijuana: comparing ballot outcomes in four states
No full textMedical marijuana is now available in 23 states, and its growing acceptance has paved the way for the legalization of recreational marijuana. This article examines four recent campaigns to legalize recreational marijuana–two failures and two successes. Using data from newspaper sources, interviews with key players, and other sources, we examine the factors that influence whether a ballot initiative succeeds or fails. We identify similarities and differences between the four measures, the social forces shaping the debate, their claims and counterclaims, and a set of factors that appear to increase the odds that a recreational marijuana ballot measure will be successful.Peer reviewe
Legitimized fraud and the state-corporate criminology of food - a Spectrum-based theory
No full textThe role that food corporations have in determining our health and nutrition is concomitant with the power and influence that corporations exercise across all commercial sectors. These large, powerful, and often multinational entities – collectively referred to as Big Food – employ a robust array of strategies to advance the organizational interests associated with a seemingly paradoxical business model: securing the continuous and ever-growing consumption of food products increasingly associated with negative health outcomes. As this model proliferates globally, the implications of this contradiction warrant specific attention to the activities of Big Food corporations through a critical criminological framework. The pervasive and increasingly legitimized activity of Big Food relies on a legal, regulatory, and moral framework that allows for the relegation of all non-market oriented value systems to be secondary to a pro-corporatist ideological and moral superstructure. Whereas previous scholarship has contributed to an understanding of what occurs when profit-maximization values collide with – and then co-opt – public health and nutrition interests, the present study offers a spectrum-based theory to explain how various degrees of food fraud are systematically incentivized by the legal privileges of corporations and the hegemonic moral economy of neoliberal governance.Peer reviewe
Conceptual and empirical obstacles in defining MS-13: law-enforcement perspectives
No full textResearch Summary
Past and present gang scholarship is marked by debate as to the appropriate criteria for defining gangs and gang membership. Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, highlights some obstacles in conceptualizing gangs and operationalizing gang membership. Although MS-13 has generated attention in recent years, little systematic criminological research exists on the gang. Drawing on in-depth interviews and surveys of law-enforcement gang experts, we link longstanding issues of gang definition and measurement to MS-13 in the Washington, D.C. metropolitan area.
Policy Implications
Gang and immigration enforcement are inextricably linked in the case of MS-13. The ambiguous, contested, and varied means by which gangs are defined and labeled may result in the overpolicing and overcriminalization of young immigrants of color and youth of color in general. Beyond unsubstantiated police stops, arrests, convictions, and gang enhancements, such labeling practices may lead to collateral immigration consequences including deportation and permanent bars to reentry into the United States.Peer reviewe
The Salvadoran Willie Horton: MS-13, electoral politics, and racialized fear mongering
No full textPeer reviewe
A culture that is hard to defend: extralegal factors in federal death penalty cases
No full textEmpirical research has exposed a troubling pattern of capital punishment in the United States, with extralegal factors such as race, class, and gender strongly correlated with the probability of a death sentence. Capital sentencing also shows significant geographic disparities, although existing research tends to be more descriptive than explanatory. This study offers an alternative conception of local legal culture to explain place-based variation in the outcomes of federal capital trials, accounting for the level of attorney time and expert resources granted by the federal courts to defend against a death sentence. Using frequentist and Bayesian methods—supplemented with expert interviews—we empirically assess the processes determining the total allocation of defense resources in federal death penalty trials at the peak of the federal death penalty—between 1998 and 2004. Our findings strongly connect extralegal factors to the lowest levels of defense resources, which in turn correlate with a higher risk of a death sentence. Far from being idiosyncratic discrepancies, these are systemic and systematic extralegal factors that stand between a defendant and his opportunity to defend against a death sentence. Ultimately, we argue for a reconceptualization of extralegal influences and the relationship between local legal culture and capital case outcomes.Peer reviewe
To study, to party, or both? Assessing risk factors for non-prescribed stimulant use among middle and high school students
No full textThis study examines the risk factors predicting non-prescribed stimulant use (NPSU) among adolescents, with an emphasis on whether such factors are reflective of instrumental (e.g. studying) and/or recreational (e.g. partying) drug consumption settings. Using data from Monitoring the Future (2011), we employed a series of logistic regression models to establish predictors of 12-month self-reported Adderall or Ritalin use without a doctor’s note among 8th and 10th graders. Whereas studies of college students have found NPSU to correlate with instrumental motives and productivity-related demands, we find no association between NPSU and indicators of academic strain for this younger sample. Rather, we find that the age of onset and current use of alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana is most predictive of NPSU, which are substances generally associated with social and recreational consumption settings. These findings have potential implications for practitioners concerned with mitigating the harms of general prescription drug misuse, as interventions efforts informed by research conducted among college students may not readily apply to younger populations. Drawing from central tenets of developmental and life course criminology, we call for continued inquiry into the broader socialization and developmental processes that influence NPSU and other prescription drug use patterns prior to early adulthood.Peer reviewe
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