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Author Archives: Kelly Reznick
Posts: 5 (archived below)
Comments: 5
Graffiti Summit and the Broken Windows Theory
The embedded video relates to the class reading “Broken Windows” by Wilson and Kelling. A news anchor woman interviews the Corpus Christi Police Chief about a Graffiti Summit taking place in his town that night. The PC says that graffiti has been happening in bigger, higher profiler areas, churches, etc. He said past graffiti summits in their town have attracted elected officials, citizens, and other law enforcement agencies looking to collaborate with and help the CCPD prevent graffiti. The PC mentions that state representatives proposed new laws to combat graffiti, and that judges have issued harsher penalties for graffiti. The news anchor even comments that the community’s involvement is necessary for this undertaking to be successful. All of this reflects the article’s emphasis on collaboration being important to police maintaining order in a community:
“These rules were defined and enforced in collaboration with the “regulars” on the street…If someone violated them the regulars not only turned to [the police officer] for help but also ridiculed the violator” (Wilson & Kelling, 2).
When the PC said
“we’re not there yet, but we’re definitely taking a bite out of graffiti”
this reminded me of an officer’s description of running out gang members from neighborhoods in the article:
“We kick ass” (Wilson & Kelling, 8).
By pursuing these quality of life issues, not violent crimes, the police do really feel like they are accomplishing something and not wasting their resources.
When the news anchor comments that
“Graffiti leads to other crime.”
the PC says she is right. He says that it not only leads to other crimes such as petty theft, but that it’s an important quality of life issue. This harkens back to the “Safe and Clean Neighborhoods Program” that was done in Newark in the 1970’s, which was
“designed to improve the quality of community life…” (Wilson & Kelling, 1).
The news anchor brings up criminology’s Broken Windows Theory. According to her, the theory says that when a community isn’t taken care of, then people stop caring about the community and commit more crime. The class article says this about the theory:
“Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken… one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing” (Wilson & Kelling, 2-3).
The PC affirms the anchor’s statement, and says the Broken Windows Theory was used to deter crime in NYC. The way he says this suggests to me that, because NYC used this measure, that it is a good idea to use it as a model for other police departments.
– Kelly Reznick
Medications Are a Form of Social Control
This video ties into the reading “From Badness to Sickness: Changing Designations of Deviance and Social Control” by Conrad and Schneider. In Frontline’s documentary “Medicating Kids”, a 6th grader Noelle is diagnosed with ADHD and prescribed Ritalin following misbehavior at school, including fights and suspensions. Her initial reaction to being prescribed is that the Ritalin helps her to do better in everything that she’s doing, increases her attention span, and helps her concentrate. This is important because she is involved in gymnastics and performing poor in school, and the Ritalin’s effect on her increases her performance in both. Her teachers are happy that her behavior has changed and that they no longer have to deal with her past aggressive behavior.
Noelle’s parents were hesitant to put her on Ritalin, but her mother said that she decided to go through with it after talking to two doctors. The doctors told her that so many studies had been done on Ritalin, proving it’s safety and effectiveness. This relates to the article, where it says that the technological advances of the 20th century have legitimized medical treatment of behavioral problems.
However, Noelle eventually wants to stop taking Ritalin when she realizes how it affects her mood. She is no longer vibrant and as socially active as she used to be. But Noelle’s parents encouraged her to take the Ritalin, citing her better performance in school and gymnastics. Noelle reminded her parents that they told her that she did not have to take medication if she didn’t want to, that it was up to her. This reflects the issue of patient’s rights brought up in the article, when conflicts arise between what the physician and patient want:
“In modern technological societies, medicine has followed a technological imperative- that the physician is responsible for doing everything possible for the patient- while neglecting such significant issues as the patient’s rights and wishes…” (Conrad & Schneider, 149).
Her physician’s aim was to legitimize his job and control her behavior by prescribing Ritalin. Noelle’s wish was to have a better social life in school, which was severly impeded by the Ritalin.
At the end of the video, Noelle says that ADHD is
“not something you can prevent.”
This reflects the second condition mentioned in the article pertaining to the patient’s “sick role” as part of the physician-patient relationship.
“It is this relationship that serves the key social control function of minimizing the disruptiveness of sickness to the group or society.” (Conrad & Schneider, 145).
The condition that Noelle is referring to, that her doctor most likely taught her to think, is that
“…the individual is not held responsible for his or her condition and cannot be expected to recover by an act of will.” (Conrad & Schneider, 145)
– Kelly Reznick
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAA1BR5-dR4
Posted in Assignment 4
Tagged ADHD, Conrad and Schneider, control, delinquency, medicalization of deviance
21 Comments
Disabled and Proud
The following video is a trailer for a documentary about the Empowered Fe Fes (females). These young disabled women take to the streets of Chicago to interview non-disabled people regarding their feelings about disabilities and the handicapped and disfigured. The women also talk about their experiences of being treated differently and discriminated against because of their physical disability. This video ties in to the Erving Goffman reading from class, “Stigma and Social Identity”, which discusses interactions between the disabled and the non-disabled.
In the video, a disabled interviewer asked a non-disabled man what he would do if he were to become handicapped. The interviewee responded that he would pray to God and ask God to make him like everyone else, meaning a non-disabled person. This reminded me of the part in the reading where it discusses that people develop justifications for discriminating against the disabled.
“Further, we may perceive his defensive response to his situation as a direct expression of his defect, and then see both the defect and response as just retribution for something he or his parents or his tribe did, and hence a justification of the way we treat him” (Goffman, 3).
The interviewee’s would-be plea to God to erase his disability reflects a view that can be held by religious people. A Christian might believe that if you do everything right in your life, you will be rewarded by God. Therefore, that Christian might feel that if one suffers from a handicap, then that person did something wrong and, as a result of their actions, is now being punished by God. This could lead the Christian to feel justified in treating the disabled person harshly, as if the person deserves the disability for some supposed wrongdoing.
A young disabled women in the video describes what non-disabled people call her:
“They call me stupid, slow.”
These words used to describe the girl are what Goffman calls “stigma terms.” These are words that people use to label and marginalize the disabled.
“We use specific stigma terms such as cripple, bastard, moron in our daily discourse as a source of metaphor and imagery, typically without giving thought to the original meaning” (Goffman, 3).
Another disabled girl tells us how she was treated in high school differently because of her physical handicap:
“It was totally awful! Because I would get talked about and put down because of my disability.”
And another girl says how people told her she wasn’t able of accomplishing certain things. They would say:
“You can’t do this, you don’t know how to do that…”
These situations clearly reflects the property of a stigma, that it is an
“attribute that is deeply discrediting.” (Goffman, 2)
– Kelly Reznick
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ix8ZPEC4qSE
Gender Roles Influence Punishment
“Murder in the Feminine” by Lisa Downing is important because it shows us how 19th century perceptions of the female murderer have carried on into modern times. Then and now, accepted social behaviors for men are very different than for women. Debates over what is acceptable for female behavior are generated from popular cases of female murderers, such as the Casey Anthony trial. In the reading, the Casey Anthony of 19th century France was Marie Lafarge, who was demonized for poisoning her husband. In Lafarge’s time, passivity, submissiveness, and maternal instinct were considered to be highly feminine virtues. Naturally, some found it difficult to reconcile society’s perceptions of feminine nature with Lafarge’s cold-blooded and calculated act. In fact, Edith Saunders’s “The Mystery of Marie Lafarge” contained the following:
” ‘I was, at first, very much predisposed to believe her innocent. The cold-blooded murder seemed so impossible an act for the charming, cultured girl to have performed…’ ” (Downing, 124).
Therefore, female murderers such as Lafarge posed a threat to society’s gender expectations and the social order. The social order was particularly threatened by female child- and husband-killers. Note that the following quote could also apply to women who kill their children:
“The husband-killer in particular occupied a special place in such taxonomies of aberration. The woman who killed her husband from the very seat of the prescribed feminine domain of domesticity threatened the social order from within” (Downing, 125).
Because of the contradictions they inflicted upon male dominated societal gender roles, female murders were portrayed as the most deviant of human monsters by 19th century criminologists.
In 2009, Rekha Kumari-Baker was sentenced to a minimum of 33 years for the premeditated murder of her two children, one of the longest prison sentences ever handed to a woman in England! And, the jury only took 35 minutes to reach the verdict! The judge’s words on the case also clearly displayed sexism and society’s expectations for women’s behavior. Note his singling out of mothers. Shouldn’t the judge find it inexcusable that a PARENT could kill their child, not just mothers?
In sentencing, the judge said: “Most people will find it inexplicable that a mother (my emphasis on mother, not the article’s) could kill her own children, and you have given no explanation for it.” He is right, but does it not also seem that we unconsciously accept crimes of this nature that men commit but reserve a special sort of hatred for women?
The article cites previous cases of paternal filicide where the sentences for the father child-killers were either reduced or prosecution was abandoned altogether in lieu of psychiatric treatment! What is amazing is that Kumari-Baker had been treated for depression, yet this was rejected by the jury to be a defense to diminished responsibility.
The article states one way in which society may view a man killing his children:
“As in this case, where men kill their children, no thought for the children as humans is given whatsoever – they are mere cannon fodder in a scheme to extract revenge. Some men kill their children and then themselves if they are depressed and feel hopeless, usually if the mother of the children has left him. Whatever the reasons, entitlement and control are generally at the forefront, along with rage, jealousy, revenge and hatred.”
Then the author juxtaposes this to how mothers who murder their children are viewed:
“The general view on these matters seems to be that men can’t help themselves, but women can. Women are expected to love and care for their children above all else, whereas men can be distant and even cruel but still considered “good enough” fathers.”
While the author and I feel no sympathy for this woman who murdered her innocent children, we would both like to see fathers and mothers who kill their children get similar sentences, and not reserve the lengthier sentences for females due to society’s perceptions of what gender roles should be.
– Kelly Reznick
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/sep/24/rekha-kumari-baker-sentencing
Same Problem, Same Failed Solutions
In both historic and modern times, racial minorities have made up the underprivileged and disenfranchised classes in the Western World. The linked article highlights the similarities of the “solutions” to minority crime in both present and past times.
From our class reading “Typecasting” by Ewen & Ewen, we were introduced to the “pictorial average” or “ideal type” revealed by composite portraiture, a technology developed by Galton. He believed the “generic images” produced from layered pictures provided how an individual conformed to a certain “type” or group. An example of groups he composited were criminals. Thus, the individual portraits that made up the composites were believed to all conform to the criminal “type” in some way that linked all the criminals in the group together. This thinking paved the way to one of Galton’s other projects: eugenics. Eugenics promoted the racial superiority of Whites over non-whites, due to physical differences among the races such as bone structure, facial profiles, and brain size. Because eugenics was based in physical measurements, it was seen as valid and scientific. Galton used eugenics to identify Europeans as being superior racial stock, and to mark non-whites as inferior racial stock whose genes were a threat to White genes if racial mixing occurred. Eugenics has therefore been used to justify genocide and racial profiling of minorities in Western countries.
Eugenics was taken to the next level, out of the laboratory and applied to social and political problems faced by the privileged White class in European cities. 19th century urban populations were exploding, circumstances which demanded techniques to zero in on and identify criminals within the city’s masses. Photography and statistics emerged simultaneously to physically identify and categorize criminals. On the political side, the exclusivity of suffrage for White property owners was being eradicated and expanded to different classes, such as black men. Because this threatened the historical White power in the West, Bertillon and similar men opened the Society of Anthropology to study the differences between human races. Based on his research, Bertillon published “The Savage Races” in which he stated that the size of a black man’s brain would make his intelligence level to be that of an “idiot” compared to a white man. The book used physical differences to “prove” that the black race was genetically and intellectually inferior to the White race.
Bertillon’s racial science was applied to urban life as it became a standard for Western police departments. Bertillonage was also used by criminologists and public administrators who saw cities as dangerous places to be subdued, rather than as places where economic and social crises needed to be solved. Therefore, the “management” and suppression of racial minorities was justified by racial science. But the hidden aim was really to maintain the status quo of White power in the West.
After the recent London riots, UK PM David Cameron is facing a similar problem and offering up a similar solution as to what happened in the past. Cameron’s reaction to recent uprisings of the marginalised and disenfranchised in England has been to declare “all-out war on gangs and gang culture” and has called for widening the use of US suppression models of policing.”
Instead of trying to fix the social and economic problems faced by rioting Londoners, Cameron is encouraging anti-gang policing which will, according to activists, scholars, and civil rights organizations, further increase racial profiling and immigrant deportation. The power of police to detain, search, and arrest someone bases on suspicion alone – or because they fit “a certain profile”, goes back to the first half of the 19th century with the passage of “sus law” (“suspected person”). Through the 20th century, the “profile” was often race-based and targeted non-white immigrant populations. In addition to economic devastation, the police use of racial profiling and “sus law” played a significant role in uprisings in black communities in England in the early 1980s. The reinvigoration of “sus law” has been championed by tough-on-crime politicians in the UK up to the present day. Similarly, the use of civil orders were championed by Tony Blair in 1990s to target “anti-social behaviour” including loitering, begging, and public drinking.”
Criminologists argue that the targeting of anti-social behavior adversely affects racial minorities, as well as the homeless, the poor, homosexuals, and other marginalized groups. What is most devastating is that with the arrests and punishments being increased due to gang affiliation, the criminal records of the arrested will further prevent these classes from social opportunities such as education and job advancement, continuing the cycle of the disenfranchised minority classes in Britain.
I chose this article to signify how racial profiling is still being used to single out and target minorites since its earliest developments as Galton’s composite portraitures. I also chose it to show how both past and present solutions have been to try to control the minorities through policing, rather than society as a whole coming together to help solve the inequalities these people face.
– Kelly Reznick
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/08/201181872718908109.html