200 research outputs found
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
Latino criminology: unfucking colonial frameworks in ‘Latinos and crime’ scholarship
No full textCritical criminology represents a plurality of subfields and political locations that address various forms of harm, violence, and injustices associated with powerful actors and institutions. Often referenced as a coherent subfield, these criminologies exist in a perpetual state of divergence and convergence, advancing novel and reconfigured lines of inquiry to examine specific and iterative systems of power and inequality. Whereas the crime and justice research community writ large has negotiated a diversification of theories, methods, and paradigms, there is much to both celebrate and critique about the current state of the criminological and criminal justice (CCJ) research enterprise. As part of the shared project of centering the margins, this paper outlines select opportunities and obstacles inherent in proposing a Latino Criminology. Far from a parochial or insular reflection, a Latino Criminology offers a research platform with urgent and translatable applications to policy, practices, and everyday people in the United States. Compatible with both orthodox and radical perspectives in criminology and criminal justice scholarship, a proposed Latino Criminology centers the margins by articulating areas of intervention for scholars, practitioners, and activists seeking to mitigate or confront state violence, interpersonal harms, and racialized social control.Peer reviewe
Minority-owned cannabis businesses as a social justice imperative
No full textWhen the growth, distribution, and point of sales for cannabis were explicitly illegal enterprises, black and brown bodies bore the brunt of the state’s coercive force via the enforcement of laws that had little to do with the objective properties of cannabis, and more to do with instrumentally moving targeted groups into formal spheres of oversight and control. Today, where the supply chain and consumption of cannabis is both an attractive and highly profitable enterprise, race, class, and power remain salient. The roster of those who profit from the legal cannabis industry is overwhelmingly unrepresentative of the rosters of those who were victimized by the earlier regulatory regimes. This irony has not gone unnoticed, with journalists, bloggers, business owners, and scholars pointing out how a plant that served as a pretext for disproportionate carceral control of communities of color is—quite literally overnight via the result of a ballot initiative or legislative reform—now responsible for advancing the capital interests of majority-white agents and enterprises. To provide additional social context to this empirical trend, this chapter highlights some of the proposed and actual steps currently underway to advance economic equity among communities of color in the cannabis industry, framing the expansion and success of minority-owned cannabis businesses as a social justice imperative.Peer reviewe
Latino criminology: unfucking colonial frameworks in ‘Latinos and crime’ scholarship
No full textTo “unfuck” is to correct a situation, or yourself if necessary, and in a timely manner. There is an enduring need to audit and deconstruct the colonial features of criminological theory and criminal justice practices. To better understand these enduring colonial harms, this article offers a forward-looking prospectus on the merits of a Latino Criminology and highlights the shared historical and conceptual overlaps between critical criminology and Latino studies in studying state violence, interpersonal harms, and racialized social control. Compatible with both orthodox and progressive perspectives in criminology and criminal justice scholarship, an emergent and politically reflexive Latino Criminology centers the margins by articulating areas of intervention for scholars to improve criminological inquiry and depart – or unfuck ourselves – from the many settler colonial and white supremacist inheritances of our field.Peer reviewe
[Review of] Presumed criminal: Black youth and the justice system in postwar New York, by Carl Suddler
No full textThe common law tradition and prescriptive philosophy of parens patriae is an underlying justification for juvenile justice systems in the United States. Under this framework, the sovereign is the “father figure” charged with caring for its subjects, which include accounting for poor, destitute, and otherwise guardian-less children. These paternalistic values are found both within and beyond juvenile justice contexts. Consistent with the early origins of institutional corrections in the United States, these rehabilitative and redemptionist frameworks were created by white people to account for the wayward or deviant souls of other white subjects. In Presumed Criminal – Black Youth and the Justice System in Postwar New York, Carl Suddler (2019) empirically documents how black youth in New York City were never subject to an ethos of care or rehabilitation that ostensibly dominated the foundational purpose of juvenile justice institutions. Instead, “black youths faced a more punitive justice system by the post-war era that restricted their social mobility and categorically branded them as criminal – a stigma they continue to endure” (p. 5). The text contributes to carceral studies by showing how black youth were historically criminalized in Harlem, and how the events in New York City can help us understand unresolved conflicts and contradictions in race, criminalization, and justice policy
The Colombian National Police and the politics of crime control evaluations
No full textThe Colombian National Police inaugurated a comprehensive operational model in 2010. Informed by evidence-based law enforcement models from the Global North, the MNVCC, or the National Quadrant Policing Model, integrates core features of procedural justice, hotspots, problem-oriented and community policing strategies. Just under a decade old, empirical assessments of the model’s impact vary in quality and availability. While the Colombian National Police presents the model as a successful intervention, there is little consensus on the degree to which the MNVCC has affected crime rates or perceptions of insecurity. The core purpose of this paper is to offer insight into the political dimensions that enable this contradictory narrative. Relying on privileged access to high-level administrators inside the Colombian National Police and other institutions, this study explains how structural features of official crime data—with political incentives specific to the Colombian context—provide the basis for contradicting claims surrounding the MNVCC’s impact.Peer reviewe
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