Chris Uggen's Blog

why haley barbour employed and pardoned convicted murderers rather than car thieves

2012-01-29T20:08:00.001-06:00

CNN's Anderson Cooper has devoted several recent crime and punishment reports to the pardons meted out by former Mississippi governor Haley Barbour. In several segments, Mr. Cooper seemed incredulous that convicted murderers were allowed to serve as "trustees" in the governor's mansion prior to their release. In one report, for example, he and attorney Jeffrey Toobin dismissed Governor Barbour's claim that murderers convicted of a single crime of passion were somehow better suited for such positions than inmates serving time for lesser offenses.

I will not comment here on the uses and abuses of the trustee (or "trusty") system, except to note that the practice was once widespread but waned considerably after the prisoners' rights revolution that began in the 1960s. Instead, I'm here to explain why Governour Barbour and his staff preferred employing convicted murderers rather than, say, convicted car thieves.

The chart below is taken from an excellent large-scale Bureau of Justice Statistics recidivism study (Langan and Levin 2002). Overall, 67.5 percent of prisoners were rearrested within 3 years of their release and 25.4 percent were returned to prison for committing new offenses (others were returned to prison for violating the terms of their release). If you click on the chart, you can see that people convicted of homicide have the lowest rate of recidivism as measured by rearrest -- 40.7 percent -- and the second lowest rate of return to prison for a new offense (10.8 percent). At the other end of the chart, about 79% of those convicted of motor vehicle theft were rearrested and about 31 percent were returned to prison after being convicted of a new crime.

This doesn't mean that a 20-year-old murderer is less dangerous than a 20-year-old car thief, of course. It just means that by the time we see fit to release people convicted of homicide, they are unlikely to pose a significant threat to public safety. Many have spent decades in prison and are much older than other inmates when they are finally freed. Convicted murderers make good candidates for pardons precisely because their sentences are soooo long relative to the risk that many of them pose at the tail-end of those sentences.

But aren't those convicted of killing especially likely to kill again? I mean, a 10.8 percent recidivism rate would be awful if half of those offenses turned out to be new murders. Contrary to all we've learned from Quentin Tarantino movies, however, homicide offenders tend not to specialize in killing.

The chart below uses odds ratios to represent the degree of specialization among people convicted of various crimes. Here, the 1.4 for homicide is the ratio of the odds that a homicide offender will be rearrested for another homicide (that's the numerator in the ratio) relative to the odds that prisoners released for other offenses will be arrested for a homicide (that's the denominator). You can see some evidence of specialization among those convicted of motor vehicle theft, where the odds of rearrest for a new auto theft are about 1.9 times greater than those for non-car thieves (2.9-1=1.9). There is an even greater degree of specialization for rape and other sexual offenses, with odds ratios of 4.2 and 5.9, respectively, corresponding to rates of new sex offenses that are 3-to-5 times higher than those for people convicted of non-sex crimes. For homicide, however, the odds ratio of 1.4 suggests comparatively little specialization.

I might also add that a great proportion of homicides are "cleared" by arrest, relative to the other offenses on the list, so it doesn't seem likely that rampant homicide recidivism is somehow going undetected by the system.

In short, there is much evidence that recidivism rates for people convicted of homicide tend to be particularly low. While it may be politically unpopular to pardon convicted murderers or to place them in positions of trust, they tend to do well when, at long last, they are afforded such opportunities.

impossible research

2012-01-17T17:01:00.000-06:00

Jesse Wozniak jets off to a job interview this week, where he'll talk about his research on state reconstruction and the new Iraqi police force. Jesse is an advisee, Contexts student board member, and frequent contributor to the Office Hours podcasts. All dissertations demand sacrifice, but this one posed particular challenges.

In fact, Jesse's project calls to mind what Pierre Bourdieu called "the craft par exellence of the researcher: investing a theoretical problem of far-reaching implications in an empirical object that is well constructed and controllable with the means at hand, that is, possibly, by an isolated researcher, with no funding, limited to his[her] own labor power." Doug Hartmann loves this passage, as it simultaneously conveys both the enormity of our task and our power and capacity to get it done.

The "theoretical problem" of civilian policing and state reconstruction certainly has far-reaching implications. I couldn't be 100% sure, though, that the "empirical object" of contemporary Iraq training academies was quite so "controllable with the means at hand." And, despite a fine academic record, Jesse had a tough time securing funding for his ambitious dissertation plan -- observations at training academies, interviews with officials, surveys and interviews with recruits in training, extensive archival research, and some very costly plane tickets and living expenses.

While he put in several grant and fellowship proposals, most reviewers and funders simply viewed the project as impossible. How could a single graduate student possibly secure human subjects approval, gain clearance from the Department of State, learn a new language, live and travel extensively in a war zone, and gain repeated access to the officials and recruits he planned to interview and survey?

Well, now he has done the impossible and returned with data in hand. When he didn't get funding, this "isolated researcher" was undaunted – he simply took on extra teaching and all manner of additional work so that he could self-fund the project. The proof, of course, will be in the pudding that Jesse is still preparing. Having seen the materials he brought back from Iraq, however, I'm confident that the hard work and fearlessness will pay off in a terrific dissertation and book.

In some ways, we're fortunate to work in a field where isolated researchers can still learn so much by the sweat of their brows. And while a couple years of cushy dissertation funding would have made Jesse's life a whole lot easier, I'm guessing that something real and true has been gained in the struggle.

* The quote is from page 156 of Pierre Bourdieu's 1988 "Program for a Sociology of Sport" in the Sociology of Sport Journal 5:153-161.
** The photo is from Ben Brears' photostream, licensed as Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) under creative commons.

Stale Records

2012-01-13T17:31:00.000-06:00

Criminologists Al Blumstein and Kiminori Nakamura offer a powerful New York Times op-ed this week, arguing that "stale criminal records" should expire when they can no longer distinguish criminals from non-criminals.

But this isn't just a couple of bleeding heart academics advocating on behalf of a stigmatized group -- there's a solid research foundation supporting the argument. Several smart and creative studies have now followed people arrested or convicted of crimes to watch how long it takes before a criminal's risk of a new offense drops to the point that it is indistinguishable from those with no record of past crimes.

Several teams of social scientists have designed really elegant studies to answer this important question. Most use some variant of event history or survival analysis -- a semi-fancy but straightforward set of statistical tools. Based on their own research, Blumstein and Nakamura now conservatively estimate the “redemption time” at 10 to 13 years. Megan Kurlychek, Bobby Brame, and Shawn Bushway came up with about a 6-year window using somewhat different data and methodology in 2006.

While the specific "time-to-no-crime" varies across studies, the best evidence is now calling into question standard "lifetime" bans on employment, voting, and other rights and privileges. This doesn't mean that the laws will be changed or even that they should be changed. But it does show how good social science can challenge old assumptions and inject much-needed evidence into public debates. And, for those of us who like to put our semi-fancy statistics to good purpose, the op-ed and the research beneath it offer a fine example of public scholarship.

teaching the 1 in 100

2011-12-14T19:14:00.000-06:00

I'm always impressed with teachers who blend established knowledge with shifting social currents, bringing it together in ways that students can understand and appreciate. My pubcrim colleague Michelle Inderbitzin seems to do this every year in her classes at both Oregon State University and Oregon State Penitentiary.

This fall, her Inside-Out Prison Exchange students combined a social fact (that 1 of every 100 American adults is incarcerated) with a new social movement (the We are the 99 Percent cry of the Occupy movement) , photographing prisoners and the people around them holding signs that shared their stories. The result is We are the 1 in 100, a class project and tumblr site that shows an important side of the American incarceration story.

As someone who works and teaches in this area, I rarely come across materials that render the lived everyday reality of prisons in such a clear, human, and intimate way. You can read Michelle's account on pubcrim or visit and add to the archive with your own photos and stories. It takes courage and trust -- and an impressive amount of work, in a 10-week class -- to bring these private moments and messages to light.

the pastiness of the long-distance runner / maroon and gold shoes

2011-12-12T18:53:00.002-06:00

Even in the most diverse cities, marathoners see mostly white legs and faces at the starting line. At Citings and Sightings, Suzy and Hollie point to a new Runner's World piece, which asks "Why is Running so White?"

This issue also arose at a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation meeting this year, when James Jackson noted that African American neighborhoods often provide few safe places to run, but ample outlets for fast food and alcohol. While both running and junk food can relieve stress in the short-term, their long-run health effects will differ dramatically. There are other reasons for race differences in running, of course, and the Jay Jennings article touches on everything from hair to role models.

In running, as in other sports, strong stereotypes persist about race and athletic ability. I once shared a starting line laugh with a fellow middle-aged, middle-of-the-pack runner ... who happened to be from Kenya. He said he was a slooooow runner but people seemed to make the assumption that all Kenyans must be faster than all Americans. Some were so convinced of his abilities they'd invite him to join the elite runners at the start of the race -- which, when you think about it, is actually a pretty horrifying prospect for middle-of-the-pack runners like us.

Speaking of running, I was resplendent in Minnesota colors at this year's marathon. This brought a few inquiries about exactly where one buys maroon shoes with gold swooshes and aglets. I fibbed that I had them specially commissioned, but these are really just "Nike Livestrong Air Pegasus +28," which can still be had for about $69 online. Fair warning, though: the kicks make for controversial office attire. Ann Meier, our Director of Graduate Studies, told me that they were not acceptable -- and most definitely not acceptable when one is bedecked in a maroon sweater and gold shirt.

i hope she brought enough for the whole class

2011-12-10T13:04:00.002-06:00

Food is important in every social setting, but it is especially salient for prisoners deprived of so many other comforts. For prisoners in disciplinary units, a meatloaf-like concoction known as Nutraloaf is often the only meal. Nutraloaf (sometimes called a "special management meal") is intended to meet the basic nutritional requirements in a "meal" that requires no utensils and minimal time to prepare or distribute. Nutriloaf -- and the whole concept of "disciplinary food" -- is so unpopular that prisoners have challenged its constitutionality in a number of jurisdictions.

I mention all this because Jesse Wozniak passed along this class project from Micaela Magsamen, a student in his policing class this semester. Hearing Jesse's mention of Nutraloaf in lecture, Ms. Magsamen decided to prepare and taste-test one recipe for the loaf (which includes both tomato paste and applesauce), photographing and powerpointing the results. While I didn't taste-test this version myself, I'd imagine that such an exercise might change one's view on the whole constitutionality issue.

what manner of bacchanalia?

2011-12-03T18:53:00.000-06:00

Because our department always seems to be celebrating something, Dean Jim Parente often asks, "What manner of Bacchanalia goes on in Sociology this week?" Well, it wasn't exactly bacchanalia (that's Izze's sparkling clementine juice, I'll have you know), but the denizens of the society pages enjoyed a fine party Wednesday at Wing Young Huie's supercool gallery, The Third Place. It was the perfect space and moment to thank our friends, commemorate our final Minnesota issue of Contexts magazine, and to begin turning the (society) page.

We were honored to feature a sampling of Wing's photographs in our final issue, which nicely punctuates a line tracing the sociological imagination of great artists, social entrepreneurs, and cultural observers -- Sebastião Salgado’s photography; the art of Anne Taintor and Harvey Pekar; and, the wit and wisdom of rock critic Chuck Klosterman, humorist Dylan Brody, and magazine entrepreneur Eric Utne. Editing Contexts was always intellectually stimulating, but it was positively thrilling to engage such work with the sociological enterprise.

As for the party, we had a great turnout, tons of fun, and a fitting tribute to a project that brought together so many good people in so many capacities the past few years.* Doug, Letta, and I feel humbled and grateful to have worked with so many brilliant contributors and colleagues at Contexts, the American Sociological Association, and around the world. We only wish we had the budget to fly you to beautiful Minnesota for an enjoyably brisk winter's night. As you can probably guess, though, it won't be too long at all before we'll have another big announcement, celebration, and (yes) some measure of bacchanalia to share with the new TSP crew. Just drop us a line if you'd like an invite.

*If you squint real hard you can see folks like Linda Henneman of ThinkDesign (who did amazing work putting our pages together); national board members and contributors like Monte Bute and Andrew Lindner; undergrad students like Sweet Al Casey; grad board alums such as Wes Longhofer, Hollie Nyseth, Suzy McElrath, Jesse Wozniak, Sarah Shannon, Kyle Green, and Kia Heise; good university friends like Elizabeth Boyle, Rachel Schurman, Michael Goldman, Teresa Swartz, Ann Miller, Alex Rothman, Ann Meier, and Mary Drew; and, plenty of family and friends, including Harper Inea, 2051-2054 Contexts editor.

best winter songs - 2011 update

2011-11-23T19:04:00.002-06:00

When I put up a list of winter songs in 2007, I really just wanted to spread a li'l love for flexible flyers and skyways. But so many folks are googling "best winter songs" that I try to patch up the links, update the list, and work in a few suggestions every year. Maybe I'm just paying more attention today, but I'm sensing a wintersong resurgence -- I added 5 songs for 2010, but could easily have added 5 more.

Almost everyone loves a good summer song, but what about winter songs? I'm not talking about played-out Christmas carols here, but other songs of the season.

Winter themes sometimes evoke bleak landscapes and chilled emotions. As a Minnesotan, however, I also associate winter with feelings of love, warmth, and safety. So, there's a duality in this list that is less apparent in summer music. There's also more cabin-fever inspired oddities than one might find on a summer list.

Here are links to a few personal favorites (and a few less-than-favorites), organized chronologically. I'd love to see your additions, since i'm guessing there's an iceberg of undiscovered wintersongs just beneath the surface. Stay warm...

• ol' hank, cold, cold heart (1951) and norah (2002) [via sarah]
• chet baker, grey december (1955)
• dean martin, baby it's cold outside (1959)
• albert iceman collins, frosty (1962)
• ian and sylvia, four strong winds (1963) [via travis]
• bob dylan, girl of the north country (1964)
• mamas and the papas, california dreaming (1965)
• simon and garfinkel, hazy shade of winter (1967) & bangles (1987)
• gordon lightfoot, song for a winter's night (1967) & sara mclachlan (1996)
• grateful dead, cold rain and snow (1967) [via @createsociology]
• doors, wintertime love (1968)
• ann murray, snowbird (1969) [see also elvis (1970) sufjan (2006)]
• nico, frozen warnings (1969)
• plastic ono band, listen the snow is falling (1969) & galaxie 500 (1992)
• bob dylan, winterlude (1970)
• neil young, helpless (1970)
• mountain, nantucket sleighride (1971)
• nick drake, northern sky (1971)
• black sabbath, snowblind (1971)
• rolling stones, winter (1973)
• edgar winter group, frankenstein (1973) with johnny winter (1992)
• gil scott-heron, winter in america (1974)
• reo speedwagon, ridin' the storm out (1974)
• frank zappa, don't eat the yellow snow (1974)
• steely dan, charlie freak (1974)
• rush, by-tor and the snow dog (1975)
• tommy bolin, sweet burgundy (1976)
• neil young, winterlong (1977) and pixies (1989)
• steve miller band, winter time (1977)
• jerry "snowman" reed, west bound and down (1977) & breakdown
• the cure, winter (1979)
• squeeze, up the junction (1979) and if i didn't love you (1980)
• joy division, love will tear us apart (1980)
• klaus nomi, the cold song (1982)
• peter auty, walking in the air (the snowman) (1982)
• aztec camera, walk out to winter (1983)
• stevie ray vaughan, cold shot (1984)
• husker du, flexible flyer (1985)
• replacements, here comes a regular (1985)
• dream academy, life in a northern town (1985)
• replacements, skyway (1987) & jeremy messersmith (2009)
• husker du, ice cold ice (1987)
• the pogues, fairytale of new york (1988)
• jane siberry, hockey (1989) [via kieran]
• vanilla ice, ice ice baby (1990)
• guy, let's chill (1990)
• tori amos, winter (1991)
• albert collins, iceman (1991)
• screaming trees, winter song (1992)
• social distortion, cold feelings (1992)
• xtc, always winter never christmas (1992)
• radiohead, fake plastic trees (1995)
• hoven droven, okynnesvals (1996)
• mazzy star, flowers in december (1997)
• hedningarna, hoglorfen (1997)
• svala björgvinsdóttir, once upon a december (1997)
• eagle eye cherry, save tonight (1998)
• madonna, frozen (1998)
• sigur rós, svefn g englar (1999)
• aim, cold water music (1999)
• glay, winter again (1999)
• nick cave, fifteen feet of pure white snow (2001)
• low, last snowstorm of the year (2002)
• nada surf, blizzard of '77 (2002)
• white stripes, cold, cold, night (2003)
• fountains of wayne, valley winter song (2003)
• animal collective, winter's love (2004)
• the caesars, the winter song (2005)
• afi, love like winter (2006)
• joshua radin, winter (2006)
• red hot chili peppers, snow (2006)
• iron and wine, wolves (songs of the shepherd's dog) (2007)
• elliott smith, angel in the snow (2007)
• gwen stefani, early winter (2007)
• bon iver, skinny love & flume (2008)
• fleet foxes, white winter hymnal (2008)
• glasvegas, S.A.D. light (2008)
• the avett brothers, january wedding (2009)
• sleigh bells, ring ring/rill rill (2010)
• MGMT, siberian breaks (2010)
• the coral, walking in the winter (2010)
• vampire weekend, horchata (2010)
• the kissing party, winter in the pub (2010)
• the decemberists, january hymn (2011)

me and the board

2011-11-22T22:45:00.005-06:00

The last Minnesota-grown issue of Contexts has now officially mailed, ending my 4-year hitch as a magazine editor. The section editors and authors were amazing and I learned a ton working with co-editor Doug Hartmann, Letta Page, Jon Smajda, and the good folks at the American Sociological Association. Truth be told, however, I found the most joy in working with our graduate student board. Stop by my office sometime to take in the wall display at left, showing the student board in all their creative glory.

As we write in our last "From the Editors" column (below), Contexts now rests in the good and capable hands of new editors Jodi O’Brien and Arlene Stein -- I hope they have as much fun with it as we did. We haven't broken up the band, though, so you can still check us out at thesocietypages.org.

In the meantime, here are a few last words:

Naked Dreams

We’ve all had some variant of the “naked dream”—you’re waiting in line at Starbucks or checking the copy machine at work when it dawns on you: you’re completely undressed. Here at Contexts, our authors have that dream all the time.

Writing a 3,000 word feature for a public audience, our contributors must dispense with the everyday apparel of scholarly publication. The layers of conceptual abstraction, the high-end designer methods and statistics, and the foundational undergarments of literature reviews—all gone. With all that stripped away, there’s no way to conceal vulnerabilities and authors can feel pretty exposed. As in naked dreams, though, when we first begin writing for a public audience, we tend to exaggerate the risks while underplaying the liberation and exhilaration that comes from breaking new ground. But that doesn’t mean the risks aren’t real.

We saw a bit of this in the kerfuffle over the American Sociological Association’s award for “Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues,” which went this year to New York Times columnist David Brooks. When sociologists protested, in part due to Brooks’s conservative politics, the knee-jerk opposition seemed to undermine calls for broad-based public relevance and engaged scholarship—or, at least, to recast those calls as more narrowly partisan projects. While we might disagree with how Mr. Brooks uses our work, we defend his right to read, interpret, and mobilize sociological research and appreciate his high-profile efforts to do so. (Indeed, you may remember that we learned a lot about the challenges of disseminating sociology from Brooks in an interview published in one of our first issues.) We’ve actually heard similar professional resistance to popularizers like Malcolm Gladwell who distill and market social science for audiences a thousand times larger than that of our flagship journals. Even when members of our own tribe cross over and achieve a modicum of popular success, critics seem to burst from the woodwork to call into question their seriousness.

We’ve always tried to come from the other side at Contexts, putting our editorial energies into celebrating and effectively conveying good social science with real public relevance. Our graduate and national boards, web and section editors, and managing editors Letta Page and Amy Johnson have made heroic efforts in support of this mission. Our final issue features some terrific examples, with pieces on innovation, adoption, recreation, and closure. Sociologists have something important to say about such irreducibly social phenomena, and it has been our joy and pleasure to help tell their stories.

We couldn’t do any of this, of course, without your indefatigable energy as readers and supporters. Rest assured that new editors Jodi O’Brien and Arlene Stein will bring a fresh perspective that takes Contexts in exciting new directions. We’re cooking up some new ideas as well, developing and expanding our web-based project at thesocietypages.org, which will continue to host contexts.org. While such transitions might leave us feeling a bit exposed, we’re even more exhilarated about finding new ways to bring social science to broader publics.

google scholar and high-impact publication

2011-11-20T20:18:00.003-06:00

Academics feel narcissistic or anti-intellectual when we check citations to our work, but it isn't just an ego thing. Citations tell us who is using our research and who we should be reading -- a big help in making intellectual connections. If we really want people to read the work we spend so much time writing, then we need to figure out why some articles rise and others (ahem) drop from cite. Analysis can also reveal correctable mistakes. We may have written the right paper for the wrong audience or used a title or abstract that all but guaranteed our work would never be read or referenced.

I ran the numbers, but never looked much at citation indexes until seeing Google Scholar, which tends to be more inclusive and useful than other indexes. Editing thesocietypages.org, though, I'm starting to think we need new ways of measuring both scholarly and public impact. For example, I'm convinced that Lisa Wade and Gwen Sharp are having an enormous impact at sociological images, but it isn't (yet) counted in ways that make sense to the Social Science Citation Index or Google Scholar. I'm not just talking about hit counts -- increasingly, students and other scholars are adopting the site's sensibility and and its application to the visual social world.

For now, though, Google Scholar represents a huge advance over the sort of citation trackers we had just a few years ago. Seeing Philip Cohen's google scholar profile this morning, I made my own. A few observations:

1. Scale. Before constructing such a profile, you should know that some people and papers get cited a lot, but it takes most of us a few years to develop an audience. Nobody cited my stuff at all as an assistant professor, but folks began excavating the nuggets once a few pieces got a little attention. In Google, as elsewhere, try not to compare yourself against the standard set by the top senior scholars in your field (a.k.a. "Sampson Envy").

2. Inclusiveness. Google scholar is indeed more inclusive than other sources. For me, at least, it includes three times the citations and twice the number of writings than SSCI (2,578 citations in Google to 84 "things" (articles, chapters, grant reports, committee documents) and 767 citations in SSCI to 35 journal articles)). Some may find it overinclusive, but Google seems far more effective in bringing to light intriguing intellectual connections. For instance, I learned that a Swedish economist found use for one of my papers in a presentation on the "entrepreneurial life course of men and women" -- which jazzed up my own thinking about a project on entrepreneurship and prisoner reentry.

3. Bias? For me, at least, the Social Sciences Citation Index seems to give a pretty misleading picture of scholarly impact. Since SSCI doesn't count books or book chapters, it misses a couple more-cited pieces -- a book with Jeff Manza and a popular chapter in an edited volume. [Junior scholars are often told to avoid writing book chapters, but some of them seem to find a pretty good audience.] Also, when I rank the articles by citation count, Google seems to have better face validity -- it does a better job picking up the contributions that people ask me about than SSCI. As chair in a department that values both books and articles, the omission of books in any index is really problematic. I haven't done a careful analysis, but my sense is that Google Scholar is also better than SSCI at tracking my criminological and interdisciplinary work.

4. Flagships. But still .... articles in the so-called sociology flagships get cited way more often than articles in other journals or book chapters. By either index, my 3 most-cited pieces (and 6 of the top 16) appeared in American Sociological Review or American Journal of Sociology.

5. Future. I expect that people will always want to assess the scholarly and public impact of academic work, and that these tools will evolve rapidly. Google Scholar offers a great set of tools already, but I suspect we'll soon be able to run much more sophisticated searches that allow us to track impact across a broader spectrum of outlets. People are sure to debate "what counts" as a citation, but the really big honkin' question concerns "what counts" as scholarly publication. My sense is that journal impact will remain important, but we'll soon have the tools to identify and assess a more robust and varied set of impacts.

fresh crim at ASC meetings

2011-11-19T17:56:00.000-06:00

I arrived late and left early at this year's criminology meetings, but the two days in Washington, DC were terrific. I'm always inspired by forward-looking talks that put a big issue on the table, especially those that could spark public discussion and, perhaps, intervention.

The paper that really turned my head this year was Bob Agnew's general strain model of the impact of climate change on crime. Professor Agnew made a convincing and nicely documented case that climate change will "increase strain, reduce social control, weaken social support, foster beliefs favorable to crime, contribute to traits conducive to crime, increase opportunities for crime, and create social conflict." After 15 minutes, he had me convinced that climate change could become a driving force of crime rates over the next century.

Sara Wakefield and Simon Cole offered a similarly future-directed and provocative talk on racial disparities in DNA databases. Every state is now collecting DNA -- in many cases for arrestees, as well as those convicted of crimes. While acknowledging potential gains to public safety, the paper raised large and timely issues about how such data collection affects surveillance and inequality. We heard evidence about what the databases look like now, but everyone in the room expected them to grow dramatically in coming years.

I've worked a lot with Sara, of course, so I'm not exactly unbiased about her work -- or that of other Minnesota grads at the meeting (including the program co-chair, Ryan King). This year, I gave talks with current grad students Suzy McElrath (above), Jessica Molina, and Heather McLaughlin (all attending their first ASC meeting), as well as Brianna Remster of Penn State. I mostly sat in the background scribbling (as above), while my collaborators did the heavy lifting.

My only solo presentation came at Madam's Organ Blues Bar's Thursday night Karaoke. Like the two papers above, my rendering of Sinatra could spark public discussion and, perhaps, intervention.

laundering honoraria

2011-10-08T16:03:00.003-05:00

I love visiting friends and giving talks, so I jump on invitations whenever my teaching schedule permits. When my host asks, "will $500 be sufficient for your honorarium?" I reply, "Gosh, I'd love to visit you guys, but I can't afford to pay that much."

Cheeseheads and hardball fans will recognize this riff on Bob Uecker's first contract: "I signed with the Milwaukee Braves for three thousand dollars. That bothered my dad at the the time because he didn't have that kind of dough. But he eventually scraped it up."

Like Mr. Uecker, I rarely turn down a free dinner, though I'm often backed up for a year or more on such commitments. It is lovely to get paid and I sincerely appreciate it, but the real reward is in the intellectual exchange -- and, let's be honest, the rush of validation you feel when people are right there in front of you, engaging the ideas and work you've been casting into the ether from some lonely academic bunker (a/k/a the collosal ego trip).

As I recently mentioned to a friend on facebook, I charge a sliding scale. With the Deluxe Package, I'll give a presentation in exchange for airfare and a nice dinner. With my Budget Package, I'll sometimes pop for the airfare, but you have to give me a plaque of some sort and say nice things about me at the dinner. The plaque is key.

In keeping with my honoraria post five years ago, I try to redirect the bulk of the money to organizations providing direct services to people leaving prison and non-profits that conduct justice-related research. The need is great and I'm already paid pretty well to study the hard times of others. That said, it is usually a hassle for universities to redirect an honorarium to such organizations -- it is much cleaner for the staff when they can simply cut a check. The problem with cashing the check and sending it elsewhere, of course, is that it looks like income to the IRS and a good chunk is lost to taxes before it can be passed along.

These days, I'm laundering my honoraria through the Minnversity's annual community fund drive (open now through 10/31). I just cash and spend the check myself (and report it to the IRS), but use payroll deduction to direct a corresponding amount to organizations doing reentry programming and research. I'll identify the local orgs offline if any Minnversity friends are interested -- there are several available for check-off but you can also write-in your own. In truth, I haven't been redirecting the full amount of the honoraria I've received, using some of the funds to cushion unreimbursable out-of-pocket expenses (related to my editorial, advising, research, and chair duties) and to purchase certain performance-enhancing research stimulants (such as 5-pound buckets of black licorice). Still, I'm hoping this sort of model might work for others -- it is deducted painlessly from pre-tax earnings, can be spread evenly throughout the year, and shows up clearly on one's paycheck at tax time.

While my schedule is pretty full for 2011-2012, I'll keep giving talks next year and for as long as people will have me. To quote Mr. Uecker, "Anybody with ability can play in the big leagues. But to be able to trick people year in and year out the way I did, I think that was a much greater feat."

blissitude and blisteration

2011-10-02T19:58:00.003-05:00

I like to write a personal blissed-out marathon post a few hours after the event, but it took a bit of work to attain full blissitude today. Last year it was a smooth and happy 3:43. The 2011 twin cities race was just a hair faster, but considerably more ... jagged. There was a little pain, including hoof blisteration, acute foreleg crampage, and the Andy Bernard-level nippular excoriation shown at right, which just made a mess of my favorite Minnversity singlet.

But it was a perfect fall day in Minnesota to cruise through the cities and see wonderful friends and family -- I was surely feeling the love from Dad, Letta, Sarah (and boys), Gabrielle, Liz and Matt, Nicole, Emily, and other good friends along the way. And, this was the first time I'd ever shared a race with a (co-)advisee (and proud finisher), Suzy Maves McElrath.

Closed-circuit to running geeks: Yeah, I pushed too hard again at the start (23:36 at 5k (I was gonna dominate that 5k), 47:50 at 10k (I was gonna dominate that 10k), and 1:41:52 at 13.1 (I was gonna dominate that half). Then I was completely dominated by the 6 miles of piddling but relentless grade on ol' Summit Hill -- while accosted, I firmly believe, by an invisible marauder who somehow severed my hamstrings on the steeper bits. I suspect he used a laser.

So I'll either have to slow down at the start or do some actual training if I'd like to keep up the pace. A helpful young runner from Nebraska suggested that her hometown marathon might be a li'l flatter (yes, flatter than Minnesota) and, hence, more amenable to my fixin'-to-pop hammies. She also promised a good bit less writhing in the final three miles.

A few other marathon posts:

2005: Battling T-Paw

2006: Hot n' Heavy and Too Beautiful

2007: Marathon Convergence and Steamy and Cool

2008: My Left Foot and Sweet

2010: Men of a Certain Age

jail guitar doors

2011-09-29T19:58:00.001-05:00

My colleague Josh Page's The Toughest Beat (2011, Oxford) is getting much-deserved good press from many quarters. Today's props come from Wayne Kramer, the MC5 guitarist now writing at Jail Guitar Doors. Mr. Kramer calls The Toughest Beat a "well researched history of how the prison guards union grew from a minor municipal association into the second most powerful political lobby in California. It’s a fascinating journey into power politics."

So how do legendary guitar players end up reviewing cutting-edge scholarship in the sociology of punishment? The name Jail Guitar Doors comes from a fine old Clash song that name-drops Mr. Kramer, who once served time in Lexington Federal Prison for a drug offense. His work with the MC5 once earned him 92nd place on Rolling Stone's all-time top-100 guitarist list. Today, he's working with Jail Guitar Doors, an organization that Billy Bragg and friends put together to provide prisoners with musical equipment in the United Kingdom and, now, the United States.

I can't cite rigorous evaluation data to show the positive effects of such programs, but it doesn't take a top-100 guitarist to grasp the group's vision: We believe prisoners provided with the musical tools to create songs of their own can achieve a positive change of attitude that can initiate the work necessary to successfully return to life outside prison walls. Creating music, along with other educational and vocational programs, can be a profound force for positive change in a prisoner’s life.

If the idea hits you like Wayne Kramer power chord -- or if you've ever just found a little peace and focus while plunking away at an instrument -- you might consider a donation.

our mauer, ourselves

2011-09-24T17:43:00.002-05:00

For a guy being paid $21 million to play baseball, Joe Mauer has sure had a tough season. Mr. Mauer only participated in about half of the Minnesota Twins' games this year, and only about one-third of them at his customary catcher position. His performance in these games was respectable in absolute terms, but far below the high bar he established in previous seasons.

According to SI.com, Mr. Mauer missed games for myriad maladies, including bilateral leg weakness, viral infections, undisclosed soreness, general soreness, stiff neck, upper respiratory infection, and, finally, mild pneumonia. Since General Soreness is not the sort of injury that typically knocks a superstar from the lineup, rumors and speculation have arisen to explain the real story behind his absences.

As regards a Minnesota icon like Mr. Mauer, such gossip occurs in a wide range of social settings. As Gary Alan Fine and Nicholas DiFonzo note in their new Contexts article, rumor is "knowledge filtered through social process," depending on local networks for verification. This means that the rumors swirling around Mr. Mauer -- as well as those not swirling around him -- say as much about the hometown as they do about the hometown hero. I've heard four basic categories of rumors and will speculate about a fifth.

First, when the team remained in contention a few months ago, one heard that the Twins were intentionally concealing a more serious injury that would have provided a strategic advantage to opposing teams. If he had a "bad wing," as a neighbor suggested at my community center this summer, opposing baserunners would steal more aggressively against the Twins. Such interpretations seem credible and rational, given the game's competitive nature and high stakes. Moreover, the guy was coming off knee surgery and he has a history of (unquestioned and legitimized) injuries in the recent past.

Second, I heard rumors of career-threatening (and, in some cases, life-threatening) physical health problems. These rumors ranged from Lyme disease, to rheumatoid arthritis, to multiple sclerosis, to ALS. Some of these appeared in print, I think, but most came from people claiming inside knowledge -- "a guy who knows a guy" within the Twins organization or the Mauer family. Some were repeated by Patrick Reusse and others on talk radio, though the local media have been guarded about making such attributions. Nevertheless, these rumors were considered plausible, in part, because of the local setting: Lyme disease is quite prevalent in Minnesota and familiar to Mr. Mauer's fans, while ALS is literally synonymous with another baseball great struck down in his prime -- Lou Gehrig.

Third, as the team's fortunes sank and their highest-paid player remained out of commission, some fans began grumbling about Mr. Mauer going "soft" -- that he was spoiled by the big contract or, worse, that he was a "cake-eater" all along, who lacked the toughness needed to play with pain. These are fighting words for athletes, of course, but such interpretations seemed plausible for those suspicious of the team's new big-money approach and expensive new stadium, funded in part with taxpayer dollars.

To the extent he is cast in the "sick role," Mr. Mauer is exempted from responsibility for his conditions and from the normal role obligations and responsibilities of his profession. But if he's just soft, he's judged against all manner of personal and professional gendered role expectations. Today, there's a passionate local debate between those who view Mr. Mauer sympathetically and attribute his absences to physical health problems and those who view him unsympathetically and vilify him for weakness and moral failure.

A fifth category of non-rumor is conspicuous by its absence, however: the possibility that Mr. Mauer might be wrestling with some unseen and unsharable mental health or chemical health problems. Given his status as a white St. Paul native with middle-class origins (like me, I suppose, though a generation removed), it is especially easy for many of his fans to identify with Mr. Mauer and, perhaps, correspondingly difficult for them to imagine him in a more stigmatized role.

Of course, mental illness and substance use problems are managed and treated just as effectively as those physical ailments that more typically put players on the disabled list. And, just to be clear, I am not suggesting that Mr. Mauer has ever had any problems with substance use or mental illness. I'd just hate to think that fear of adverse public reaction would keep a public figure from seeking help, especially here in the land of 10,000 treatment centers (in 2011, no less). It just strikes me that it might still be difficult -- if not unimaginable -- for Minnesotans to accept our native son as mentally ill or "addicted." Somehow, despite much evidence to the contrary, the community may simply be more comfortable imagining the twenty-eight-year-old athlete as terminally ill or incurably lazy. While the latter rumors have been much discussed, the former have scarcely been mentioned.

For my part, I'm attributing the rumors to what professors Fine and DiFonzo call a "shared commitment to sense-making" in the absence of clear information. As for the vague injury reports, I'll chalk them up to the local context as well. For the team's baffling public relations work and passive-aggressive motivational strategies seem as Minnesotan as walleyes and honeycrisp apples.

identity work and personas

2011-09-13T19:40:00.002-05:00

The savvy Sarah Lageson sends word of Personas, an MIT project created by Aaron Zinman. Personas uses sophisticated natural language processing to create a data portrait of one's aggregated online identity. The idea is to show folks how the internet takes them apart and reassembles them -- sort of a critique of data mining embedded within a cool data mining project. Simply stop by the site, launch personas, and let the digit counters fall. Then reflect or recoil as your online world flashes before you (cranking vintage Kraftwerk at volume may enhance the effect). Sarah sent me the personalized screenshot below, but personas is really more about process than product.

new contexts reader

2011-08-13T23:56:00.000-05:00

The second edition of the the contexts reader is officially o-u-t OUT with WW Norton -- signed, sealed, and delivered in time to raise our root beer glasses at the annual board meeting in Las Vegas.

The reader pulls together about 60 articles from the magazine, with minimal front-end bloviating by Uggen and Hartmann. Big thanks are due to Karl Bakeman of Norton and all 6,500 employees of Contexts Worldwide, especially Letta Page and Sweet Al Casey of the Scranton office, Jon Smajda from the Kansas City set-top box manufacturing facility, and Kia Heise, Hollie Nyseth, and our rippin' good graduate student board in Minneapolis.

trusting our stuff

2011-08-13T23:02:00.004-05:00

I spent some time in court today, taking the stand to share some research on voting and disenfranchisement. I've done this sort of thing a few times before, but courtrooms, sworn oaths, and cross-examinations are still a little scary to me -- more like heebie-jeebies scary than howling fantods scary -- but scary nonetheless. Whenever I get anxious, though, I try to "do as I say" in my capacity as advisor, editor, or chair.

When my students are anxious about presentating their work, I tell them what my little league coach said on his (frequent) trips to see me on the pitcher's mound: trust your stuff. I remind them about all the preparation, hard work, painstaking research, analysis, and careful writing they've done on the subject. If they're well-prepared, know what they're doing, and have good stuff to present, there's really little reason for anxiety. And, at that point, they can direct their energies into communicating effectively, rather than worrying about freaking out, melting down, or curling up in a fetal position before a room of stunned observers.

Social scientists are trained to be appropriately cautious in presenting our work to peers and to the public, but such caution shouldn't morph itself into learned helplessness or defeatism. As editors, we're often encouraging writers to trust their stuff -- "We actually know a lot about that right? You don't need to put "may," "perhaps," "preliminary," and "exploratory," in the concluding sentence. You've actually written some good stuff that's quite convincing on those very points, right?"

So, while it makes good sense to worry about "overselling" a particular study or finding, there's also a danger in "underselling" the real knowledge we've gained on a topic of importance. When I see social scientists overselling or overreaching, it is usually because they've gotten away from their stuff and started popping off about things they haven't researched or thought much about.

I was thinking of this after raising my right hand and striding across the courtroom to take the stand -- just stay on your research and trust your stuff. And it seemed to work out okay today -- I said "I don't know" when I lacked the information to answer a question responsibly, but I also made clear that we have learned some information relevant to the case at hand.

Learning how to trust your stuff comes in as handy in the courtroom as it does in the lecture hall or on the pitcher's mound. Of course, it won't eliminate all sources of anxiety. While 95 percent of my attention may have been devoted to responsibly communicating the research, about 5 percent was still pretty anxious. So, however much I may trust my research, I'm still mortified that my fly may be down when I feel a cool breeze on my way to the witness stand.

- cross-posted at The Editor's Desk and PubCrim

contexts and men's health

2011-05-23T19:13:00.000-05:00

The spring Contexts has sprung. The editors are especially cruel with local submissions, wielding the critical comments of external reviewers like a bludgeon against favoritism (and, sometimes, the authors themselves). One new feature survived the torture test -- a piece on those embedded sociologists who ply their craft in non-academic fields. Excerpt:

In some settings, it is the skill of gathering basic data and organizing that information in useful ways. In others, it is the ability to put data and issues in broader perspective, with a critical edge. People like Jim Kirby are often the only sociologists in their organizations. Jim emphasized how the sociological perspective is even more valuable outside a research university: “I felt like I could contribute more, in effect, because I had a different perspective than most of the economists [around me].” Mayra Gomez gave an illustrative example. “In my work on women and housing rights, being a sociologist really gives me a different understanding of gender in society, gender roles, and gender inequality...
Embedded sociologists are working in agencies and communities on some of the most troubling problems of our time. Their research and writing is infusing society with a sociological worldview as, day by day, they conduct socially relevant research, engage policy makers, and translate sociological knowledge across disciplinary boundaries. More than this, these researchers are closer to the ground, able to see the new, cutting-edge trends and emerging developments that are shaping our social worlds for better and for worse.

This follows on the heels of a provocative 2010 grad student piece on sociology bestsellers. Look for another cool (and non-Minnesota) graduate student project coming up in our summer issue.

For our part, the spring editors column registers our personal and professional reactions to Men's Health -- a competing magazine with ever-so-slightly higher circulation figures. And it ain't pretty...

Well, our metabolisms aren’t “fired-up,” we’re not doing the high-intensity squats that would give us “quads of the gods,” and there are apparently dozens of “sizzling bedroom tips” that our partners wish we knew. Imagine that! (Or, maybe not.) Even worse, judging by the Ultimate Ab Workout centerfold poster, neither of us is on the Six-Pack Fast-Track....

rock-em sock-em sociologists

2011-05-07T15:01:00.019-05:00

While it's all well and good to share one's goals and aspirations, there's little upside to sharing one's actual dreams with friends and colleagues. Frankly, the subconscious is just too weird, random, and/or revealing. Nevertheless, in honor of tonight's Pacquiao-Mosley megafight, here's my recent boxing dream:

I'm checking email at my desk, when I read an invitation (I think it was from Dalton Conley, but I'm fuzzy on this) to appear on a Special Boxing Session at the American Sociological Association's 2011 annual meetings in Las Vegas. The invited participants would be me, Dalton Conley, Loic Wacquant and (... wait for it ...) Thomas "Hit Man" Hearns. After some introductory remarks, Professors Conley and Wacquant would spar for 15 minutes in an actual boxing ring, and then I would fight Mr. Hearns in a three-round "exhibition" (no, there was no mention of a discussant, but that would be fun -- maybe Bert Sugar). I immediately replied "yes" and then, milliseconds later, felt a wave of regret, wondering why they get to spar with each other and I had to fight the real boxer.

I've never been a boxer, but I once entered the ring against a real fighter in my mid-teens. Everything moved much faster than I anticipated. The punches came quick as flashbulbs and I was too slow to land a punch, avoid one, or even get my arms in position to defend myself. It was an intense and humbling experience, but I'm glad I had the adventure.

What's the dream mean? Well, it arrived the very night of a seminar discussion of Professor Wacquant's work, so that's an obvious trigger. The appearance of Mr. Hearns is more of a mystery, though I especially admired his work. His combination of a wicked-long reach and booming right hand were almost unfair -- his punches would unfurl across the ring and land with prodigious force. Since Mr. Hearns' epic battle with Marvin Hagler is most memorable to me, perhaps I'm challenging myself to be as tough and talented as the marvelous one. Or maybe I'm just conflicted about the attraction/repulsion I feel toward boxing ... and professional meetings.

cutting corrections while supporting correctional officers

2011-05-05T16:50:00.000-05:00

My colleague Josh Page offers a thoughtful commentary on California's prison system in Zocalo Public Square today. Quote:

Prison officers understandably worry that downsizing the correctional system will put them out of work. Thanks largely to their effective union, these officers have solid, middle-class jobs with good pay, good benefits, and good retirement packages. California officers make between $45,000 and $73,000 a year before overtime and other incentives. As the manufacturing sector declines, “prison officer” is one of the few remaining occupations providing upward social mobility for people who lack advanced degrees. This is especially true in the rural areas in which many prisons are located. Officers and their families, then, are justified in thinking that major reforms might close one of the few remaining paths they have into the middle class. Policymakers must make good faith efforts to protect these workers as they reshape the correctional system...The CCPOA would be much more likely to support reform measures if it could protect its members’ jobs along the way, or at least be persuaded that its worst-case fears are unfounded.

For more, check out, The Toughest Beat, Josh's new book with Oxford.

talk to the clown

2011-01-11T19:59:00.001-06:00

When I offered up a buck for a creepy ceramic clown in a small-town junk store, I only dimly perceived the great and terrible power of the clown. When I laid said clown down in the passenger seat and, then, on the black leather office couch, friends and colleagues reacted like they'd seen a corpse rather than a clown. When they visited my office for a demand or request, a little part of me was tempted to exploit the coulrophobia: "I dunno," I might say, "Maybe you should talk to the clown." "Talk to The Clown." "TALK TO THE CLOWN!"

When I took the clown back home, the family didn't want the clown in the house, or the garage, or the deck, or the yard, or anywhere near the house, or the garage, or the deck, or the yard. And when, in desperation, I returned to the junk store to return the clown, that junk store was gone.

[Ok, I made that last bit up. But the part about the clown doll giving everyone at home and in the office the heebie-jeebies is entirely not made up.]

el primo boots at auction

2010-12-13T18:33:00.004-06:00

I like gear that comes with a story. And "these alligator boots were seized in a cocaine bust" is a story worthy of Quentin Tarantino, if not the Coen brothers. See, the proprietor of St. Paul's El Primo Western Wear was evidently stashing cocaine in the boot boxes, so the store's inventory was placed into storage. Now you and I can bid for the fine snap-button shirts, boots, belts, and stetson hats at auction.

via Mara Gottfried at The Pioneer Press:

A large amount of Western wear seized from a St. Paul store by police is now up for auction. The owner of the store, El Primo Western Wear, was sent to federal prison after he was convicted in a 2008 drug case. He had stored cocaine among cowboy-boot boxes in the basement of the store at 176 Cesar Chavez St., according to a search warrant affidavit.

The merchandise seized included 881 pairs of boots, 579 hats and 1,111 pairs of jeans. It had been in storage until the advisory board of the now-defunct Metro Gang Strike Force authorized the sale of the inventory at auction last month. Hines Auction Service is holding the online auction now. The first one closes Dec. 20 and the second Dec. 23. There will be more auctions, but they haven't been scheduled yet, the Ellsworth, Wis., company said today. The auctions are listed at http://bit.ly/g2lf80 and http://bit.ly/hBHJ9N. Proceeds from the auction will be used to pay Metro Gang Strike Force legal fees, settlements, storage fees and other costs, an attorney has said.

Property seizures by law enforcement agencies are controversial to say the least, as forfeitures of cars and other big-ticket items have increased directly with budget cuts in some jurisdictions. For their part, Minnesota's Metro Gang Strike Force has transitioned from beleaguered to defunct, finally shutting down in 2009. By most accounts, the MGSF was overzealous about seizing property and not nearly zealous enough about recordkeeping -- hence, an auction to help defray their own legal fees.

Now that's a story worthy of the Coen brothers.

[update: Jessica Lussenhop offers further details on both the bust and the goods in City Pages.]

today's keywords, seasonally adjusted

2010-12-11T18:17:00.000-06:00

According to statcounter, the folks stumbling upon this blog might be a little more interested in seasonal songs than sociological criminology. These are the keywords today's visitors entered before arriving here, ranked by frequency. Just another perfect day in Minnesota...

229 60.74% winter songs
33 8.75% songs about winter
29 7.69% best winter songs
15 3.98% best wintry songs
7 1.86% winter songs list
5 1.33% dissertation acknowledgements
4 1.06% songs winter
3 0.80% good winter songs
2 0.53% winter songs top
2 0.53% the silence by philip schultz
2 0.53% best winter music
2 0.53% top winter songs
2 0.53% best songs 2010
1 0.27% best winter songs ever
1 0.27% are there any private organizations that will sponsor a drug convicted felon to go to college
1 0.27% top tier journals in criminology
1 0.27% top songs winter 2010
1 0.27% best songs about winter
1 0.27% nice dissertation, 'acknowledgements'
1 0.27% in the name of love story
1 0.27% winter song list
1 0.27% top songs of winter 2010
1 0.27% acknowledgments dissertation
1 0.27% good winter songs for christmas
1 0.27% sex offender and their parental rights
1 0.27% Subjective Financial Well-being Quiz
1 0.27% songs of winter
1 0.27% newsweek top global universities
1 0.27% municipal taxes paid by jon bongiovi 2009
1 0.27% summer songs in winter songs
1 0.27% lawsuits ratemyprofessor
1 0.27% ratemyprofessors hot
1 0.27% best songs of 2010 update
1 0.27% symbolic interaction in news
1 0.27% is keith richards a good guitarist
1 0.27% against hiring non-violent ex-felons
1 0.27% need help getting an expungement mn
1 0.27% songs on winter
1 0.27% winter songs 2010
1 0.27% best winter songs 2010
1 0.27% songs for winter
1 0.27% failing quals
1 0.27% +Jon+uggen+facebook
1 0.27% writing acknowledgements
1 0.27% working rights for ex-felons
1 0.27% difference between felon and ex-felon
1 0.27% good dean
1 0.27% best winter song
1 0.27% great winter songs
1 0.27% winter song 2009
1 0.27% calvin pickering
1 0.27% cool winter music 2010
1 0.27% name effects
1 0.27% the World's Top 100 Global Universities
1 0.27% support group for felons

new article/old gratitude

2010-12-09T12:30:00.002-06:00

For academic administrators like me, it is pretty easy to lapse into research hibernation. My own research progress has been slower than maple surple since becoming chair, but I do my best to keep a few articles oozing through the pipeline. One new piece with Mike Massoglia is just out in American Journal of Sociology today -- Settling Down and Aging Out: Toward an Interactionist Theory of Desistance and the Transition to Adulthood.

I was revising the syllabus on my criminology seminar when I first saw it in print, which took me back to a crim seminar with my advisor in my first year of graduate school. I vividly recall my first encounter with a draft of his spine-crushingly cool AJS article on symbolic interactionism and delinquency. Though I didn't know much sociology at the time, I could appreciate its beautiful marriage of theory and research design. And while I haven't followed Ross Matsueda's ginormous footsteps as a social psychologist, he always gave me strong and steadfast support, the freedom to pursue my own vision, and an exemplary model to follow.

Over the years, I've come to appreciate the rarity of this sort of advisor/advisee relationship -- and my own good fortune in having an advisor who was more interested in pushing me intellectually than in replicating himself. The new piece, written with one of my own advisees, is close to my heart because it touches on a few ideas he shared with me in those first heady days of graduate school.

it's the most wonderful time of the year

2010-12-07T18:47:00.003-06:00

I've been all smiles today, since Dr. Julie Barrows successfully defended her extraordinarily ambitious dissertation this morning. She surveyed all 249 gang task force collaborations in the United States, estimated event history models to predict when and where they formed, analyzed the network structure of the 34 participants in one task force, and then conducted a fixed-effects analysis on her national data showing how multi-agency collaborations can reduce juvenile crime. Her multi-method dissertation thus offers 1) the first attempt to explain why such collaborations form, 2) a systematic look inside the network of a gang task force, and 3) a sound evaluation of their success. Julie will continue working full-time as a federal agent, but look for three strong papers and a book from this project in the not-too-distant future.

did you think I was going to hang myself for littering?

2010-11-27T20:50:00.008-06:00

Arlo Guthrie, whose Alice's Restaurant is dished up like cranberry sauce each Thanksgiving, finally made the Macy's parade this year. The protracted protest anthem tells the story of Mr. Guthrie's 1965 littering arrest, as detailed in this uncredited and unsourced account:

The lyrics tell the tale of how this trivial criminal event emerges as a major issue at the draft induction center, with Mr. Guthrie ultimately asking, "you want to know if I'm moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after bein' a litterbug?" So, while there was plenty of humor and good fun in the song, it packed a real punch.

The story is well-told and still engages audiences, but the status politics of garbage dumping have changed a lot in forty-five years. When it comes to dumping busloads of garbage down hillsides, contemporary hippie kids might sympathize more with Officer Obie's strict environmental protection than with their smiling sixties-era counterparts.

As I recall from my own freshman year, the film version was considerably sadder, slower, and uglier than the song. But I still like the following clip and could imagine using it for a class exercise on changing environmental norms:

gettin' ready

2010-11-26T17:27:00.003-06:00

Most academics dismiss self-help books, even when they're built on a decent research foundation. I think that's part of the reason we tend to fold so quickly when we try to make changes in our lives. Despite our erudition, we just don't do our homework. I guess I'd probably be dismissive too, if I didn't spend so much of my research time studying how prisoners and heavy drug users go about making changes.

With resolution season approaching, I thought I'd share a bit from Mark Groberski's summary in a Minnversity wellness magazine. The point of this post is that most of us need a ramp-up to make changes that last, so get ready now if you're thinking about trying to change any behavior in January. Mr. Groberski's article is based on Prochaska, Norcross and DiClemente's model of the stages of change, taken from their Changing for Good (1994):

1. Pre-contemplation - Not seriously considering change, but gaining awareness or concern.
2. Contemplation - Self-examination, thinking about rewards and costs of change.
3. Preparation - Getting ready to commit to change, making concrete and realistic plans.
4. Action - Making the change and working the plan.
5. Maintenance - Sustaining change, consolidating gains, and integrating into lifestyle.

It might seem silly to make a big deal about a move from "pre-contemplation" to "contemplation" but this is the difference between thinking "I should probably lose a little weight" and asking "what would I have to give up to keep the weight off?" Most of us just dive right in -- going directly from "pre-contemplation" to "action." Here's what happened in summer 2009, when I tried to lose a few pounds:

I lost five or six pounds in the first couple months but found them again in winter, ending up right back where I started. And that's pretty much what always happened for me. Last fall, however, I took the ideas of "contemplation" and "preparation" more seriously, working through some of the potential costs and benefits and actually writing out a plan.

Feeling sluggish intellectually and physically, I was motivated to do something about it. I decided to quit drinking (for lots of reasons, but the winter ales were certainly not conducive to weight loss), carve out a regular weeknight exercise time, change some of my worst habits, and start putting basic diet and exercise data into a daily spreadsheet.

The preparation stage involved finding substitute foods (e.g., fruit and nuts rather than chips) and drinks (e.g., pomegranate juice and diet root beer rather than beer and wine) and considering how much exercise I could realistically expect when the temperature dropped below zero. It also meant considering new ways of dealing with stress and social events -- how do I handle big deadlines, professional disappointments, or bad days at the office? who should I hang out with at university events and professional meetings?

By January 1, I felt like I had a reasonable handle on what to expect, so I took it up a notch, from preparation to "action." The results for 2010 have been better, so far:

The combination of changes in eating, drinking, and exercising made it easier to get off to a fast start in January and February and the plan has worked pretty well throughout the year. I've been in maintenance mode since the first week of October, when I had my last race of the season, but know that maintenance will be tough through the winter.

Of course, I'm just one foot injury from extreme exercise deprivation and I realize that most weight loss is eventually regained. If and when I find myself back at 200 pounds with a Winter Ale in my hand, I'll likely proceed as I did this time -- thinking seriously about what I might gain and lose and making a plan before making change. Even if you don't buy the self-help approach to making changes that last, it shouldn't be so hard to believe that good preparation is linked to success, here as elsewhere.

elizabeth cook, details, and degrumpification

2010-11-23T19:36:00.006-06:00

When I drydocked the ol' Lincoln for repairs a few weeks ago, I scarcely missed the car but I sorely missed the stereo. That's because the radio station rotation on my morning commute just wasn't the same without at least a brief stop by Elizabeth Cook's Apron Strings on Sirius 63.

Ms. Cook is a sharp-witted observer who tends to keep on the sunny side, which makes her an excellent dj for grumpy commuters. She's also got an eye for the telling details that bring a song or story to life. I was no star in my Wizversity writing courses, but I learned that it was just as easy -- and much more evocative -- to put a character at, say, "the Crystal Corner Bar" than "the bar."

I'm always haranguing my students for more details in their writing, often in increasingly insistent margin notes on their papers. As one now-quite-successful professor reminded me last week, I once offered him comments like this, hand-drawn in a tortured scrawl:

p. 2 "This is vague."

p. 4 "How does it 'matter'?"

p. 7 "Be specific here."

p. 11 "What the h* are you talking about?"

p. 13 "is different than? Different?!"

p. 15 "WTF?"

p. 15b "Come ON, man!"

p. 16 "This is still F*ing VAGUE!"

But I digress. Unlike most songwriters and social scientists, Elizabeth Cook will never be void for vagueness and she finds images far more evocative than the Crystal Corner. Here's a serious one and a goofy one, with spare performances to draw out the words a little.

Heroin Addict Sister

El Camino

press reports and flyin' shoes

2010-11-22T17:50:00.015-06:00

I've been getting some (mostly) positive press attention lately, so I'm sort of waiting for the other Red Wing 3508 Steel Toe Work Boot to drop. At the risk of navel-gazing, here's a quick rundown:

College Report. There's been thoughtful coverage of our CLA 2015 report to reshape the College of Liberal Arts, with strong features in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, St. Paul Pioneer Press, Minnesota Daily, Minnesota Public Radio, and notes in the Chronicle and Inside Higher Ed. Jenna Ross' terrific Strib article generated especially provocative reader comments.
Other shoe. We're glad the report isn't gathering dust and it is nice to hear good things about our writing and analysis. That said, implementation decisions will ultimately determine whether we've been a beacon, a burden, or a complete nonentity -- and that's a job that's largely out of our hands.

Personal Profile. Adam Overland turned our fun and wide-ranging conversation into a really smart and friendly profile, touching on felon voting research, Contexts, administrative work, and even this blog.
Other shoe. My only regret is that I borrowed a friend's fine phrase without attribution. Jeremy Freese was first to describe his blogging source material as "cognitive runoff," so I can't take credit for that apt and creative descriptor. Sorry, Jeremy.

Felon Voting. My disenfranchisement research with Jeff Manza and friends is in the news again.
Other shoe. Michael Thielen, director of the Republican National Lawyers Association, referred to me as "Liberal, pro-felon vote advocate University of Minnesota criminologist Christopher Uggen." Hmmm. Adam Overland's profile tells the story of how we came to make policy recommendations on this issue. We initially planned to close the book with a just-the-facts public opinion poll, but were convinced by the weight of the evidence to advocate extending voting rights (writing op-eds in the LA Times and Newsday, academic policy pieces and legislative testimony). So, I take issue with attaching that "liberal" modifier. Unless, of course, Mr. Thielen uses the word in the sense of our CLA 2015 report: Justice and equality; belief and truth; the beauty or expressive power of the written word, a work of art, or a musical passage—these are how we find a life worth living and search for its meaning. These are the liberal arts in the 21st century. I guess I'd cop to liberal in that sense of the word.

Watch out for those flyin' shoes...

running from waymore to wallace stevens

2010-11-14T20:39:00.003-06:00

There's nothing like a hard winter run when a body wakes up feeling lonesome, on'ry and mean. Tramping through a foot of wet snow just has a way of drawing out the toxins.

I slogged through a few sour and defiant miles today, before eventually finding a pace and seeing things a little more clearly. The exercise put me in the (winter) mind of Wallace Stevens' observant Snow Man -- a single supercooled sentence in five perfect tercets:

The Snow Man (1921)

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

on a scale from one to five-O

2010-11-11T18:45:00.005-06:00

Yahoo News reported on a study by media-research company Experian Simmons today. I couldn't find any methodological details about the study and cannot vouch for its accuracy, but it presented the listing below, purporting to show how political partisanship is linked to preferences for various television programs.

Not surprisingly, Glenn Beck ranks high among Republican viewers and low among Democrats, with Keith Olbermann's Countdown showing the opposite pattern. Yet some of the other patterns are more intriguing, with critically acclaimed cable-only shows like Mad Men garnering far higher ratings among Democrats, and highly-rated network programs generally doing better among Republicans. [I can only guess about the precise metric here, but it looks as though scores are standardized such that an average rating would be scored at 100.]

To get a better sense for the story the data might tell, I arrayed the shows and ratings from left to right by the ratio of Democratic to Republican scores. In this figure, it is easy to spot the "purple middle" represented by programs such as Desperate Housewives, Dancing with the Stars, and The Mentalist.

I wouldn't draw any inferences from the bivariate association shown in the chart. It would be fun (or at least "fun" in the classroom exercise sense of the word) to ask a social statistics or methodology class to identify potential confounders and sources of spuriousness here -- at minimum, I suspect that age, gender, race, and urban residence would be associated with both viewing habits and partisanship. That is, it might be the case that the Mad Men or 30 Rock crowd is not so much Democrat as young, urban, and female.

As a criminologist, I'm fascinated by portrayals of the criminal justice system -- specifically, the extent to which they adopt a "crime control" or "due process" model of law enforcement. I'd guess that Democrats would be more likely to favor crime dramas that nod to "due process" concerns (e.g., Law & Order), but I've never seen a study documenting such preferences. Most shows, in fact, lean heavily toward crime control portrayals, with rogue officers routinely taking all manner of head-busting liberties with suspects.

For example, I recently caught an episode of the new Hawaii Five-O and was surprised to see the heroic detectives toss a witness (a witness!) into a shark tank, just to loosen his tongue a bit. Despite Five-O's silly portrayal of police work, stilted dialogue, and cheesy acting, I'd still rate it highly -- that theme song remains irresistable.

the big hairy college committee

2010-11-08T00:40:00.001-06:00

I've spent about a year co-chairing a big hairy audacious college committee to make recommendations about current budget cuts and future priorities. This morning we're sharing our final report with all the students, faculty, and staff in the college, and anybody else who might take an interest. I'm not sure how our numerous goals and recommendations will be received, but the effort has been personally rewarding and, at times, even inspiring.

Our college of about 16,700 students and 550 faculty is diverse and consultative, with an emphasis on transparency. These are wonderful attributes in a college, of course, but they do keep committees busy.* When the dean asked me to serve, he read a list of the 30 names and affiliations of the committee members, spanning the full range of humanities, arts, and social sciences. My first reaction, which seemed to delight him, was that, "These people don't agree with each other at all." Plus, they were multitudes, with enormous differences in status and power -- so much so that we'd sometimes use classroom clickers to make sure that everybody could be heard.

As it turns out, I shouldn't have worried so much about whether everyone on the big hairy committee agreed with one another. Instead of advocating narrowly on behalf of their departments or units, the members seemed to check their affiliations at the door -- even in high-stakes conversations and debates. People generally just rolled up their sleeves and got to work, with everyone orienting toward some vision of the common good of the college. While these visions were not always in perfect alignment, we avoided the sort of internecine conflict that one might expect among folks acting on behalf of their home departments or units. For me, at least, it was inspiring to witness so many smart people doing such difficult work so civic-mindedly.

*For example, being consultative and transparent meant sharing our draft reports as we were writing them and quite a few meetings with stakeholders. In just the past two weeks, we've met with the associate deans, chief financial officer, chief of staff, chief information officer, and director of alumni relations; the department chairs and center directors; the budget advisory committee and the curriculum, instruction, and advising committee; the professional and administrative board; the administrators forum; the undergraduate student board; and, graduate student representatives on college and university committees.

between the bars

2010-11-05T19:00:00.000-05:00

Josh Beckman sends word that Charlie DeTar and friends have developed a prison blogging platform, with support from MIT's Center for Future Civic Media. The description:

Between the Bars is a weblog platform for prisoners, through which the 1% of America which is behind bars can tell their stories. Since prisoners are routinely denied access to the Internet, we enable them to blog by scanning letters. We aim to provide a positive outlet for creativity, a tool to assist in the maintenance of social safety nets, an opportunity to forge connections between prisoners and non-prisoners, and a means to promote non-criminal identities and personal expression. We hope to improve prisoner's lives, and help to reduce recidivism.

It felt good to see how they used one of our civic reintegration articles, since this sort of public criminology and civic reintegration project goes way beyond anything we might have envisioned. Amazing stuff. I even like the project title, which brings to mind still another interpretation of an especially evocative Elliott Smith lyric.

an easy listening version of Jeffrey Alexander's new article?

2010-11-04T15:06:00.001-05:00

I'd been wondering why web editor Jon Smajda was making like Easy Reader lately, ambling around the office with his nose in a book. Turns out, the Office Hours podcast lab is experimenting with an audiobook format, in which listeners can hear Jon read Jeffrey Alexander's new Contexts article "Heroes, Presidents, and Politics" in its entirety. If you like, let us know. And if you aren't a regular listener, you might stop by to hear the wicked-good new interviews with U.S. Census Director Robert Groves, Juliet Schor, Jeremy Freese, and a cavalcade of star social scientists.

immunology and the trunk monkey

2010-10-14T19:03:00.004-05:00

Marc Jenkins gave a terrific lecture titled "How the Immune System Remembers Infections" this week. As a sociological criminologist, I've long been fascinated by immunology and its connection to the social organicism of Spencer, Durkheim and others. The immune system wondrously learns to quickly recognize and neutralize pathogens in the body, even as the pathogens quickly evolve and adapt to overcome the immune system. He used this trunk monkey* video to introduce immune functioning (body=car; pathogen=thief):

By analogy, some argue that communities exercise social control in the same way. One hears such analogies when people describe how a social group is brought down by a nefarious "virus" or "cancer." For example, when the Patriots traded Randy Moss to the Vikings, a commentator was asked whether Patriots Coach Bill Belichek considered him a "cancer" in the locker room ("more like a polyp," was the clever response). Such social organicism can be carried way too far, of course, perhaps even to genocide.

More positively, I'd compare immune response to the sort of rapidly mobilizing and self-sustaining resistance that a good school might develop in response to, say, a sudden rash of fights breaking out at the Friday night football games. The destructive behavior can either take root or it can be brought under control pretty quickly, once the fans in the bleachers learn to recognize and take the collective responsibility to stop it.

Professor Jenkins closed with another video, and I couldn't help but identify with the host's completely ineffectual efforts to ward off the pathogen in this one. Reminds me to boost the ol' immune system before winter hits....

* No, that doesn't look like an actual "monkey" to me either, but "trunk monkey" makes for a clever name.

missing 411 on the 420

2010-10-13T09:54:00.003-05:00

In a few weeks, California voters will consider Proposition 19 -- The Regulate, Control and Tax Cannabis Act of 2010. This measure (1) legalizes various marijuana-related activities, (2) allows local governments to regulate these activities, (3) permits local governments to impose and collect marijuana-related fees and taxes, and (4) authorizes various criminal and civil penalties. As the national Gallup data indicate below, support for marijuana legalization has risen dramatically over the past quarter century, to the point where such ballot referenda now have a strong chance of passage in states like California.

I've gotten a few calls on the subject and wish I knew more about it. At this point, I defer to my California colleagues because I simply do not feel sufficiently informed or qualified to render an opinion as either an expert or a private citizen on this issue. But I do know this: should Proposition 19 pass, it would likely portend a Very Big Change in past practices and policies with respect to marijuana. Some excellent researchers at the RAND Drug Policy Research Center (Beau Kilmer, Jonathan P. Caulkins, Rosalie Liccardo Pacula, Robert J. MacCoun, Peter H. Reuter) have made heroic efforts to model the likely effects of such a Very Big Change, based on estimates of current and future consumption, likely price changes, taxes levied and evaded, and nonprice effects (such as a change in stigma), but they acknowledge that we are in uncharted waters. Their best guess?

(1) the pretax retail price of marijuana will substantially decline, likely by more than 80 percent. The price the consumers face will depend heavily on taxes, the structure of the regulatory regime, and how taxes and regulations are enforced;
(2) consumption will increase, but it is unclear how much, because we know neither the shape of the demand curve nor the level of tax evasion (which reduces revenues and prices that consumers face);
(3) tax revenues could be dramatically lower or higher than the $1.4 billion estimate provided by the California Board of Equalization (BOE); for example, uncertainty about the federal response to California legalization can swing estimates in either direction;
(4) previous studies find that the annual costs of enforcing marijuana laws in California range from around $200 million to nearly $1.9 billion; our estimates show that the costs are probably less than $300 million; and
(5) there is considerable uncertainty about the impact of legalizing marijuana in California on public budgets and consumption, with even minor changes in assumptions leading to major differences in outcomes.

So, marijuana will become significantly cheaper in California, but we cannot tell for certain whether the increase in consumption will be correspondingly large (say, to the peak marijuana levels of the late-1970s). We also can't say for sure how much will be collected or evaded in taxes, saved or spent on treatment and law enforcement, or how neighboring states and the federal government will respond. The RAND report is helpful in showing both the kinds of factors to be considered before casting one's ballot and the limits of our current knowledge base.

On balance, will we be better off or worse off in a post-Prop. 19 world? At this point, responsible experts, including the RAND team, are pointing to an unusually large gap between the change voters must consider and our knowledge about its likely impact. Call me gutless, but under such conditions my personal preference would be for a gradual phase-in and limited pilot period before attempting to flip such a Very Big Switch in a state of 39 million people.

the smoker you drink, the player you get

2010-10-10T00:59:00.004-05:00

I heard many fine presentations at a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation gathering last week, but the most provocative likely came from James Jackson, a University of Michigan psychologist. I don't want to blog any work in progress, so I'll limit this post to his 2010 American Journal of Public Health article, "Race and Unhealthy Behaviors: Chronic Stress, the HPA Axis, and Physical and Mental Health Disparities Over the Life Course."

Professor Jackson's basic hypothesis is that people cope with chronically stressful environments by engaging in unhealthy behaviors like smoking, drinking, and eating comfort foods -- and that these physically unhealthy behaviors might actually have protective mental-health effects. Of course, unhealthy behaviors eventually catch up to us, contributing to physical health problems that show up as morbidity and mortality disparities among the social groups who partake at varying rates.

Professor Jackson suggests that this hypothesis might help explain why African Americans generally have higher rates of physical health problems than non-Hispanic Whites but similar or lower rates of mental health problems, such as major depression. If a group uses unhealthy behaviors to cope with chronic stress, they might gain a short-term boost in mental health but pay a long-term physical health penalty. That said, the hypotheses isn't really about race differences, so much as the differential distribution of chronic stressors and the differential availability of healthy and unhealthy coping mechanisms.

Most data I've seen show that Whites do more drinking and smoking than African Americans, but Professor Jackson is hypothesizing race differences in effects rather than race differences in the prevalence or incidence of use. And this is what he found in the AJPH article. The figure below shows how the relationship between stressors and major-depression criteria varies by the level of unhealthy behaviors for African Americans (in panel a) and for Whites (in panel b). Stress was more strongly linked to depression among African American abstainers who had not engaged in unhealthy behaviors (the zero group) but stressors were unrelated to depression for African Americans who reported at least two of the unhealthy behaviors. For non-Hispanic Whites, on the other hand, the situation was reversed: those with the fewest unhealthy behaviors actually coped the best with stressors, perhaps due to their greater access to healthier stress-reducing alternatives.

I'd still be cautious about the race interaction until it is consistently replicated, but I'm more convinced by the argument about the protective mental health effects of unhealthy behaviors. Why else would parolees risk going back to prison and football stars risk million dollar contracts over minor substance use? They aren't partying (well, not all of them), they are dealing with stress in a way that, for better or worse, functions for them.

At this point, the hypothesis is intriguing and the evidence provisionally supportive, but the matter is far from settled. The first policy conclusion, of course, is to dial back the stressors in the first place -- reduce discrimination, improve living conditions, provide job opportunities, and reduce poverty for the most disadvantaged. With fewer stressors, there is less need or motivation for unhealthy coping. A second policy conclusion might involve finding or facilitating healthier alternative coping strategies.

age-invariant versus life-course conceptions of marathoning

2010-10-03T18:44:00.002-05:00

I used some very bad words when this email arrived in advance of today's Twin Cities Marathon:

TNT's critically acclaimed, hit drama, MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE, is back for a second season December 6th at 10/9c! In celebration of the highly anticipated return of this viewer-favorite show, TNT is assembling the "Team Of A Certain Age" at the 2010 Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon. MEN OF A CERTAIN AGE, touting an award-winning cast of Ray Romano, Scott Bakula, and Andre Braugher, provides a wry and realistic depiction of three friends navigating through the complexities of mid-life. This series proves that life is a marathon (not a sprint)! Now TNT is looking for men and/or women over the age of 40 to join our Team of a Certain Age! If you sign up and are selected, you will receive an exciting gift package valued at over $100, including:
* A high-quality Limited Edition running shirt to wear during the marathon;
* Six Limited Edition, customizable t-shirts for your friends and family, and;
* A $50 gift card to help reimburse you for the cost of your entry fee!

I've got nothing against the show, though my job as a department chair provides more than enough "wry and realistic depictions of friends navigating through the complexities of midlife," thank you. No, I just hate the idea of being targeted by age. Apparently, other dudes agreed. I saw exactly one runner flying the high-quality Limited Edition "Men of a Certain Age" shirt -- and that runner, my friends, was a young woman. Some clever curmudgeon pocketed the gift card and gave the shirt to his kid.

I realize that we all slow down, but part of me needs to believe that I could still crank out a personal record under the right conditions -- you know, during a sabbatical year, after altitude training, with perfect race day weather, while wearing a jet-pack. I mean, it isn't as though I was ever fast in the first place. So, I cling to the idea that my times are age-invariant -- I should be able to go as fast or faster than I ever have. To provide a reality check, I plotted my 25 known marathon times from 1995-2010. I don't yet have my official "chip time" for today, but it was 3:47 on the clock and I'm guessing it took at least 3 minutes to make my way to the starting gate.

Well, a few heat-induced clinkers spiked up in 2006-2007, but at least it doesn't look like a linear decline or the inexorable aging of the organism -- the correlation is only .0004 between age and finish times. I can see three slopes here: decline in my mid-thirties; ascent in my late-thirties, and another more gradual decline since my early forties. Looking at the graph, though, I'm still about as fast (that is, about as slow) as I was 15 years ago.

Next, I plotted something more life-coursey -- my percentile rank against Ray Romano, Scott Bakula, Andre Braugher and the other men of my certain age, pitting me against the male 30-35 year olds in 1995 and the male 45-49 year olds today.

This graph looks a bit better, though I was disappointed to find myself in the bottom half of my reference group during my early thirties (what the heck was going on? oh yeah, tenure and small children were going on...). But the percentile rank has the virtue of controlling to some extent for race conditions (everybody slows down in the heat) as well as life course stage. So, today I ran the full race with a M45-49 tag on my back. I'm still a long way from the prize money, but the equation says I'm picking up 1.5% per year.
By the time I hit M70-74, that sweet age group cash is mine.

two things my students remembered

2010-10-02T19:17:00.004-05:00

Father Guido Sarducci's Five Minute University come up in Dave Berger's talk at the Sociologists of Minnesota meeting yesterday. The premise is that in five minutes you can learn what the average college graduate remembers five years after he or she is out of school. While the good father may be right about the facts we ask students to memorize, Dave was making the point that there is powerful truth in the liberal arts dictum that we are actually in the business of teaching people to think.

Occasionally, we get direct evidence on this point. I'll often ask former students what they remember from my classes when I bump into them off-campus. Few can recall the fine-grained distinctions among the theories that I taught and tested, but sometimes I'll get a heartening response about how they developed a habit of mind in my classes that made a lasting, trajectory-altering impact.

My favorite came from a woman who said that I taught her "how to look at the data." When I pushed her about this, she said that she had always had a knee-jerk reaction to evidence about things she cared about, but she liked how I dealt with information that she knew challenged my own beliefs. She claimed I would try to understand the new evidence, evaluate it, and then -- if it passed the basic methods bar -- incorporate it into my beliefs and teaching, or at least recognize it as a puzzle that I needed to figure out. All this made data less scary to her and much more interesting. And today, she said, this gives her power and a career advantage in social services, where her colleagues mostly embrace data that supports them and dismiss anything that might be perceived as critical. I doubt my classes were responsible for all that, but it was still cool to hear.

My least favorite came from a student who took a course from me a decade ago and is now a Ph.D. He claimed to remember a few things from my classes but the lesson that stood out came on the first day, when somebody asked whether it would hurt to skip the occasional class. I was caught off-guard, so I said something like, "Well, skipping class is sort of like having unprotected sex. You might get away with it for some time with no consequences but, then again, the consequences might be quite serious and disruptive for you going forward. Wouldn't you rather be safe?" I doubt that particular message really helped his career or his personal life, but, then again, he's now a happily married father with a great job.

contexts, creem, and sports illustrated

2010-09-23T15:01:00.001-05:00

New post on today's Editors' Desk with Doug.

downward trend in f.b.i. uniform crime report data, 1990-2009

2010-09-20T18:00:00.004-05:00

The FBI has released their Uniform Crime Report Crime in the United States numbers for year-end 2009 and, once again, the rate of crimes reported to police continues to fall.

I've just begun to explore the new report, but researchers can easily download spreadsheets to show long- and short-term trends in both population-adjusted rates and raw numbers. The chart above shows the crime decline since 1990 in murder, rape, robbery, aggravated assault, motor vehicle theft, burglary, and larceny-theft. This chart makes it apparent how much the overall crime numbers are driven by larceny-theft -- and the comparative rarity of violent crimes such as rape and murder.

But crime is dropping across each of these categories. The purple bars show the magnitude of the drop in the past 20 years, comparing 1990 rates with 2009 rates, or ((2009-1990)/1990). The green bars show the most recent change from 2008 to 2009 ((2009-2008)/2008). I'd normally compare these numbers with those from the National Crime Victimization Survey before drawing any big conclusions about crime trends. With regard to the FBI's official crime index, however, it seems pretty clear that there has been a significant drop in crime reported to police over the past year and, for that matter, over the past twenty years.

interim report on toxic substances control act

2010-09-19T18:22:00.003-05:00

In keeping with the Toxic Substances Control Act provision of the 2009 Mojo Reclamation Project, I've been teetotalin' since January 1. Though I'd abstained throughout my graduate school years, there were still a few surprises. Five observations at the nine-month mark:

1. I don't miss it. I substitute drinks like diet A&W for beer and pomegranate juice for wine. Pom juice always seemed too expensive for everyday use, but it is far cheaper than good wine and far more drinkable than cheap wine. There is no substitute for Knob Creek bourbon, but fresh apple pie might come closest.

2. Restaurants suddenly seem tired and boring. I still enjoy hanging in taverns with friends and colleagues, but restaurant meals seem absurdly protracted. A teetotalin' friend actually brings books to help pass the long hours that precede the appearance of food. I'd rather just get up and do something.

3. The Interim Pants Elimination Program suddenly became more successful. After nine months, I've lost twentysomething pounds and the last brigade of interim pants has been withdrawn from the upstairs closet. I'm a spectacularly unsuccessful dieter, but finally got decent results after kicking up the exercise and cutting out the alcohol.

4. A bit stronger physically. My running miles increased about 10 percent and the max lifts are up a bit at the gym. I probably shouldn't work out at night, but those long runs under the stars serve as an effective non-toxic stress-buster.

5. A happy brain? It took a few months, but I started feeling a little sharper, quicker, and more clear this summer, especially when puzzling through geeky-fun research problems (e.g., trying to apply a new logit decomposition technique to a discrete-time hazard model with experimental data). I wouldn't make any claims without pre-test/post-test data, but I sure feel sharper.

Teetotalin' hasn't solved every problem, with insomnia and the email inbox proving especially resistant to attack. I'd like to think that my judgment is improving -- as dad or department chair. I'm doing a better job with the late-night father/son and father/daughter chats these days, but there's really little evidence that I've become a better father, scholar, or administrator. Overall, though, I feel good enough about how things are going to continue the experiment. The costs are low and the benefits are tangible.

reentry in black and white

2010-09-13T18:49:00.001-05:00

Despite a new wave of programs and research, people still write about reentry using the stylized tropes of old James Cagney and Humphrey Bogart movies. Either the ex-prisoner is portrayed as a noble witness to this cruel world, as a predatory menace to be gunned down, or (in more sophisticated variants) as a gangster with a heart of gold.

Given these cultural reference points, it takes courage to say something real and true about the lived messiness of reentry -- especially when one's freedom or livelihood depends on telling convincing narratives of success. Josh Page tipped me off to a short piece by Jody Lewen of the Prison University Project, who describes the sort of reentry experience I see played out in my research and in everyday life.

In the latest issue of the PUP Newsletter, Dr. Lewin writes about a former client who hadn't committed any major new crime but had nevertheless violated the conditions of his release.

Derek Meade had been an exceptional student while in the program at San Quentin, had enrolled in school immediately after paroling to continue his studies, and had also managed to find a part-time job. He had sounded great for quite a while. When he didn’t respond to one of our messages, we sent another, and he finally wrote to say that he had recently relapsed, and was close to being sent back to prison as the result of two positive drug tests. He said he hoped to send us the letter soon, with some better news.

Derek’s assumption was, of course, that his current news was “unfit” for the newsletter. It was as if he had absorbed the pressure we often feel to provide nothing but upbeat success stories and clear evidence of our “results.” And yet how many of our former students – or other people in recovery, for that matter – experience the same thing he was going through? What impact does it have on those individuals never to see their experiences reflected in publications about our programs? And equally important: how does this absence affect the public’s understanding of our work – whether in terms of the value of education for people in prison, or the role education can play in the process of recovery?

Of course, there are two layers of courage here. Unlike Mr. Meade, many clients will remain silent about their struggles and only share stories of unadulterated success or extreme hardship that justifies their actions. Unlike Dr. Lewin, many program directors will select and highlight only those narratives that celebrate the transformative power of their programs or justify a claim to greater resources. In challenging such biased and selective pictures, they give us a glimpse of what reentry is really like -- and it is rarely as black and white as those old movies.

ps. If you'd like to support the Prison University Project, you can make a donation in any amount.

grinning like a ...

2010-09-12T17:40:00.009-05:00

Friends met me with concern at the national sociology meetings, asking why I've blogged so little this summer. Nobody said they missed my trenchant observations on crime and society, but Tina, Ryan, and other friends wanted updates on life, health, and kids. I've been putting more professional online energies into The Society Pages and Public Criminologies lately, but I'm eager to keep this li'l personal rowboat floating a bit longer as well.

Things seem to be going pretty well. Living with nocturnal returning college students became a challenge once school let out (Why do they cook spaghetti at 1 am on a Tuesday? Because they can), but I enjoyed a happy summer and actually had some productive conversations with the progeny.

At least I think it was a happy summer. I'm an interactionist who generally trusts others' appraisals as much as my own on such matters. For example, I know I must be feeling real good when one of my kids commands that I "quit grinning like an idiot." I seem to suffer from excessive involuntary grinning in the worst possible social settings for them -- driving in the car with buddies, taking a campus tour with Tor, or enjoying a meal with Hope. I always thought they were exaggerating until I walked into a gym with Hope and caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. Yeesh, what a chucklehead. I was actually embarrassed for her.

I rarely grin so broadly at work (though the phrase "big a** smile" once popped up on my ratemyprofessors.com page), but summer is Happy Research Funtime for department chairs. And, it turns out, there's not much that makes me happier than diving into tough research problems with killer graduate students. I realized this after I'd scheduled meetings with three current and former students (who happen to share the same first name). Afterward, our department administrator came by to say, "I was going to interrupt for our appointment, but you just looked so happy meeting with your Sarahs." And, lest it look like I'm playing favorites, she said the same thing about my summer meetings with the Mikes, Heathers, and other students passing through my office.

I've always felt it was a privilege to work with the grad students I advise, but I hadn't realized how much I enjoyed it until somebody else pointed this out to me. And while the joys of parenting are far different than the joys of advising grad students, both roles come with daunting responsibilities -- and ripping good fun.

crime and black flight in detroit

2010-06-08T18:32:00.000-05:00

The Wall Street Journal is reporting on "black flight" from Detroit, or the out-migration of "taxpaying, middle-class professionals who invest in local real estate, work and play downtown, and make their home" in the central city:

By some estimates, this year's Census will show a population drop of 150,000 people from the 951,000 people who lived within city limits in 2000. That would be roughly double the population loss in the 1990s, when black, middle-class flight began replacing white flight as the prevailing dynamic. There are other signs the middle class is throwing in the towel. From 1999 to 2008, median household income in Detroit dropped nearly 25% to $28,730, after growing 17% in the 1990s, according to Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit that analyzes Census data for the city. Over that period, the proportion of owner-occupied homes fell to 39% from 49%, while the proportion of vacant homes nearly tripled to 28%.

The Journal identifies serious and persistent crime problems as driving the trend. Motown's violent crime rate has generally fallen since the 1980s and declined again by about 2% between 2008 and 2009. Nevertheless, Detroit remains a relatively dangerous city, with crime problems likely exacerbated by the residential instability of the housing crisis. Although cross-city comparisons can be misleading (mostly because jurisdictional boundaries and denominators vary so greatly), the violent crime rate was about 75% higher in Detroit than in Minneapolis in 2009. Moreover, Gallup polls consistently show that Detroit is perceived as a dangerous city:

As the graph shows, Americans have long viewed Detroit as a dangerous city, with only 18% viewing Detroit as a safe place to live or visit in 1990. This perception improved as crime declined in the 1990s, but had fallen back sharply by 2006. Perceived safety improved much more rapidly for cities such as New York and Chicago, such that these cities are now viewed as significantly safer than Detroit. I couldn't find any data beyond 2006, but I suspect these trends in perceived safety have continued.

My sense is that flight from Detroit, both black and white, is driven partly by these perceptions and partly by the lived reality of crime in Detroit neighborhoods. I poked around the Detroit Police Department site tonight, looking for some reassuring long-term trend data. I found few statistics of any kind there, though I did discover the department's youtube channel. I'm sure the video below was well-intended, but such chilling safety tips will do little to reassure residents or change perceptions about the city's safety.

still time to join us at sunday's minneapolis marathon

2010-06-04T17:45:00.003-05:00

I missed last weekend's Madison Marathon for a conference, but found a lovely alternative in this Sunday's Minneapolis Marathon. The race begins in Urban Paradise then ambles up the river to ol' Fort Snelling. Rodney Pygoya Chang's depiction of last year's race sure entices:

I hear it is a smaller-scale, lower-key affair than the Twin Cities marathon in October, which sounds dead solid perfect for me. If the prospect is similarly enticing to you, there's still time to register for the marathon or half-marathon.

dr. drew on celebrity narcissism

2010-05-24T18:00:00.007-05:00

I was surprised to learn that media personality Dr. Drew Pinsky had published a peer-reviewed article in Journal of Research in Personality 2006. I'm not wild about the sampling, but his "Narcissism and Celebrity," coauthored with S. Mark Young, turns out to be a pretty good read. From the abstract:

We used the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) to assess the degree of narcissism among celebrities. Results indicate that celebrities are significantly more narcissistic than MBA students and the general population. Contrary to findings in the population at large, in which men are more narcissistic than women, female celebrities were found to be significantly more narcissistic than their male counterparts. Reality television personalities had the highest overall scores on the NPI, followed by comedians, actors, and musicians. Further, our analyses fail to show any relationship between NPI scores and years of experience in the entertainment industry, suggesting that celebrities may have narcissistic tendencies prior to entering the industry.

The sample was drawn from 200 celebrities appearing on Loveline, Dr. Pinsky's syndicated radio program, and a comparison group of 200 MBA students. Each participant completed the 40-item Narcissism Personality Inventory (NPI). I would be reluctant to draw any strong inferences from such a selective sample of celebrities, but I've charted some of the basic descriptives below. The figure shows mean levels of seven component NPI subscales for each group (authority, exhibitionism, superiority, entitlement, exploitativeness, self-sufficiency, and vanity), with the highest score on each subscale highlighted in yellow.

Overall, celebrities were significantly more narcissistic than MBA students, with the small samples of reality TV stars and comedians posting the highest overall scores (19.5 and 18.9, respectively). Are bloggers narcissists? For what it's worth, I scored a 16 on the online NPI -- about the same as the musicians and male MBAs.

the steak knives or the caddy? small rewards and cultures of appreciation

2010-05-20T18:45:00.001-05:00

According to Fortune, bonuses, titles, and big giveaways to top performers aren't very effective in motivating employees. Of course, Fortune's primary source on this point was a CEO selling alternative incentive systems -- Eric Mosley of Globoforce, the "leading worldwide provider of global strategic recognition solutions." The article did not cite much of the empirical literature on the subject from social psychology or organization studies, though it did offer a supportive quote from Hyagreeva Rao, a Stanford business professor and frequent contributor to American Journal of Sociology.

Celebrity CEO "Neutron Jack" Welch famously advocated rewarding the top 10% of employees and firing the bottom 10%. Universities, in contrast, offer non-tenured faculty an incentive system more akin to that of the Alec Baldwin character in Mamet's Glengarry, Glen Ross:

So what might work a little better?

Share the Wealth. About 80% to 90% of employees should get some reward every year. "A lot of companies worry that this sounds like 'everyone is a winner' thinking," says Globoforce's Mosley. "But when you're trying to reinforce certain behaviors, you need to constantly recognize them."

Small bucks beat big ones. The average prize should be just $110. Smaller prizes can seem insignificant, but larger ones, Globoforce found, don't motivate any better. "Even billionaires appreciate a Christmas sweater from their mom," says Mosley.

Weekly, not quarterly. Every week, 5% of employees should get an award. Any less frequent and people will forget about the program. "Salary increases, which many employees say they prefer, are one-time events," Mosley says. "There's just pressure for another one. Small awards all the time are a way to constantly touch people."

I'd like to see broader cultures of appreciation in academic departments, but academics are loathe to give out $110 gift certificates until they've been properly vetted by a Behaviors to be Recognized Committee with a fully articulated appeals process. Maybe if we hired Globoforce...

spring issue

2010-05-15T20:42:00.004-05:00

When Hartmann and I bid for Contexts magazine, our proposal was long on vision but skimpy on details. I think our new spring issue is about the closest we've come to realizing that vision, presenting a broader, more diverse, and more engaged sociology and celebrating its contributions to the public good.

This issue features a lively print exchange based on culture editor Dave Grazian's bar room discussion of glam metal and guilty pleasures with (non-academic sociologist) Chuck Klosterman. Paul Hirsch and Dan Cornfeld offer a fine retrospective on (non-academic sociologist) Studs Terkel, with some amazing artwork from (non-academic sociologist) Harvey Pekar's graphic adaptation of Terkel's Working. We've also got a slate of strong features by academic sociologists like Doug Downey and Edward Walker, incisive culture reviews on reality TV, and a compelling original analysis of bestselling books in sociology, with a comment by Herb Gans himself.

Though we've started to make good on a bit of the vision in our proposal, we know that Contexts ain't there yet. And while contexts.org is attracting millions of eyeballs these days, our print publication is still speaking mainly to a few thousand academic sociologists. Those issues aside, I was dang pleased to peel the shrink wrap from this issue -- and I hope you like it too.

law enforcement death rate is falling, not rising

2010-05-10T19:17:00.008-05:00

The Minnesota law enforcement community turned out strong to honor the memory of Officer Joe Bergeron of Maplewood, killed in the line of duty on May 1. Of course, such deaths ripple outward to affect much broader communities. I recall my mother's stories about a brave officer in our family -- the nice cousin who sang Everly Brothers songs with her, I believe -- shot and killed during a basic traffic stop. So I was especially troubled to see media reports citing a "a 17 percent jump in the number of officers 'feloniously killed' in the line of duty."

The reports are based on an FBI press release, but is it really the case that More Officers Died in the Line of Fire in 2009? The National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund tracks law enforcement deaths by year and jurisdiction, while the Officer Down Memorial Page provides breakdowns by state. These include both felonious deaths (which are primarily firearms-related) and accidental deaths (which are primarily traffic-related). The long-term trend in officer deaths is shown in the first figure below. You can see peaks of 285 deaths in 1930, 279 in 1974, and 240 in 2001, but a decline to 116 officer deaths in 2009.

Of course, there were a lot more people in the United States in 2009 than in 1974, and a lot more in 1974 than in 1792. To get a better sense of long-term trends in the rate of law enforcement deaths, I plotted this long NLEOMF data series after standardizing it by population. The figure below shows the resulting rate of law enforcement deaths per million citizens.

Death rates were highest during the prohibition era from 1920-1932, reaching a peak rate of 2.32 officers per million population in 1930. Officer deaths then dropped dramatically in the 1940s and 1950s before rising again to a second peak of about 1.3 deaths per million in 1974. Since then, there has been another steep decline that extends to the present. By my calculations, the 2009 death rate of .38 per million has now reached its lowest point since 1875.

While there were indeed 7 more felonious deaths in 2009 than in 2008, I can find no evidence of a longer-term increase in the rate, number, or proportion of felonious deaths. According to an NLEOMF research bulletin, about 62 percent of officer deaths were felonious in the 1970s, about 54 percent were felonious in the 1980s, and about 46 percent were felonious in the 2000s.

A few caveats on this analysis: I cannot vouch for the quality of the National Law Enforcement Memorial Fund data in the early years of this series, but it seems to track the FBI data very closely for more recent years. One might also critique the latter figure for using the total population as the denominator rather than the number of law enforcement officers.

Finally, it should go without saying that 116 officer deaths remains far too many. Nevertheless, this picture is far more heartening than the one painted by recent news reports -- the rate of officer deaths appears to be lower today than it has been for the past 135 years.

bill bielby, wal-mart, and the interstices of public and policy sociology

2010-04-29T19:40:00.002-05:00

In Dukes v. Wal-Mart, two million former and current female employees just cleared a major legal hurdle in their employment discrimination lawsuit. According to a 2009 article by Melissa Hart and Paul Secunda, the "social framework" testimony of sociologist Bill Bielby has played a pivotal role in the largest sex discrimination case in U.S. history.

Here's the latest from Workplace Profs:

Looks like a big win for the plaintiffs in the gigantic employment discrimination class action in Dukes v. Wal-Mart (a group of some 2 million former and current female employees have sued over lack of promotion opportunities). The 9th Circuit en banc, 6-5 with four separate opinions and 137 pages, affirmed class certification under Rule 23(b)(2) for some issues and remanded on others.

The expert testimony was especially important in obtaining class certification -- a huge issue in employment discrimination cases -- and clearing the case for trial. The news caught my eye as a friend of Bill, but also because his role in the case was noted in Michael Burawoy's famous 2004 American Sociological Association presidential address -- to illustrate how policy sociology differs from public sociology. From Burawoy:

Barbara Ehrenreich’s (2002) best-selling Nickel and Dimed—an ethnography of low-wage work that indicted, among others, Wal-Mart’s employment practices is an example of public sociology, whereas William Bielby’s (2003) expert testimony in the sexual discrimination suite against the same company would be a case of policy sociology. The approaches of public and policy sociology are neither mutually exclusive nor even antagonistic. As in this case they are often complementary.

In my view, one often blurs the public/policy boundary in practice (not to mention the public/policy/professional/critical lines). However we classify it, Professor Bielby shows how the conceptual and methodological tools of sociology can be put to practical use. Since a lot of our graduating majors are going on to law school, I might even pull a few quotes from Judge Hawkins' opinion in my li'l speech for sociology majors next week. How many sociological concepts can you spot in the following passage?

Plaintiffs presented evidence from Dr. William Bielby, a sociologist, to interpret and explain the facts that suggest that Wal-Mart has and promotes a strong corporate culture — a culture that may include gender stereotyping. Dr. Bielby based his opinion on, among other things, Wal-Mart managers’ deposition testimony; organizational charts; correspondence, memos, reports, and presentations relating to personnel policy and practice, diversity, and equal employment opportunity issues; documents describing the culture and history of the company; and a large body of social science research on the impact of organizational policy and practice on workplace bias.

Dr. Bielby testified that he employed a social framework analysis to examine the distinctive features of Wal-Mart’s policies and practices and evaluated them “against what social science shows to be factors that create and sustain bias and those that minimize bias.” In Dr. Bielby’s opinion, “social science research demonstrates that gender stereotypes are especially likely to influence personnel decisions when they are based on subjective factors, because substantial decisionmaker discretion tends to allow people to seek out and retain stereotyping-confirming information and ignore or minimize information that defies stereotypes.” Dr. Bielby concluded that: (1) Wal-Mart’s centralized coordination, reinforced by a strong organizational culture, sustains uniformity in personnel policy and practice; (2) there are significant deficiencies in Wal-Mart’s equal employment policies and practices; and (3) Wal-Mart’s personnel policies and practices make pay and promotion decisions vulnerable to gender bias.

...

While a jury may ultimately agree with Wal-Mart that, in the absence of a specific discriminatory policy promulgated by Wal-Mart, it is not more likely than not, based solely on Dr. Bielby’s analysis, that Wal-Mart engaged in actual gender discrimination, that question must be left to the merits stage of the litigation (and presumably will not have to be decided as there will be other evidence). At the class certification stage, it is enough that Dr. Bielby presented scientifically reliable evidence tending to show that a common question of fact — i.e., “Does Wal-Mart’s policy of decentralized, subjective employment decision making operate to discriminate against female employees?”— exists with respect to all members of the class.

now blogging at minnpost

2010-04-28T16:28:00.006-05:00

Joining an actual syndicate holds special meaning for a criminologist, so I was intrigued by MinnPost's invitation to syndicate some of my writing on their Blog Cabin Network. Since I've long admired MinnPost, I was delighted to sign up when Justin Piehowski reached out. I'm not sure how many posts they'll run, but today they're offering my blurb on higher education and police use of force. Coincidentally, I was just interviewed by MinnPost's Casey Selix for her thoughtful story on the CLA 2015 report and mission this Monday.

my voice, my vote

2010-04-27T12:04:00.002-05:00

The Minnesota Second Chance Coalition is calling for volunteers to be photographed in their campaign to restore the right to vote for people convicted of felonies in Minnesota. During the 2009 campaign I offered a report on Felon Disenfranchisement in Minnesota report and some brief Senate testimony -- I'm hoping to update both this summer and would welcome any feedback.

VOLUNTEERS NEEDED to participate in our voting rights restoration campaign!
A professional photographer has agreed to take photos of individuals who are currently or have in the past been denied the right to vote based on a felony conviction. Photos will be used in the MY VOICE, MY VOTE campaign. A copy of the photo will be made available to anyone wishing to participate in the campaign. We need your voice to help restore the right to vote for thousands who are currently disenfranchised. Photos will be taken on two dates in two locations:

Tuesday, May 18th, 2010; 5:30 - 7:00PM; Emerge Community Development; 1101 West Broadway Avenue; Minneapolis, MN 55411-2571

Thursday, May 20th, 2010; 5:30 - 7:00PM; Goodwill Easter Seals; 533 Fairview Ave N; St. Paul, MN 55104

 Restoring the right to vote for ex-offenders living in the community maximizes their ability to contribute to society.
 Minnesota denies the right to vote for anyone convicted of a felony and is on probation, supervised release (parole) or is incarcerated.
 Over 70,000 Minnesotans with a felony conviction were unable to vote in 2007, an increase of over 500% since 1982. Over 60,000 Minnesotans would be re-enfranchised by allowing parolees and probationers to vote. Minnesota ranks fourth highest in the nation for number of individuals who are on probation or parole. The result is that 87% of the 70,000 disenfranchised live in the community, hold jobs and pay taxes.

claude's blog

2010-04-26T08:26:00.000-05:00

Berkeley sociologist Claude Fischer authors a fine new blog, building on Made in America: A Social History of American Culture and Character, his new book with University of Chicago Press. In the first few posts, Professor Fischer takes on individualism, taxes, baseball, consumerism, Christianity, and health. Characteristically, and consistent with his vision as Contexts' founding editor, both book and blog offer accessible but rigorous social science. To learn a bit more about the book, check out the current cover interview for Rorotoko.

coolest sri award ever

2010-04-24T14:48:00.010-05:00

Yesterday marked my department's twentieth annual Sociological Research Institute. The student research was well-presented, Michael Tonry gave a powerful keynote, and the entertainment was a beguiling mix of Andy Kaufman, Max Weber, and Cats. I was also bestowed the spine-crushingly cool award at left, hand-delivered by ol' Goldy. I can't say whether Warren acted alone, so I thank Rob, Mary, and all conspirators for an especially memorable SRI.

prepare tar, feathers

2010-04-23T18:41:00.001-05:00

Every university is commissioning blue-ribbon committees these days to manage through the financial challenges in higher education.

As a sociologist, I recognize the symbolic role of my own CLA 2015 commitee with Gary Oehlert, charged with strengthening and repositioning the College of Liberal Arts. But, as Lauren Edelman taught me, just because an institution serves symbolic functions doesn't mean that it can't do some real good. To take but one example, I've argued (with Lauren and Howie Erlanger) that equal employment grievance procedures can offer both symbolic and functional value to both organizations and workers.

When blue-ribbon university committees are composed of a diverse set of civic-minded participants, I'd like to think they have the potential to develop a broad-based vision, set an agenda, generate a plan to realize it, and make sound recommendations for action -- even while they are also providing political cover, legitimating unpopular changes, and demonstrating symbolic compliance with widely-shared norms and expectations.

Our CLA 2015 committee just released our interim report on the future of liberal arts in Minnesota. Our final report isn't due until October, but we're offering up a document now in the interest of transparency -- and to signal our direction and provoke discussion or feedback. Our intent was to provide a short statement that would be part wake-up call, part unifying call-to-arms, and part vision statement. To the extent we succeed, we'll generate some heated debate and hard-hitting critique. To the extent we fail, well, we'll be run out of town on a rail.

I'm cautiously optimistic, but I wouldn't mind hearing that I could crash on your couch for a few days -- just in case I need to leave town in a hurry.

higher education and police use of force

2010-04-18T19:07:00.007-05:00

Frederick Melo at The Usual Suspects comments on the high rates of advanced degrees among police officers in Minnesota. He cites a bit of the criminological research literature on the effects of higher education, but didn't mention a new paper in Police Quarterly by Jason Rydberg and William Terrill.

I won't belabor the methods or Project on Policing Neighborhoods data source, but I graphed the main finding above: relative to less-educated officers, those with college experience are significantly less likely to use force in police-citizen encounters. About 56 percent of interactions with college-educated officers involved force, while about 68 percent of encounters with non-college-educated officers involved force. This relationship holds up (p < .001) in models that adjust for age, experience, suspect characteristics, and the setting of the encounter. In contrast to the use of force, defined here as "acts that threaten or inflect physical harm on citizens," there appears to be no relationship between education and arrest or search behavior.

Even with a nice set of statistical controls, one could interpret these findings as the result of self-selection processes -- that is, there might be something about the type of people who go to college (rather than the college experience itself) that results in less force by officers. Plus, force is difficult to measure and, if I'm interpreting them correctly, these levels look suspiciously high.

Nevertheless, the basic finding has now been replicated across a number of data sets and research settings. Why haven't we required all officers to hold advanced degrees? The old arguments involve the desirability of recruiting less-educated former military personnel, while the new arguments involve the desirability of recruiting a less-educated but more diverse force. The enduring argument, I suppose, involves costs: if we require all officers to have a college degree, we might have to pay them more.

visualizing academic jobs

2010-04-17T17:49:00.006-05:00

When I checked in with our Minnesota graduate students this spring, their first question concerned market conditions and getting good jobs. I started answering in terms of technical skills and economic conditions, but ended in visualization and bad poetry.

As a long-serving department chair, I've got plenty of advice about high-demand skills and high-impact publication. But most know this stuff already and there are real structural challenges and uncertainties in the markets they'll be entering. So, at the risk of being perceived as (even more) flaky, I doffed my chair hat and shared my own story.

The market was bleak when I attended grad school in the early 1990s -- not brutal like today, of course, but there weren't many jobs out there. Knowing almost nothing about academic life, I spent a lot of time asking what kind of job I wanted. I figured that if I could suss that out, I might be able to chart a course to getting there.

I thought of Minnesota, but I couldn't realistically envision myself landing a perfect job in my hometown. Then I figured another Big-10 (or Big-10-type) school would be great. I knew I preferred to be in a public research university and I truly enjoyed larger lecture classes. I didn't care much about status or pay at the time, but knew I'd need good colleagues and lots of mentoring. And there were a ton of great crime/law/deviance scholars in Big-10 universities, many of whom seemed like good people.

Still, "Big 10" was too vague to help me set course, so I started visualizing myself flying into a small airport to interview at a specific place -- the University of Iowa, where they had a great crim group. Then, on a perfect summer day after my second year of grad school, I looked out my window and could almost see myself readying to leave Madison -- cleaning out the shed, picking through stuff for a yard sale, and listening to an old radio as I slopped blue paint on our li'l east side house and jawed with my neighbor. I couldn't envision my dissertation or job talk at that point, but I could definitely imagine leaving our Second Street house to move to Iowa City. Since, I could see and hear it clear as day, I just wrote down what i saw and heard:

Paint Radio (On Leaving Madison)

Dusty flecks of has-been paint,
in ice-cream white and foggy blue,
thick drips of new stuff stuck fast,
to an outdoor radio.

I dig it from the shed we raised,
and plug into fat orange cords.
Tonight it hides with little-boy treasures,
old timing lights and fishing tackle,
else Friday sells for a quarter.

Brewers losing five to three,
still Molitor, Yount, and the rest
of this team belongs in slow-
pitch city league.
I heard Robin leg out a triple,
could see him rounding second,
weightless on the bases.
And Uke likes this kid Navarro,
up from Double-A El Paso,
another call-up with potential.

Smithereens on M.A.D.
play House we Used to Live In
so i keep it there and puzzle the move,
the longer drive,
the company of things familiar.
what do they get in Iowa,
Twins games?

The tired Ford whistles and creaks,
gently clatters over the driveway and onto the grass.
Rhonda's got paint with clean labels,
brown legs and tin buckets.

Climbing shaky ladders in the sun,
then Jerry yells from his window:
"Djou guys booked for next weekend?"
I laugh and he apologizes for his dog again.

To this day, I'm still much better at imagining house painting than actual house painting. But here's the deal with visualizing something concrete: once I had an actual place in mind, it was suddenly much easier to plan and make decisions about my graduate career (e.g., will taking on this project/class/meeting help move me toward a tenure-track job at Iowa?). I didn't get my hopes up about actually landing that job, but it helped put me on a path toward a similar sort of job.

The market had improved when I went looking for jobs in 1994-1995. Iowa wasn't hiring, but I did land four interviews -- three at big-10 schools and one at a Pac-10 school. So, did the visualization work? This isn't so much a story about the "power of visualization" as about specifying the mechanism linking where I was with where I wanted to be. Visualizing a concrete place and set of role expectations gave me clear directives to make decisions in day-to-day life. Over the course of a few years, with the help of some smart and caring advisors, the effects of these decisions cumulated to the point where I was a realistic candidate for the job I set out to get.

kara goucher and trusting your stuff

2010-04-15T12:38:00.003-05:00

Bruce Barcott's long-form Runner's World profile of Kara Goucher is a good read for marathoners, but a really excellent read for anyone struggling with self-doubt:

“Everyone has their weakness,” she says. “Mine is confidence.” ... her head has always messed with her. For as long as she can recall, it's thrown hammers at her feet. Some runners have trick knees or fragile hamstrings. She has an undermining psyche.

Some will read her admissions as weakness or dismiss Ms. Goucher's work with a sports psychologist as touchy-feely psychobabble. Not me. It takes guts to seek help in overcoming emotional barriers to success. Runner's World pairs the piece with a sidebar offering general advice for anxious runners -- worry early not late; enjoy the motion; define success by your own progress; embrace your competitors; and, employ a keyword.

On the latter point, Ms. Goucher used the word "fighter" during intense training moments and then invoked it at a critical race moment to push her to a strong performance. Even middle-of-the-packers can get a boost from keywords or affirmations. I like the words strong or stronger. I never feel fast or light when the wheels come off at mile 22, but I recall my training, feel my quads and calves tighten and my lungs open up, and know I can finish strong. Then I just tromp along to the finish, usually to the blub-blub-blub rhythm of my heavy-rollin' '71 Chrysler.

As a sociologist, I believe that success is structured, in part, by social relationships and resources. I've never used keywords in my professional life, but before big talks I'll remind myself to trust my stuff -- to believe in my preparation, methodologies, and the quality of work I'll be presenting. If you're well-prepared, you know what you're doing, and you've got good stuff to present, there's really no reason for anxiety.

The profile of Ms. Goucher emphasizes the critical distinction between a 10th-place finish in which she quit and a 9th-place finish in which she ran her heart out. She knew the difference, and I guess that's the point of the article -- confidence comes from performing to our full capabilities, regardless of any external validation for our efforts.

national geographic and solitary watch

2010-04-13T00:16:00.004-05:00

Tonight's episode of National Geographic's Explorer takes up the "science of solitary confinement." Solitary Watch is skeptical, however, especially about an experiment purporting to offer a live window into the solitary experience.

Holing up for a few days in an 8X10 room might be unpleasant, but it really doesn't approximate solitary confinement when the subjects can get up and leave whenever they want. Solitary Watch also points to a few of the differences between real solitary and faux-solitary, as described by a former prisoner:

1) Being surrounded by other mentally ill inmates howling and banging on doors and walls, resulting in sleep deprivation.
2) Viewing or rather listening to the brutality of prison guards reacting to these outbursts.
3) The uncertainty of when, or if, you will ever be released and the hopelessness that this feeling of loss of control over your own destiny instills.

not drinking but not exactly sober, either

2010-04-12T18:28:00.000-05:00

When the financial tsunami hit the University last fall, I agreed to co-chair a big "remaking the college" committee. This brought a few challenges, but working with a wonderful group of college citizens has been its own reward.

I had a time-management problem, though, and a need to think very clearly. Not wanting to cut anything else out of my life, I suspended alcohol use on December 31. This freed up a little time for exercise or correspondence, but it meant no more Surly ale after work, Louis Martini cabs with dinner, or Knob Creek on the deck.

After 100 days, though, I hardly miss 'em. And, I'm feeling just a little harder/better/faster/stronger than before. The committee works through October, but I'm not sure how long I'll abstain. I didn't drink at all in six years of grad school, for pretty much the same time-management and clarity reasons -- I had little kids, little time, and little brain to spare, so I wanted to stay as sharp as possible.

That said, I know that not drinking also raises questions -- especially with spring festivities like our annual Sociological Research Institute coming up next week. I normally just politely decline, but I'm thinking of offering up the following excuses next Friday:

1. I'm training for the London Olympics (said while making javelin-throwing motion)
2. ...just tryin' to stay sexy
3. well, after the seventh DWI...
4. there's a chance I might be pregnant -- fingers crossed!
5. my religion only permits horse tranquilizers; and,
6. I get a little "stabby" when I drink (said while making short stabbing motions)

Perhaps a more effective demurral, in these austere times, is that "I'd like to leave an extra drink or two for the grad students."

spirogytallica

2010-04-05T13:55:00.004-05:00

A li'l something from andy rehfeldt to touch up those metal roots and brighten another fine spring day:

no minimum wage for civilly committed sex offenders

2010-04-02T19:13:00.004-05:00

After they have served their court-ordered prison terms, people convicted of sex crimes are often civilly committed, ostensibly for treatment. When the acting warden at the Wisconsin Resource Center cut the pay of these patients/detainees from the minimum wage of $6.50 per hour to as little as $1.94 per hour, several filed lawsuits.

Since they were not prisoners, the residents argued they should qualify for the minimum wage just like any other employee. According to Business Week, Wisconsin's District 2 Court of Appeals rejected their argument on Wednesday. Judge Daniel Anderson, writing for the court, said the patients "do not need the minimum wage to protect their well being" since they are "cared for by the state."

I've argued in print that the hyperstigma applied to sex offenders approaches caste-like levels of second-class citizenship in the United States (though I never got around to that screenplay). The minimum wage example is just one of many legal and ethical paradoxes of sex offender civil commitment. What rights and liberties obtain for those who are no longer prisoners but will likely die behind bars?

going green to be seen

2010-04-01T18:57:00.005-05:00

They're doing some conversation-provoking social psychology in the Carlson School of Management these days -- and I'm not just saying that because Heather and I are speaking there tomorrow. The latest "talker" is Vladas Griskevicius' Going Green to Be Seen: Status, Reputation, and Conspicuous Conservation, forthcoming in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. From the abstract:

[W]e examined in three experiments how status motives influenced desire for green products. Activating status motives led people to choose green products over more luxurious non-green products. Supporting the notion that altruism signals one’s willingness and ability to incur costs for others’ benefit, status motives increased desire for green products when shopping in public (but not private), and when green products cost more (but not less) than nongreen products.

So, status motives apparently lead people to forgo luxury for the environment only when such choices can be observed and influence one’s reputation. Hmm. I suppose an unscrupulous operator could profitably apply this research by purchasing replacement hybrid badges -- the very icon of conspicuous conservation -- and reselling them at a nice markup to the guilt-ridden drivers of gas-guzzling luxury vehicles. Sure 'nuff.

stigma creep: adding johns to the kansas sex offender registry

2010-03-28T16:38:00.006-05:00

The Kansas City Star reports that a bill passed by the Kansas House would require those convicted of soliciting a prostitute to be listed on the state’s sex offender registry for 10 years.

Prostitution involving adults is typically a misdemeanor, subject to fines and/or a short jail term, though the activity has long drawn shame-based sanctions. For example, police departments in Minneapolis and St. Paul now post photos of people arrested for soliciting prostitutes -- a punishment that can be far more frightening than a $700 fine. In many jurisdictions, those soliciting prostitutes must also attend "john school," where the lessons combine deterrence (e.g., powerpoint slides of late-stage STDs; a stern prosecutor's lecture) with an appeal to family and community values (and their wives, mothers, and daughters).

While recognizing the social harm involved with prostitution, I'd hate to see further expansion of state registries. If you think it is tough to get a job with a felony conviction on your record, try applying as a sex offender. I'll never forget a phone call from one such offender in a western state. He had worked steadily throughout his adult life until his conviction, but had been unable to gain any real employment in the nine (crime-free) years his name appeared on the registry. When he learned his ten-year term of registration was changed to a lifetime registration requirement, he broke down completely and resigned himself to social isolation and dependency.

In short, a decade-long registration requirement would represent a significant increase in punishment if the Kansas bill were to become law.

-via sentencing law & policy.

proliferation -- an animated mapping of u.s. prison growth

2010-03-25T18:40:00.008-05:00

via Sarah W: Artist Paul Rucker uses animated mapping and a powerful original score to depict U.S. prison growth in Proliferation. Each dot corresponds to a new prison -- and the punishment, pains, and penance therein. I believe the source data are based on some Geographic Information Systems work by Rose Heyer at the Prison Policy Institute. The result is surely more effective and affecting than social science presentations of the same information.

state prison population drop is first since 1972

2010-03-23T13:18:00.007-05:00

The number of U.S. state prison inmates fell for the first time in 38 years, according to a new report by The Pew Center on the States. A few figures from the report: Pew attributes the drop to greater diversion of low-level offenders and probation and parole violators from prison; stronger community supervision and re-entry programs; and, a quicker release of low-risk inmates who complete risk reduction programs. State budget problems have likely played an important role in accelerating each of these trends. While the magnitude of the 2009 change is small -- a drop of 5,739 inmates (or .4%) on a base rate of 1.4 million -- any change in direction is meaningful after four decades of unabated growth. Nevertheless, I should note that the total number of state and federal prisoners actually rose in 2009, since the federal inmate count expanded by 6,838. And, despite a crime rate that has fallen over at least the last two decades, the United States still maintains the world's highest incarceration rate.

on apples not falling far from trees

2010-03-18T17:42:00.006-05:00

Deborah Appleman was an inspiring public school teacher at Henry Sibley Senior High, whose poetry class blew our young minds to kingdom come. Today I read that she's a Carleton professor with a new book, based on her work at the Minnesota Correctional Facility in Stillwater. So I went right to Amazon, of course, and ordered the anthology: From the Inside Out: Letters to Young Men and Other Writings Poetry and Prose from Prison.

If anybody wonders why a sociologist and criminologist like me wants to write poetry posts (prison poetry posts, no less) or edit magazines, it probably started with the teacher we called "Apple." She pushed and nurtured and cajoled and cultivated creative writing and dangerous thinking. And she was tough. If I'm remembering right, I got a B+ on my final project -- a full album of angsty original love songs, recorded on a four-track reel-to-reel. The songs sucked, of course, but c'mon! I'd never worked so hard in my life. I'd like to think she was just as tough on the guys at Stillwater -- and that maybe she'll have the same long-term impact on their lives.

fewer reconvictions, more revocations in reentry court

2010-03-17T00:27:00.002-05:00

Zachary Hamilton and The Center for Court Innovation offer perhaps the most rigorous evaluation to date of the prisoner "reentry court" model championed by Jeremy Travis and others. The basic idea is to facilitate reintegration and protect public safety by giving some focused indivualized attention and intensive services during the critical period immediately after release.

More specifically, the Harlem Reentry Court "provides intensive judicial oversight, supervision and services to new parolees during the first six months following release from state prison. The goal of the program is to stabilize returning parolees in the initial phase of their reintegration by helping them to find jobs, secure housing, remain drug-free and assume familial and personal responsibilities."

To criminologists, this may sound like low-caseload intensive supervised release programs -- and results from the reentry court evaluation seem to mirror those of earlier ISP/ISR evaluations. The difference in the 3-year reconviction rate suggests that the reentry court significantly reduced new crime -- from about 52% in the comparison group to 43% in the treatment group. Nevertheless, the greater attention given the treatment group likely led to their significantly higher revocation rate for technical violations of parole conditions (56% vs. 38%).

Like other forms of intensive supervision, the Harlem Parole Reentry Court probably observed violations in the treatment group that went unnoticed in the comparison group. However much reentry courts help clients adjust to life outside prison, the high rate of technical violations remains a stubborn problem in such programs.

chris (@) cornell

2010-03-14T15:37:00.002-05:00

I'm leaving tomorrow for a Spring Break trip to the sunny beaches of Ithaca, New York. These days I'm spending most of my time on college budgets, department administration and Contexts editing, so it is especially lovely to think and talk about research. I could really use some feedback on a couple lines of research, so I'll be doing half the talk on a crim project and half the talk on a soc of law project.

My talk is co-sponsored by Cornell's Policy Analysis and Management and Sociology programs. Tuesday, March 16th, 3 PM, The Rushmore Room, MVR 114. Please stop on by if you're in the neighborhood.

Sex and Stigma: Experiments and Observations on Discrimination and Harassment

Chris will present ongoing work from two lines of research on crime and the employment relation:

(1) An Experimental Audit on Low-Level Criminal Records and Hiring

A prison record clearly reduces employment outcomes for entry-level job applicants. Yet many employers now have access to applicants’ arrest records, even for misdemeanor cases that never resulted in formal charges. We present experimental evidence from a new audit study testing the extent to which employers consider low-level arrest records in making hiring decisions. Our team sent matched pairs of African American and White men to apply for jobs, experimentally manipulating whether they reported or did not report a low-level criminal record during the application process. We find a modest effect of arrest records on employability, with callback rates about 4 percent lower for the experimental group than for the matched control group.

(2) Sexual Harassment, Workplace Authority, and the Paradox of Power

This article uses longitudinal data from the Youth Development Study (YDS) to predict change in the likelihood of experiencing sexual harassment and in its frequency and severity. Expressions of gender and workplace authority emerge as consistent predictors. In particular, women supervisors are more, rather than less, likely to report sexually harassing behaviors and to define their experiences as sexual harassment than non-supervisors. Intensive interviews with a subset of survey respondents suggest that male coworkers, clients, and supervisors use harassment as an "equalizer" against women in power, consistent with research showing that sexual harassment is less about sexual desire than about control and domination.

if you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write something worth reading or do things worth the writing

2010-03-13T16:33:00.009-06:00

If USC can recruit a 13-year old quarterback, then our sociology graduate program should offer early admission to 13-year-old Rowan Garrigan of St. Paul.

Garrigan has been writing daily tweets as Ben Franklin, using the same abbreviations she uses with her friends. Tweets and translations are available at benfranklinexhibit.org and there's a nice story on Ms. Garrigan on fox9 news. A sampling:

Tweet: OMGYG2BK JBro is B& and wz bustd by the judge for his OP ed in 1/1723 Courant quotn Sil D0good (he still dk its me lol) im the print shop DBAU. I h8 it. :-P

Translation: OH My God you've got to be kidding! James is banned and was arrested by the judge for his Opinion Editorials in the January 1723 Courant quoting Silence Dogood. (he still doesn't know its me Laughing Out Loud) I'm back in the print shop doing business as usual. I hate it. Yuk

Tweet: JBro wnts me 2 run BAU & prnt Courant 4 him in mah nme, but HE is IC! NW! im OH & goin 2 NY! I <3>

Translation: James wants me to run the business as usual and print the Courant for him in my name, but HE is in charge! NO WAY! I'm out of here and going to New York! I love New York! See you there!

kelly kulick

2010-03-11T19:54:00.006-06:00

When Kelly Kulick became the first woman to win a men's Professional Bowlers Association Tour title, Billie Jean King called it "a motivational and inspirational event for girls and women competing at all levels all around the world." Rick Reilly of ESPN went further, calling it the greatest moment in women's sports. According to Reilly, this is the first time in American history that a woman has defeated a field of male athletes in any ball sport.

Heather McLaughlin has been schooling me lately on gender and sport. Reading her prelim, I learned how the press described the first women's 800-meter race in the 1928 Olympics as “eleven wretched women fainting or delirious.” It was not until 1960 that women were again allowed to subject their putatively delicate constitutions to distances longer than 200 meters. Now some gender scholars are advocating greater opportunities for women to compete directly with men, as in the PBA competition won by Ms. Kulick.

Of course, this might affect how we view the events as well as the athletes. I suspect that many sports fans will minimize and devalue any event that includes women -- just as earnings may decline as women enter historically-male occupations or industries. David Whitley of Fanhouse offers an ideal-typical catch-22 argument along these lines:

How could a guy lose to a girl in an athletic event?
Simple, really.
Bowling isn't an athletic event.
Rule No. 1 in determining whether an activity is a sport: If the best female in the world can beat the best male in the world, it doesn't qualify.

Yeesh. Reading this makes me hope that Paula Radcliffe breaks the men's marathon record -- just to see Mr. Whitley tie himself in knots.

sainted n' tainted

2010-03-10T19:29:00.000-06:00

Getting to know the distinctive personalities of Minneapolis and St. Paul is one of the true pleasures of living in these twin cities. Take a summer stroll in each city, for example, and you'll know why the Minneapolis Star-Tribune runs features like How I Got this Body, while St. Paul's Pioneer Press instead offers up community fare like Sainted and Tainted.

I love how the latter feature uses informal social controls to call out those who exemplify or offend community values. This being Minnesota, many features emphasize helping behaviors like snow shoveling and car-pushing. This being Minnesota, there are also a lot more saints than ... well, I guess you would call them 'taints.

For me, there's no better start to the weekend than reading about a li'l or big act of kindness undertaken by my friends and neighbors. And, not being a big tsk-tsker, I usually get a chuckle out of the "tainteds" as well. Here's the basic format:

SAINTED

Belated thanks to the couple who took the time to help me, a total stranger no less, with a flat tire in the Lino Lakes Kohl's parking lot. They not only filled my tire with air, they led me to the Wal-Mart auto store, which I know was out of their way, to make sure I got there safely. They just drove off and I never got to thank them.

SUPER TAINTED

I collect for snow plowing an alley in the Como area. Sainted to the people who pay without question; tainted to the few who think I am a big bother; and a super tainted to the couple who "bought a house and not a neighborhood; we don't care what happens to everyone else."

Ouch! Now that's a profoundly un-Minnesotan attitude about both snow removal and neighboring. My friends and neighbors also tend to dwell on the positive aspects of their stories -- relegating their own very serious troubles to the background:

SAINTED

Several weeks ago, Air Force Tech. Sgt. Aime Dahl, James Magee and Erin Courtney quickly responded when they saw a medical emergency involving my husband. They calmly and professionally did everything they could to try to save his life. They truly deserve to be sainted.

It is getting tougher and tougher for the twin cities to support two independent dailies, but I'll lobby hard to save Sainted and Tainted if a merger is really inevitable.

new paper on innovation and tolerance for failure

2010-03-08T19:21:00.004-06:00

Here's a quick post via Minnpost for my friends at org theory. Brad Allen summarizes:

Initial public offering firms backed by more failure-tolerant VCs not only produce a larger number of patents but also ones with larger impact, as reported in a paper titled “Tolerance For Failure And Corporate Innovation,” co-authored by Tracy Yue Wang, assistant professor of finance and insurance at the U of M’s Carlson School, and collaborator Dr. Xuan Tian, assistant professor of finance at the Kelley School of Business at Indiana University.

I'm sympathetic to this argument, since it fits my idealized notions about productive failure and fostering innovation in academic units. I'm no expert in the area, so I can't vouch for the empirical foundation (though I'm a little wary about period effects within the 1980-2006 observation period). Nevertheless, I like how Professors Wang and Tian operationalized the "failure-tolerance" of venture capital firms using the average duration of investment in past failed projects. Clever. From the manuscript's conclusion:

Other things equal, the longer the VC investor on average waits before terminating funding in an underperforming project, the more tolerant it is for early failures in its investments. We then examine whether such failure tolerance spurs innovation in a sample of VC-backed IPO firms between 1985 and 2006... We find that IPO firms backed by more failure-tolerant VC investors exhibit significantly higher innovation productivity. A rich set of empirical tests shows that this result is not driven by the endogenous matching between failure-tolerant VCs and startups with high ex-ante innovation potentials. Further, the analysis suggests that being financed by a failure-tolerant VC is particularly important for ventures with high ex-ante potentials but also high failure risk. VCs’ tolerance for failure allows the startups’ innovation potentials to be realized.

It all reminds me of an old quote attributed to Woody Allen: "If you're not failing every now and again, its a sign you're not doing anything very innovative."

how to stay cool when interviewed by an aggressive ideologue

2010-03-05T19:00:00.001-06:00

I enjoy talking publicly about my research, though I'm sometimes caught off-guard by an aggressively partisan interviewer. During a "talk radio tour" for Locked Out, I remember how a producer put me at ease and told me to relax and have fun. But as soon as the theme music ended and I let down my guard, the host snarled, "So, Mister Professor, tell my listeners why you think Charles Manson should pick the next President of the United States?"

I honestly don't remember my response, though I'm sure it involved both stammering and yammering. This sort of thing happens a lot on talk radio and television. How best to approach such attacks? As Danielle Maestretti reports, Yes! magazine asked Pramila Jayapal, director of the immigration-rights group OneAmerica, how she handles guest appearances on shows like the O'Reilly Factor. Ms. Jayapal's advice is spot-on and heartening:

I look for something that I can agree with. The host says, “I believe in law and order.” I find a way to take that argument and connect it to my values. When I become reasonable, that deflates both my anger and the conversation. The host is not expecting me to agree with anything they say. They’re expecting an all-out fight.

I cite statistics. I am the one with the facts. The facts are not to convince anybody but to establish my identity as someone who is calm, uses logic, and isn’t just speaking wildly. The host becomes the angry, shouting, loud, mean person.

I focus on values that I believe most people hold deeply. I say, most Americans value respect or hard work, and that’s what this debate should be about. The host is not going to say he or she doesn’t believe in respect or kindness.

Then when I come home, I need to be around people who can shower me in wonderful, nice things. The hosts’ comments are not directed at me personally, but they are personal. A good glass of wine, good friends, good family, good love are important if you are going to be out there on the front lines.

I'd summarize these points as finding common ground, citing solid evidence, referencing shared values, and -- if all else fails -- limping off to lick your wounds. I never want to sound like an egghead, but I try to remind myself that I'm a researcher and educator rather than a combatant in such settings. That means that I don't have to play if someone starts making personal attacks, or questions my patriotism, masculinity, or fashion sense. With regard to the evidence, I also carried around a little folder with all the basic facts and figures I might need for an interview.

If you can keep your facts straight and keep your cool, you might even connect with audiences hostile to your research. I'll never forget how a regular listener called in after I'd been savaged in an especially rough interview: "I listen to you every day, Bob, and we agree on most things, but the professor makes sense -- I got out of jail twenty years ago and I sure as hell deserve the right to vote!" I can't say that this sort of thing happens very often, but it sure feels good when it does.

data reduction: gains and losses in magazine circulation, 2008-2009

2010-03-01T19:51:00.002-06:00

Vanity Fair makes the case that liberal magazines such as The Nation and Mother Jones have taken a major hit, "now that they don't have W to kick around anymore." In contrast, conservative standard bearers, such as The National Review and The Weekly Standard, have prospered since Barack Obama's election. I graphed the 2008-2009 gains and losses reported in Matt Pressman's story below:

When I ran image searches on "Obama cover," I was a little surprised to see so many mean-spirited caricatures coming from the left as well as the right. As I recall (and I could certainly be mistaken), it seemed to take a few years before the really nasty Bush II and Clinton caricatures started appearing on newsstands. In any case, Vanity Fair interprets the circulation changes as indicating that "hate sells," though I'd need more evidence to support that conclusion and rule out alternative explanations.

Klosterman, Gans, Pekar, and Soc Images

2010-02-19T17:34:00.005-06:00

As our Winter 2010 issue mails, I'm soooo glad we brought Contexts to Minnesota.

Our terrific culture editor Dave Grazian interviews Chuck Klosterman in a fascinating two-part podcast available now and a shorter print exchange in spring. I'm an avid Klosterman reader, so I've been scheming about how Contexts might engage his work sociologically. As we've discovered, however, it is a lot easier to talk about sociologists engaging folks like Klosterman than it is to actually pull it off. Dave was the perfect sociological interviewer -- he drew out Klosterman's big themes (authenticity, identity, celebrity...) as well as the populist vibe that pervades his work. And he got to questions of meaning and culture without the arch tone or condescension that other academics might have brought to such an interview. In my view, this is "cultural analysis," real and true. The feel of the podcast is terrific, with the bar background noise giving us the sense that we're eavesdropping on a couple of knowledgeable heads.

In this issue, we're also launching a new print feature based on Gwen Sharp and Lisa Wade's wonderful Sociological Images blog, a spirited exchange with Eric Utne, thoughtful essays by sociology students at Oregon State Penitentiary, and a rant by the editors about scientific evidence, peer review, and accessibility at Contexts. Next up? We're pulling together some great pieces on aging and discrimination for free electronic release March 1 and we're lining up Harvey Pekar and Herb Gans for the Spring issue.

love, jasper

2010-02-13T17:17:00.005-06:00

I'm not sure whether to credit dog or camera, but Jasper somehow wagged himself a heart. Happy Valentine's Day!

bjs report on sexual victimization in juvenile facilities, 2008-09

2010-02-03T19:51:00.005-06:00

The Bureau of Justice Statistics just released a new report on Sexual Victimization in Juvenile Facilities based on a sample of over 9,000 adjudicated youth in 2008-2009. Overall, about 12 percent of youth in these facilities report some form of sexual victimization by staff or other residents. Many of these involved contact between female staff and male youth where no force is involved. Nevertheless, 4.3 percent of the youth reported being sexually victimized by facility staff who used force, threats, or other explicit forms of coercion.

I charted a couple of the differences in victimization by staff and other residents below. Male residents are more likely to report sexual victimization by staff (10.8%) than by other residents (2%), while the reverse pattern holds for female residents. And sexual orientation is an important predictor: over 20 percent of "non-heterosexual" youth reported some form of sexual victimization, with 12.5 percent reporting victimization by other youth.

The report "names names" by identifying the rate of sexual victimization in particular institutions (as well as the survey response rate in each institution). In the Minnesota Correctional Facility at Red Wing, for example, about 2.8 percent of youth reported sexual victimization. In Pendleton Juvenile Correction Facility in Indiana, in contrast, the rate was over 36 percent.

While such surveys are now mandated by the Prison Rape Elimination Act, I'm both disturbed by this report's statistics and impressed by its clear and unflinching presentation.

clickers on college committees

2010-02-01T19:33:00.000-06:00

I'm co-chairing a blue-ribbon committee to help address our immediate budget squeeze while orienting to a longer-term vision for my college. The committee is composed of 30 people, including deans, administrators, established and probationary faculty, and graduate and undergraduate students in the social sciences, arts, and humanities.

With such a large and diverse group, it can be difficult to come to consensus. Moreover, with such extreme power differentials in the room, it seemed important to build in some mechanism to ensure that we heard all the voices on the committee. We used email, of course, and set up a site to archive notes and reading materials. But not everybody weighed in either verbally or in writing. To get a better sense of the group's wishes before we prepared the first round of recommendations, my co-chair and I decided to do some instant polling using classroom clickers.

I can't report on the specifics at this point, but I think the committee members generally found this process useful. Six points:

1. We used them to get "the sense of the room" rather than to take high-stakes votes. People seemed comfortable using the results as a starting point for a focused discussion.

2. Though the committee seemed okay with the polling, they had lots of questions and qualifications about wording. For example, they noticed immediately when the answer categories were not mutually exclusive or exhaustive (in fact, several seemed to have taken some variant of Nora Cate Schaeffer's graduate seminar in questionnaire design).

3. Taking a tip from Carolyn Liebler, who uses clickers in her introductory sociology classes, we tried to offer response categories that left room for compromise (e.g., "mostly agree" or "mostly disagree") on potentially polarizing questions. We also asked variants of the "most important priority" questions that often arise in budget deliberations.

4. We were genuinely surprised with results on some items, especially when we found consensus where we'd anticipated disagreement. This helped us move expeditiously to more contentious issues.

5. I'd expected to hear at least a few groans or grumbles about "dumbing down" the process, especially since the clicker system was based on simple powerpoint slides. Nobody expressed such sentiments, but I wonder whether I should have asked this question on the last slide: How lame is this clicker exercise? (a) completely lame, (b) very lame, (c) moderately lame, (d) not so lame, or (e) not at all lame.

6. By directly addressing some of our uncertainties, the clicker data made the co-chairs a bit more comfortable writing on behalf of the group. I'm not sure whether they will bring any greater legitimacy to our recommendations, but I was glad to include the polling in our discussion of processes.

Athens, GA

2010-01-28T19:24:00.005-06:00

I'm plane-blogging en route to the University of Georgia, where I'm doing a colloquium talk tomorrow. I've been deep into college administrative work lately, so I'm truly looking forward to sharing ideas with new friends and old.

I like to combine a li'l fresh research with more mature lines of work in my talks, so this one is titled Social Research and The Price and Promise of Justice Reform. I'll be saying something about felon voting policy changes and then teeing up policy questions raised by newer experimental work on employment discrimination against people with low-level arrest records. As always, I'll be blabbing about Contexts to anyone who will listen. Please stop on by if you're in the neighborhood. I'll also be pumping longtime residents for stories about the post-REM/B-52s music scene in Athens (Mathew Sweet, Danger Mouse, Widespread Panic, Vic Chesnutt, Of Montreal, Drive-by-Truckers et al.).

Osvaldo Hernandez's criminal record, military service, and pardon

2010-01-18T11:54:00.007-06:00

The Times reports that Osvaldo Hernandez, whose weapons conviction barred him from the New York Police Department but not the U.S. Army, has been pardoned by Governor David Paterson.

I learned Mr. Hernandez's story when I met his attorney, Jim Harmon, at a recent Cornell conference on criminal records and employment. The military now conducts a "whole person review" of enlistment eligibility, granting Mr. Hernandez a misconduct waiver. Here's the policy:

The Services will enlist into the Armed Services individuals who are fully qualified to serve. Judgment as to an applicant’s qualifications is reached by virtue of a “whole person” review in which all aspects of an applicant’s qualifications are examined. It is possible, in some cases, that waiver consideration may be warranted. Enlistment waiver practices shall be standardized across the Military Services to ensure consistent and equitable reporting that, in turn, assures reliable and meaningful evaluation of the Department’s performance in managing whole person eligibility reviews.

In contrast, the NYPD has categorically barred anyone with a felony from service. Mr. Hernandez evidently served with great distinction as a paratrooper in the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division. Now, with the help of various generals, governors, attorneys, and advocates, he hopes to make good on his dream of becoming a New York City police officer.

purple-colored glasses and conduct unbecoming a minnesotan

2010-01-16T17:17:00.006-06:00

Minnesotans are a hardy people, capable of enduring misfortune, fatigue, and exposure to brutal elements without comment or complaint. Yet, as my Vikings play host to America's Team tomorrow, I must publicly acknowledge that we are without question the whiniest football fans on God's green* earth. And we never stop! All week, I've been hearing about the 1975 Drew Pearson push-off of my youth.

As newcomers such as Dan Barreiro have observed, we Minnesotans attribute any sports setback to a vast International Officiating Conspiracy. All fans believe the refs are biased against their team, of course, but Vikings fans see the world through purple-colored glasses. In Green Bay, the schnapps-sippin' grammies in snowmobile suits will boo momentarily after a bad call, but quickly return to the game. In Philly, they boo more lustily but more knowledgeably, ably distinguishing bad calls from good calls that went against their Eagles. In Minnesota, in contrast, we boo reflexively whenever the outcome doesn't go our way. I've got several hypotheses explaining the cultivation of whininess amongst an otherwise strong people.

1. Opinion Leaders. Sid Hartman, dean of Minnesota sportswriters, has been pushing the International Officiating Conspiracy hypothesis since the Lakers were in Minneapolis. The idea has since diffused to numerous proponents in local print and broadcast media, but ol' Sid might be patient zero. Today's column: 'Hail Mary' Should Never Have Happened.

2. Minnesota Nice. In some locales, fans will quickly turn their backs on a poor-performing home team, calling them "bums" (as in Brooklyn) or "dogs" (as in anywhere else the millionaires underperform). But this would be un-Minnesotan. We just aren't the sort to boo our boys or girls, so we must have been robbed by those out-of-town officials.

3. Flyoverland Insecurity. The officiating conspiracy exists, in part, to serve the interests of wealthier and more powerful teams and owners. Didn't you catch former President Bush in the skybox with Jerry Jones and Emmitt Smith?

4. Heartbreak and Misery. I suspect that Vikings fans are whinier than Twins fans because the Vikes were defeated in IV (count 'em, IV) Super Bowls and a tear-inducing NFC championship game, while the Twins at least hung a couple World Series banners. One doesn't hear much whining about officiating at star-crossed Timberwolves games, since the local five are usually trailing by 30 at the half. The referees tend to have little bearing on the outcome of such games, though some fans attribute our failure in the draft lottery to a Vast Ping Pong Ball Conspiracy.

5. There's Something about Footyball. I enjoy high school wrestling and rugby because the fans and participants usually find a li'l honor in defeat as well as victory. It can be beautiful to see an undefeated wrestler lose a close, hard match -- and blame nobody but himself. Wrestling fans grouse loudly about judgment calls, of course, but they're generally either hardcore enough to know the rules and appreciate a good match or clueless enough that they're content to just watch and learn. High school football fans are another matter entirely. They're more likely to greet the ref with a loud "OH, COME ON!!!" no matter how obvious the violation. When my lad Tor played O-line, I knew he and his linemates left just a little bit early on every snap and ever-so-discreetly filled their massive fists with opposing players' jerseys on most downs. On the two or three occasions in which Tor was caught and penalized, I was surprised the surrounding home fans didn't actually see him holding or blowing off the line well before everyone else (his reflexes were good, but not that good). Football is so familiar to Americans that we all think of ourselves as experts -- even if we know very little about how the game is actually experienced by players. To a greater extent than in other sports, perhaps, audiences seem to appreciate the spectacle -- and whining is just part of the game.

I'm optimistic my Vikings will prevail in a close one tomorrow and break my heart in a week or two, though they'll surely be savaged by the Cowboys' tough pass rush and burned by Whitten across the middle and Austin downfield. Should the Cowboys win, I'll expect great whinging about blown calls (if not pathetic winging of whiskey bottles) -- even if the Minnesota offensive line is consistently pushed five yards off the ball, Mr. Favre throws a couple picks, and Mr. Peterson puts the ball on the ground. I just hope we're not still bellyaching about this game in 2045 -- the way we're still whining in 2010 about Drew Pearson pushing-off in '75.

*Technically, Minnesota earth is only "green" for a few weeks in May and June.

Farrakhan v. Gregoire

2010-01-15T23:28:00.003-06:00

via the crawler and Seattle Times:

Evidence gathered by friends at the University of Washington -- sociologists Katherine Beckett and Bob Crutchfield -- played a key role in overturning Washington’s law banning incarcerated felons from voting. Much of the litigation to date has focused on former felons who have completed their sentences, rather than current inmates. The case, Farrakhan v. Gregoire, was decided on January 5, 2010.

Having spent a few years doing expert witness work on this issue, I know that it takes good social science evidence, lucid presentation, and dogged persistence to prevail in such cases. The ruling will likely be appealed, but it represents a major step toward a more inclusive democracy.

I like big X and I cannot lie, where X = (eyes, lips...)

2010-01-14T20:00:00.001-06:00

(a)

fleshmap compiled mentions of body parts by the frequency with which they occur in various musical genres.

(b)

The resulting map helps visualize how the body is represented in varying cultural expressions.

(c)

It probably isn't too difficult to identify hip hop here, but can you tell which of the maps were drawn from country, alternative and jazz songs?

(d)

orthogonal, ooh...

2010-01-11T17:52:00.003-06:00

As a new grad student, I was consistently shocked and disappointed when careful quantitative analysis yielded answers that directly contradicted my long- and deeply-held hypotheses. At one point, I threatened to title my M.S. thesis Employment and Crime: Another Theory Shot to Sh*t or, perhaps, Nothing Matters and So What if it Did?

But I wasn't working alone on the second floor of the Wizversity's Social Science Building. My office-mate Brad Wright, who wasn't much for cussin' but quite attentive in stats class, suggested a more respectable scientific title: "Factors Orthogonal to Recidivism."

Great word, orthogonal. In oral argument today, U.S. Supreme Court Justices Scalia and Roberts also seemed fascinated with the term. Via volokh:

From the oral argument transcript today in Briscoe v. Virginia, a funny moment in the argument of University of Michigan law professor Richard Friedman:

MR. FRIEDMAN: I think that issue is entirely orthogonal to the issue here because the Commonwealth is acknowledging -
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: I’m sorry. Entirely what?
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal. Right angle. Unrelated. Irrelevant.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Oh.
JUSTICE SCALIA: What was that adjective? I liked that.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Orthogonal.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Orthogonal.
MR. FRIEDMAN: Right, right.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Orthogonal, ooh.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE KENNEDY: I knew this case presented us a problem.
(Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I should have — I probably should have said -
JUSTICE SCALIA: I think we should use that in the opinion.
(Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: I thought — I thought I had seen it before.
JUSTICE SCALIA: Or the dissent.
(Laughter.)
MR. FRIEDMAN: That is a bit of professorship creeping in, I suppose.

fatalities down for traffic, fire, and murder -- but not suicide

2010-01-09T15:46:00.008-06:00

When the Strib reported that Minnesota traffic deaths had fallen to a 65-year low, I checked the Department of Public Safety to see the long-term trend. They posted data from 1910 to present on traffic fatalities and from 1961 to present on vehicle miles traveled. The rate of deaths per mile traveled has fallen even more sharply than the rate per 100,000 population. As the figure shows below, both peak in the beautiful-but-deadly muscle car era of the late 1960s. Experts attribute the drop to safety features such as seat belts and airbags. Why, my own dad tells me that he started buckling up his seat belt when the legislature toughened the mandatory seat belt in 2009 -- he even stuck a post-it note on the steering wheel to remind him of the fine.Over the past three decades, the death rate has also fallen for homicide and fire in Minnesota. In contrast, the suicide rate has risen in recent years. In 2008, almost as many Minnesotans died from suicide as from fire, traffic, and homicide combined. The final numbers are not yet available for 2009, but I bet that the number of suicides now surpasses the combined sum of the other three categories. Moreover, at least some of the deaths classified as accidental fires, car crashes, and shootings may be victim-precipitated (e.g., one-car accidents, "suicide by cop").

Suicide rates rise with age, especially for white males, so the number of suicides is likely to rise in Minnesota as the population ages (the figures above are not age-adjusted). Nevertheless, the overall death rate across the four categories has fallen from about 38/100k in 1980 to about 23/100k in 2008. If these trends continue, I suspect that more social scientists will be turning their attention to suicide (and, presumably, Durkheim) in coming years.

we met in a college town...

2010-01-03T16:28:00.009-06:00

Writing on failure, fathers, and family love, Philip Schultz earned a Pulitzer in 2008.

This 2002 piece evokes the macho romanticism of a bygone era, but stay with it -- like much of Mr. Schultz's writing, it finishes beautiful and true.

The Silence by Philip Schultz

for RJ

You always called late and drunk,
your voice luxurious with pain,
I, tightly wrapped in dreaming,
listening as if to a ghost.

Tonight a friend called to say your body
was found in your apartment, where
it had lain for days. You'd lost your job,
stopped writing, saw nobody for weeks.
Your heart, he said. Drink had destroyed you.

We met in a college town, first teaching jobs,
poems flowing from a grief we enshrined
with myth and alcohol. I envied the way
women looked at you, a bear blunt with rage,
tearing through an ever-darkening wood.

Once we traded poems like photos of women
whose beauty tested God's faith. 'Read this one
about how friendship among the young can't last,
it will rip your heart out of your chest!'

Once you called to say J was leaving,
the pain stuck in your throat like a razor blade.
A woman was calling me back to bed
so I said I'd call back. But I never did.

The deep forlorn smell of moss and pine
behind your stone house, you strumming
and singing Lorca, Vallejo, De Andrade,
as if each syllable tasted of blood,
as if you had all the time in the world. . .

You knew your angels loved you
but you also knew they would leave
someone they could not save.

2009 homicide drop

2009-12-31T00:28:00.002-06:00

Matt McKinney offers a good analysis of the declining twin cities homicide rate in this morning's Strib . I plotted the data for Minneapolis (purple, population = 390,000) and St. Paul (gold, population = 287,000) in the chart below. With two days left on the calendar, we've had 19 homicides in Minneapolis and 14 in St. Paul, a big drop since the murderapolis days of the mid-1990s. Since the population in both cities has grown a bit since 1980, these drops would look even steeper if I plotted them as rates.
The Minneapolis numbers are especially low -- by my count, almost two standard deviations (sd = 16.2) below the 28-year mean of 50.4 homicides per year. The St. Paul numbers are about one standard deviation (sd = 5.8) below the 26-year mean of 20.0. Based on recent trends, I'd be (very pleasantly) surprised if the Minneapolis number dropped below 20 again next year.

In the twin cities, as elsewhere, homicide victims and offenders are disproportionately young African American men, so shifts in the homicide rate among this age/race/gender group sometimes have a big effect on the aggregate numbers. If I were to do any analysis of these data series, I'd start with a local breakout by age and weapon use.

The national gun homicide rate, shown in the bureau of justice statistics figures below, has fluctuated far more than the non-gun rate over the past 30 years -- especially among young males. I'd guess (and it is only a guess) that gun homicides among males aged 14-24 must have declined to near zero in Minneapolis this year. I can speculate about why this would be the case (e.g., aggressive enforcement of weapons offenses and corresponding shifts in the social acceptability of gun-carrying by young men), but I'd best check the data before piling one speculation atop another speculation.

chestnuts roasting on the reverb tank

2009-12-23T01:04:00.001-06:00

At this point in the season, we've all had our fill of certain holiday classics. But I always save just a little room for sweet n' snarly surf guitar versions, like this God Rest Ye by upst8 or the Ventures' Sleigh Ride. Here's an update of the latter (with a side of George Benson), from my favorite amigurumi ukulele band:

video wonkfest on criminal records

2009-12-22T19:29:00.005-06:00

I just screened a new hour-long video, Sentenced For Life? The Right Focus on... Crime, Justice and Second Chances produced by the Minnesota Department of Human Rights.

There's an abbreviated transcript online, along with the full-length video in Windows Media Player and QuickTime formats. I enjoyed the other panelists and host, Rondah Kinchlow, who gave me lots of room to talk about research on criminal records and disenfranchisement.

There were a couple pointy disagreements around the table, but far fewer than one might expect in a panel with a legislator, prosecutor, sociologist, and non-profit rep. It is probably too local and too wonky for general consumption, but I found the general tone and willingness to dive into nitty-gritty details refreshing. Here's my concluding comment/question:

And what I'm hearing now on these issues, that I wasn't hearing ten years ago, is much more realism, much more pragmatism, and much more talking across the aisle—as opposed to you having pie-in-the-sky researchers saying, "Well, close all the prisons," without any regard to public safety. I don't hear that anymore. And I certainly don't hear people completely denying or having a knee-jerk punitive attitude that, "No, we'll lock 'em up forever, and we'll just keep 'em there." Those sorts of things have gone away, and so now we're dealing with the hard part, right? We've got to figure out, well, how do we proceed. What's the best way to protect public safety, but also to ensure justice and some sort of balance between the rights of private citizens, the rights of employers, the rights of the state?

the snake

2009-12-21T15:31:00.002-06:00

In the new December issue of Sociological Theory, Mark Gould writes,

I contend that George Herbert Mead's Theory is incapable of explaining the interactions in a song by Oscar Brown Jr., "The Snake," and that a satisfactory explanation of these actions, which illuminate everyday conduct familiar to us all, requires the conceptualization of personality systems grounded in affect and cultural systems understood as symbolic logics that make intelligible certain activities.

In addition to being a prolific songwriter, Mr. Brown, Jr. was a regular on Studs Terkel's radio show in the 1940s, attended the University of Wisconsin at age 16, and made several runs for political office in Illinois. I've always been partial to Al Wilson's (1968) version of The Snake (due, in part, to some swingin' production by secret agent man, Johnny Rivers), but I never figured to see the lyrics appendixed in Sociological Theory.

I enjoyed the article, but couldn't help wondering what popular songs wouldn't offer a critique of cognitive and rational-choice theories -- and whether the gender story in the song had greater bearing on theories of cultural meaning.

soaking the rubes

2009-12-19T19:30:00.003-06:00

On my long Saturday runs, I often stop for a li'l convenience store Gatorade. Over the years, I've spent more and more time waiting in line behind the lottery players. According to the Wall Street Journal, U.S. lottery sales have risen from about $20 billion in 1992 to over $77 billion in 2008. With the current recession, however, they may be declining in some states.

The Wall Street Journal story suggests that die-hard gamblers are still playing just as much, but the part-timers have dropped off during the recession. I suspect we'd see the same sort of pattern with alcohol spending: heavy drinkers would drink just as much during a recession -- though they might switch to cheaper stuff -- but moderate drinkers would (because they could) moderate their expenditures.

To try to understand the $77 billion figure in the WSJ chart, I checked out the source data at the U.S. Census Bureau and made a few plots after standardizing by the adult population. I should add a caveat here, since I'm unfamiliar with the accounting procedures and the social science literature on lotteries. But here goes...

By my count, there were $336 in annual state-administered lottery ticket sales per U.S. adult resident in 2008.

Three states run ginormous lotteries: Delaware, West Virginia, and Rhode Island. I'd imagine these are "destination" lotteries, drawing purchasers from neighboring states. If so, the per capita numbers are likely misleading (e.g., $11,960 per adult in Delaware), so I top-coded the first graph at $1,000 per resident.

The census data also listed prizes, administrative costs, and net proceeds available, which might say something about the efficiency of each state's operation. I'm not a fan of state-run lotteries, but I'd hope that after soaking the good rubes they'd at least put a li'l cash back into the state coffers. A simple plot of the proceeds returned per sales dollar suggests that Michigan and Illinois do best on the latter count: they each return about 39 cents for every dollar in sales.

Michigan took in 2.33 billion, paid out 1.35 billion, spent $66 million on administration, leaving $913 million available for the state's financially troubled public schools.

I was not at all surprised to see Minnesota rank low in terms of sales, proceeds, and return to the state coffers. Apart from the three mega-lottery states (who surely make it up in volume), Minnesota, Massachusetts, and South Dakota had the lowest proceeds per dollar sold. At .22, the Minnesota rate is a bit more than half that of Michigan.

Still, I'm a little disappointed to think that there were $411 million in lottery tickets sold in my state last year -- or over a hundred bucks for every man and woman in the state. I'm also a little cheesed off about the ratio. If we'd been running our lottery like Michigan, we'd have $161 million of the proceeds in the coffers (.392*411m), rather than the $92 million currently available to the state.

holiday parties and unseemliness

2009-12-17T19:20:00.002-06:00

The Boston Globe and Every Major Web, Print, and Broadcast Outlet are running stories on the cancellation of holiday parties this season.

I can't vouch for the quality of the Globe's data, but the survey seems about right to me: parties are down 15% since last year and cost is not the primary reason for cancelation.

I suspect that the "other reasons" responsible for cancelling parties are symbolic. It is just unseemly to party immediately before or after the layoff notices are sent, even if there is a little money in the budget for a gathering.

I understand that folks are in a somber mood, but I suspect that regular community-building rituals are especially important in tough times -- particularly when they draw attention to the good work that colleagues have completed under challenging conditions.

I've been told that my department celebrates with greater frequency than others in the Minnversity, as my dean often asks, "what manner of bacchanalia goes on in Sociology this week?" There won't be any bacchanalia at tomorrow's li'l holiday lunch, but I'm looking forward to sharing food and camaraderie with my very good friends and colleagues.

not me

2009-12-17T18:08:00.003-06:00

Believe it or not, it took a few seconds to convince the good doorman at D.C.'s Liaison Hotel that he is not me. In fairness, I may have been wearing a look of steely determination and a WWE heavyweight belt at the time. I bet the other Chris is mistaken for a professor all the time.

u.s. correctional populations on 12/31/08

2009-12-14T20:18:00.000-06:00

The Bureau of Justice statistics recently released year-end 2008 data for two important data series: Probation and Parole in the United States, 2008 and Prisoners in 2008.

Overall, these populations rose about .5% over 2007 levels, so they are growing at a much slower rate than in the recent past. In fact, the U.S. imprisonment rate actually fell slightly -- from 506 per 100,000 in 2007 to 504 per 100,000 in 2008. All told, there are about 7.3 million Americans under correctional supervision -- about 3.1% of the adult population, or 1 in 31 adults. After a long period of growth that began in the mid-1970s, this rate has remained relatively stable since 2000.

hipsters and the life course

2009-12-11T22:24:00.002-06:00

Our friends at City Pages offer a cheery end o' the decade look at the 10 things hipsters couldn't ruin: 1. Flannel; 2. Sunglasses; 3. Pabst Blue Ribbon; 4. The Internet; 5. Coffee; 6. Beards; 7. Electronic Music; 8. Macintosh Computers; 9. Irony; and (my personal favorite), 10. Actually Liking Things.

The list is a clever ode to authenticity, distinction, extended adolescence, narcissism, and the leisure class, chiding twentysomething hipsters for mock-enjoying things that we, the authors and readers, genuinely and truly enjoy. All this presumes, of course, that neither authors nor readers were ever insecure loudmouths swilling PBR in foam trucker hats.

Well, maybe not, but we were hipsters -- or at least their generational equivalent, putting the tastes and preferences of peers and elders through the "meatgrinder of cool." When I started reading City Pages (or was it Sweet Potato?), I was an insecure skinny-tie wearing loudmouth, affecting and mock-enjoying the narrow lapels of my father's generation (now inexplicably cool again via Mad Men). I'd guess that every cohort passes through a hipper-than-thou period -- the fads change, but the attitude persists. If there's anything distinctive about the current generation of hipsters, it is their almost mature capacity for self-awareness (see, e.g., hipster olympics, stuff hipsters don't like. stuff hipsters hate).

This seems to go deeper than simple consumption -- it reminds me of a favorite quote from David Foster Wallace on age, cohort, and values:

The intellectualization and aestheticizing of principles and values in this country is one of the things that's gutted our generation. All the things that my parents said to me, like "It's really important not to lie." OK, check, got it. I nod at that but I don't really feel it. Until I get to be about 30 and I realize that if I lie to you, I also can't trust you. I feel that I'm in pain, I'm nervous, I'm lonely and I can't figure out why. Then I realize, "Oh, perhaps the way to deal with this is really not to lie." The idea that something so simple and, really, so aesthetically uninteresting -- which for me meant you pass over it for the interesting, complex stuff -- can actually be nourishing in a way that arch, meta, ironic, pomo stuff can't, that seems to me to be important. That seems to me like something our generation needs to feel.

So I'm guessing that something will change for today's hipsters, just as it changed for David Foster Wallace and for me -- probably by the age of 30 or so, if only because the aging hipster role is so unattractive. But there are consolations for the formerly hip, including the final item on the City Pages list -- actually liking things:

Between the average hipster's love for all things ironic and a shared nostalgia for the more obnoxious parts of '80s and early '90s culture, this decade found twentysomethings parading around in ironic wolf t-shirts, reminiscing about crappy sitcoms, and competing in endless debates over who loves Journey and Styx the most. Somewhere in the mix, we almost forgot how to really, honestly enjoy things without feeling deeply ashamed or writing it off as a "guilty pleasure." Luckily, being a humorless a-hole is only fun for so long, and the majority of us understand that feeling actual joy about something isn't going to kill us.

Chapter 19. Productive like a Cough

2009-12-11T13:07:00.009-06:00

Further notes from my mean-spirited and entirely fictitious* academic novel:

Academics who publish are said to be "productive," but Professor X was productive like a cough. Disgorging bile and phlegm at regular intervals, he annoyed everyone within earshot. It was impossible to suppress Professor X, though colleagues dosed him with strong central nervous system depressants in hopes of gaining temporary relief.

*Note. Any Resemblance to Actual Events or Persons Living or Dead is Purely Coincidental.

ADDENDUM: Oh, for heaven's sake, of course I'm not talking about you! And, no, there is no "Professor X." The line just hit me on a plane from MSP to DCA today -- some guy was coughing up, well, something and I thought, "hmm. at least, that's a productive cough." When I thought about how "productive" meant something different to doctors and to academics, I figured it might be a fun way to introduce a villain in a cheezy academic novel. I probably should've given a bit more context here, especially in a time of year when everyone has a cough...

number 94 with a bullet

2009-12-10T01:16:00.000-06:00

I just learned this blog was ranked #89 in newsbobber's top 100 directory of minnesota blogs. By the time I'd checked, it was down to #94 and sinking fast. Ah well, I'm happy to have been momentarily listed alongside pharyngula, powerline, mayo, lileks, 22 words, and overheard in minneapolis. Am I disappointed to fall so far below such good company? Not so much. I'd have been cool with #194.

Q: What do you call the person who graduated last in class in blog school?
A: Blogger, that's what.