4,873 research outputs found
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
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
Interview with Kenneth Sprunt
No full textKenneth Sprunt was born in Wilmington in 1920, the third son of James Lawrence Sprunt. The Sprunts have a long history in and around Wilimington. His grandfather was a cotton merchant in the area and his great-great Uncle is the man for whom James Sprunt Community College is named for as well as the author of Chronicles of the Lower Cape Fear. Mr. Kenneth Sprunt relates his family history both before his birth and after. He spent three years in the Coast Guard during WWII primarily working on anti-submarine warfare in small boats
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
Impact of scour on lateral resistance of wind turbine monopiles: An experimental study
No full textThe majority of offshore wind structures are supported on large-diameter, rigid monopile foundations. These piles may be subjected to scour due to the waves and currents that causes a loss of soil support and consequently decreases the pile capacity and system stiffness. The results of numerical models suggest that the shape of the scour hole affects the magnitude of pile capacity loss; however, there is a dearth of experimental test data that quantify this effect. This paper presents a series of centrifuge model tests on an instrumented model pile that investigates the effects of scour-hole geometry on the response of a laterally loaded pile embedded in sand. The pile instrumentation allowed load–displacement and p–y (soil reaction – displacement) curves to be derived. Three scour geometries (global, local wide, and local narrow) and three scour depths (1D, 1.5D, and 2D; where D is pile diameter) were modelled. For all three scour types, pile moment capacity decreased almost linearly with increase of scour depth. Simple empirical relations were proposed to evaluate the detrimental influence of scour on the pile moment capacity. A new method has been developed to allow designers to quantify the effect of scour-hole shape and severity of scour on the pile response.Green Open Access added to TU Delft Institutional Repository ‘You share, we take care!’ – Taverne project https://www.openaccess.nl/en/you-share-we-take-care Otherwise as indicated in the copyright section: the publisher is the copyright holder of this work and the author uses the Dutch legislation to make this work public.Geo-engineerin
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
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
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
A Review by Kenneth Atkinson of Alexandria and Qumran: Back to the Beginning, by Kenneth Silver
No full textKenneth Silver (a.k.a. Kenneth A. K. Lönnqvist), is a historian and professional archaeologist, who has lived and worked for decades in the Near East. With extensive publications on Hellenistic and Roman archaeology, history, and numismatics, Silver is the director of a survey and mapping project in Northern Mesopotamia studying the border zone between the late Roman/ Byzantine Empires and Persia. Author of numerous publications on Qumran and related topics, Silver’s lengthy monograph proposes that the documents and type of library found at Qumran were based on models derived from Egypt. The main thesis of the volume is that Pythagorean philosophy is the core and basis for the beliefs reflected in the non-Biblical texts found at Qumran
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
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