Gonzo Justice

The role of public discourse, social control, punishment and claims about justice are joined in this essay through the concept of gonzo justice. Gonzo justice refers to the use of extraordinary means to demonstrate social control and moral compliance through rule enforcement and punishment designed to stigmatize publicly, often through the mass media, and to demonstrate the moral resolve of those mandating the punishment. The collapsing of distinctions between the news media as chroniclers of public life and formal agents of control is illustrated with materials from an ongoing study of new forms of social control. The implications of making extraordinary sanctioning practices ordinary and routine are noted.     

Criminology and war: where are we going and where have we been?

Although the metaphor of war (e.g., the war on terror, war on crime, war on drugs) figures prominently in contemporary criminological discourse, criminologists have generally lagged behind other disciplines in studying the reality of war and its implications for crime, punishment, and ideology. In this essay, I first consider potential reasons for criminology's limited role in studying war and make the case for why war warrants a more central place in criminological discourse. Subsequently, I trace some of criminology's early contributions to the study of war in two domains—(a) legal responses to war and (b) the link between war and crime—and reflect upon ways in which the discipline can both broaden its purview and draw from its own intellectual history to engage more critically with the subject of war.     

Conservatism, institutionalism, and the social control of intergroup conflict

This research investigates the state social control of intergroup conflict by assessing the sociopolitical determinants of hate crime prosecutions. Consistent with insights from the political sociology of punishment, group-threat accounts of intergroup relations and the state, and neoinstitutional theory, the findings suggest that hate crime prosecutions are fewer where political conservatism, Christian fundamentalism, and black population size are higher, although this last effect is nonlinear. Linkages between district attorneys' offices and communities, on the other hand, increase hate crime prosecutions and the likelihood of offices' creating hate crime policies. Yet these policies are sometimes decoupled from actual enforcement, and such decoupling is more likely in politically conservative districts. The results indicate that common correlates of criminal punishment have very different effects on types of state social control that are protective of minority groups, and also suggest conditions under which policy and practice become decoupled in organizational settings.     

“This Ain’t My School!” Criminality,Control, and Contradictions in Institutional Responses to School Truancy

While previous research has explored the causes and consequences of school truancy, few studies have considered the meanings of institutional responses. This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of a pilot program promoted as a “progressive” form of truancy intervention. Midvale Truancy Center claimed to focus on education, rather than punishment. In practice, however, the crime control tactics used to capture, isolate, and discipline truants often overshadowed the Center’s educational objectives, locating the Center in a liminal space between school and detention facility. The Center’s competing goals—revenue creation, truancy deterrence, and organizational survival—resulted in rehabilitation being pushed aside in favor of normalization and behavioral control. These findings illustrate a recent larger cultural turn toward control and punishment (Garland 2001), and the encroachment of crime control tactics into the civil sphere.     

Crime,Politics, and Punishment: Criminological Research for Political Sociologists

As a sociologist studying the intersection of crime, punishment, and politics, it is often surprising to me how many aspects of political sociology and the study of crime and punishment overlap, and yet, there is often limited cross‐fertilization of the two fields. For the sake of brevity in this discussion, I refer to those who study crime, deviance, law, criminal justice, and punishment as criminologists. My goal is to provide an extremely brief “primer” on criminology for political sociologists, in the hopes that a short reading of some issues and research in criminology may stimulate additional theorizing and research, as has so often happened when I have read political sociological work. To do this, I begin with a brief discussion of overlaps in political sociological and criminological perspectives. Following this, I highlight some examples of criminological research which incorporates politics, and would likely interest political sociologists, Then, I highlight a hot button issue in criminology – sex offenses – and suggest some ways that political sociologists could examine recent legislation on sex offenders and conclude with brief discussions of a few additional areas of overlap for the two disciplines.     

COMMUNITY IMAGERY AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT

This article explores the relationship between the collective representations and rhetoric that residents use to make sense of their communities and changes in the built environment. I draw on data from a case study of land-use discourse in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, to explore the ways in which imagery shapes the rhetoric available for land-use debate and how this, in turn, affects changes in zoning. Of particular importance in this process are heritage narratives. These broad renditions of a community's history are a form of constitutive rhetoric. When successful, they create an audience to whom subsequent appeals can be made, and they set boundaries on the content and direction of public discourse. The analysis suggests that communication and rhetorical processes are central to ecological change and that to dismiss these phenomena in favor of macrostructural forces is to miss a significant aspect of the human dimensions of local change and of the processes through which places are stratified.     

Critical rhetoric’s truth-telling function

The relationship between rhetoric and philosophy reveals competing orientations that guide what a subject can say about a domain of things and how that saying is informed by discourses of truth. In this article, I consider Raymie E. McKerrow’s admirable rendering of a “critical rhetoric” alongside Michel Foucault’s examination of parrhēsia to locate in critical rhetoric a truth-telling function that is formed in the ethopoetic relationship between subjects immersed in public discourse.     

OPTIMAL PUNISHMENT SCHEMES WITH STATE-DEPENDENT PREFERENCES

The optimal tradeoff between the certainty and severity of punishment is studied in a setting in which individuals are more sensitive to changes in certainty than severity and have state-dependent preferences—being convicted of a crime reduces utility at every wealth level. In this setting it is not optimal to set the probability of punishment at one even if it is costless to convict criminals, because reducing the certainty of punishment also reduces the probability that offenders' utility functions shift downward. The optimal level of certainty is therefore lower than that implied by prior studies based on state-independent preferences. (JEL K42, D81)     

THE REHABILITATION EFFECT OF PUNISHMENT

The putatively beneficial effect of punishment on criminal offenders is examined by estimating a logistic specification of a two-period model of optimal participation in illegitimate and legitimate activities. Estimates are obtained utilizing a sample of parolees released from all adult correctional institutions in the United States during 1972. The conclusion would seem to be that incarceration is not substantially effective in rehabilitation efforts and may even have a result opposite to that intended: increased punishment may increase optimal participation in crime.     

“Its Own Kind of Torture”: Denial,Acknowledgment, and the Debate About Force Feeding at Guantánamo Bay

Social science research has revealed how U.S. political and media elites, as well as U.S. citizens, downplayed and denied allegations of torture during the country's wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. This research effectively applies and extends Stanley Cohen's ( 2001 ) typology of the rhetoric of denial. We lack, however, a typology of the rhetoric of acknowledgment. In this article, I synthesize studies of discourse of torture to develop just such a typology. I propose three rhetorical forms of acknowledgment, which parallel Cohen's forms of denial. Literal or factual acknowledgment includes claims to convince audiences that alleged incidents indeed occurred. Interpretive acknowledgment consists of claims to affirm that those allegations constitute serious human rights violations, such as cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or torture. Implicatory acknowledgment includes efforts to delegitimize torture. I then illustrate the use of the rhetoric of acknowledgment through a qualitative content analysis of newspaper coverage of force feeding at the United States' detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. This case allows me to extend our understanding of the rhetoric of denial and acknowledgment by revealing ways in which discourse around force feeding deviates from that around the United States' use of “enhanced interrogation” and torture.     

Immigration,internal migration and crime in South Africa: A multi‐level model analysis

A review of South African literature on crime confirms the lack of a study that considers the impact of migration on the crime rate in the country. The high levels of crime in South Africa aside, additional motivation behind the study has been the increasing rhetoric in media and by politicians insinuating the prominent role of foreign immigrants in the high crime levels of the country. While this is the first attempt to study this relationship in the South African context, it also stands apart from existing studies undertaken in the developed countries by accounting for both internal migrants as well as foreign immigrants. Further, the study claims the use of multi‐level regression estimations as an improvement from the existing studies on the issue by accounting for variance clustering across different spatial levels. In all the estimated models, internal migrant ratio came out as being positively and significantly related to crime rates across five different crime categories, with the sole exception of sexual crime rate. There was no evidence of foreign immigrant ratio impacting on crime rate in any of the crimes analysed except crime relating to property. Further, income inequality and sex ratio figure as determining factors across most types of crime in South Africa.     

What does Ubuntu solve? Thoughts on the rhetoric used in the making of the Heritage Transformation Charter

Following the drafting of the Heritage Transformation Charter, an academic study investigated one of the mandates of the Charter, that of oral traditions as part of South Africa’s living heritage. Through an engagement with the discursive elements of both the draft and final texts of the Charter, it found that the authors of the Charter considered Ubuntu as its underlying philosophy, which should inform not only the heritage sector but become an overarching principle for nation building. This approach transpired mostly through the use of rhetoric in the Charter texts, which seemingly placed the discussion of the concept of Ubuntu and to a certain degree the entire Charter firmly within a postcolonial Afro-centric position. Following some of the rhetoric with regard to Ubuntu, and considering the characteristics of rhetoric, its functions and manifestations, the paper will trace the effects of such rhetoric from within the context of a public document such as the Charter to the context of the wider South African society. Thereby, elaborating on the rhetoric around Ubuntu in the Charter texts, it will demonstrate in part how such rhetoric is used in shaping the wider postcolonial and post-apartheid discourse in the present socio-economic dispensation.     

CERTAINTY VS. SEVERITY OF PUNISHMENT

Recent research has generated conflicting findings regarding the role of employment and earnings versus criminal justice sanctions in reducing crime. Further disagreement exists over the relative effectiveness of increased certainty versus increased severity of punishment as deterrents to crime. This paper uses a large data set containing criminal and labor market histories of a broad sample of young male arrestees to estimate an economic model of crime. Deterrence, incapacitation, and criminal human capital effects are measured, and the effects of employment and earnings on criminal activity are estimated. The results largely reconcile the conflicting findings from previous research.     

Children and the Discourse of Fear

The news media, a dominant source of information about social issues, use entertainment formats to organize reports that audiences will understand. Part of this organized effort is the use of a discourse of fear, or the pervasive communication, symbolic awareness, and expectation that danger and risk are central features of everyday life. Reliant on formal agents of social control as news sources about fear, news reports tend to repeat certain words, themes, and perspectives that support more social control. Although associated with crime, the discourse of fear includes other topics and concerns as well. A qualitative content analysis approach, “tracking discourse,” permits a mapping of discourse over time and across various topics. Analysis of the use of fear in three major newspapers during 1987–1996 shows that it has increased; that a large part of the discourse of fear includes children and the spaces they occupy (e.g., schools and neighborhoods); and that it changed from a focus on specific events in the 1980s to a more generalized, pervasive perspective in the 1990s, peaking in about 1994. It is argued that this is important for making claims about “necessary” social action to protect children, as well as protect us from children. Fear is the path to the dark side. —Star Wars: Episode 1: The Phantom Menace     

Criminal behavior in general equilibrium: Who benefits from crime?

Analyses of the social costs and benefits of crime generally focus attention on the perpetrator and victim, with secondary incidence limited to public and private enforcement costs, and possible efficiency losses from punishment. Professors Jorge Martinez-Vazquez and Bruce Seaman extend the notion from the tax evasion literature that variations in the frequency of illegal behavior across sectors of the economy necessitates a full intersectoral approach to the determination of the long run general equilibrium incidence of crime. An algebraic model of three product markets is used to derive the total social costs per dollar of crime under four different market structures in the “crime prone” industry, and similar differences in the related substitute and complementary goods markets. The differing social impacts suggest that industry market and cost structures are potentially relevant factors in devising optimal law enforcement strategies.     

Radical/Critical Social Work with Young Offenders: Challenges and Possibilities

In the UK, particularly in England, youth crime is perceived as a serious social problem, which is always near the top of the political agenda. Since the early 1990s, ‘populist punitiveness’ (Bottoms, 1995), amounting to varying degrees of punishment and control, has been key for addressing the problem. This culminated in New Labour's flagship Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and thereafter increasing concern with anti-social behaviour. The Conservative-led coalition is continuing in this vein. It is a ‘get tough’ approach in which the role of social work has been sidelined. In this article, I argue that such an approach is counterproductive as evidenced by the riots of August 2011 in London and other major cities. Rather than notions of punishment and control being to the fore, attention should be paid to the social and economic conditions that shape young people's lives and behaviour. For social workers, this involves relationship building with young offenders and their families and this is where a radical/critical work practice comes in. It is an emancipatory practice, which resists the neoliberal present and has some vision of a more socially just and equal future world.     

A Study on Conceptual Metaphor in Advertisement Discourse from the Perspective of Critical Discourse Analysis

Advertising can be seen everywhere in our life,the main purpose of it is to persuade people to buy.The paper discusses the negative effect of conceptual metaphor from the perspective of CDA(critical discourse analysis),aiming to raise people’s critical awareness in advertising and disclose the truth under the rhetoric.     

MANAGING GUILT:

In this article I illustrate the connections between talk, emotion management, and identity. In much of the recent work on collective, discursive strategies such as narrative and rhetoric, this link is left implicit. Through the study of a support group for parents of "troubled" teenagers, I highlight how parents' rhetorical talk created an emotional pathway that enabled them to maintain their good-parent identities despite their teenagers' rebellion. Parents used a personal responsibility rhetoric to make sense of their teenagers' misbehavior. For the most part as parents applied the personal responsibility rhetoric, they followed meeting protocol. Occasionally, however, parents violated the rhetoric's expression rule that parents were to avoid talking about guilt. I address how parents collectively constructed meeting discourse and conclude that their use of the personal responsibility rhetoric was how they collectively managed their own and each others' emotions. As a result they set the stage for becoming strict disciplinarians, which made it possible to see themselves as good parents, regardless of their teenagers' rebellion.     

Fighting Words: What We Can Learn from Hitler's Hyperbole

The question of why human beings fight wars continues to stalk modern thought. This article treats Hitler's national socialist discourse as an extreme example of the social construction of a social problem, a cultural paradigm of how to talk people into fighting revolutions and wars. Drawing upon recent work in rhetorical studies by Gusfield and others, I show how political agents concoct a rhetoric of motives which they use to incite their followers to fight their enemies. The formal and poetic features of this system of discourse are identified and explicated. We can learn many things from Hitler. By identifying his technique, we can recognize when political agents are using the same technique and counter its seductive effects. We learn that the main effect of war rhetoric is social integration through the constitution of common enemies. And finally, we realize that wars are made to happen through the calculated use of symbolic practices. War is not, as many have argued, a fall into a latent animality, but an expression of our symbol-mindedness–our capacity to make and use hyperboles.     

The crime drop in comparative perspective: the impact of the economy and imprisonment on American and European burglary rates

Influential statements on recent American crime reductions maintain that the crime drop was confined to the USA. Yet other research has revealed comparable crime decreases in Europe. We suggest that the USA and European crime declines occurred in tandem because they were both brought about by upturns in the economy. In light of US research showing crime reductions resulting from growth in imprisonment, we also examine the possibility that rising imprisonment rates reduced European crime rates. We test these hypotheses in a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis of burglary rates in the USA and nine European nations between 1993 and 2006. The results indicate that burglary declines in the US and Europe were associated with rising consumer confidence. By contrast, imprisonment appears to be significantly related to burglary rates only after unusual policy interventions, such as Italy's 2006 clemency measure that dramatically reduced the size of its prison population. We interpret these findings as reflecting the structural similarity and economic integration of the world's developed nations and the uneven convergence in US and European punishment policies.