The Lightbulb Does Not Need to be Changed.

Q: How many sociologists does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: The lightbulb does not need changing. It is society that must be changed.

 

I thought that I might pursue a doctorate here at the University of Texas because the school will pay for up to 5 credit hours per semester for an employee. The plan died aborning. I sent a letter to the sociology department and received a rejection in 15 minutes. The essential message was, “Go away.” 

My Query Letter

The Reply

 

When I was majoring in criminology at Eastern Michigan University, I had a lot of sociology classes, of course. One of my classmates was about a year ahead of me and we had a couple of classes together for a couple of semesters. One day, walking in from the parking lot, he asked me, “Why do think that conflict theory is the one they teach best here?” I did not understand the question.

Has a special interest in criminology

Conflict theory is among about 50 explanatory or predictive narratives that describe the facts about individuals in society. Pure conflict says that individuals are naturally aggressive toward each other and society (reified) holds us together by means of its institutions by preventing, mediating, remediating, or negating conflict. Variations include class conflict, gender conflict, race conflict, and others. Those become “critical” when they assert that the conflict is unnatural. Critical class conflict theory is congruent with Marxism, for example: fix society’s problems and conflict will abate and perhaps disappear entirely. But I could tell that my friend was asking a rhetorical question. And he asked another: “Why don’t we have a department chair?”

 

Has a special interest in criminal justice reform.

At EMU, sociology, anthropology, and criminology were all under the same office in the College of Arts & Sciences. At that time, no one wanted to be the chair. You would think that any tenure track professor would take the two-year rotation, even if they had been the chair perhaps ten years earlier. But no. As a new undergraduate, I was not in stream with the idle chat about department politics, but I knew that some of my professors were unhappy with their organizational leadership. Then came the defining crisis: a murder on campus.

 

Has a special interest in law and regulation.

As I recall, there was a general mandate from the University administration to all professors and staff not to talk to the press or other news media. But they are called “press” for several reasons and the reporters pressed the criminology department for quotable quotes. And my professor for White Collar Crime (Crim 307), Andreas Tomaszewski, offered his opinion. Then, his application for tenure was denied. He did still show up for class, but he basically stopped teaching. At the end of the semester, he moved to Canada. 

 

Has a special interest in juries.
I wonder if she has read
Young S. Kim, Gregg Barak, and Donald E. Shelton
from Eastern Michigan University on the CSI Effect.

The facts of the crime and the response of the University were at issue. EMU claimed that they did not want the perpetrator to flee, so they left the cause of death as “natural” as indicated by the (acting) county medical examiner. Eventually, another enrolled student was charged with the crime and convicted. However, EMU was fined over $800,000 for violation of the Clery Act, which requires the reporting of crimes. The university president, the EMU chief of police, and several others resigned. 

 

Has an interest in policing.

Here and now, my request for an informal meeting with the chair of the UT sociology department was answered by the acting chair because the chair is on sabbatical. Despite Dr. Lin Ken-Hou’s protest that UT is not the place to study white collar crime or misconduct in scientific research, several professors in the department do claim relevant interests. 

 

More to the point, if I had had the opportunity to talk out the options, even if it were true that none of their sociologists is interested in crime, that in itself would have been a good reason for me to do just that and complete some original and significant research for the department. 

Just one option would have been to work with the Institutional Review Board, which audits research and investigates lapses in ethics. 

That is especially relevant because UT is a research university, not a teaching college. Our classes here are taught by graduate assistants (and post-grads). At EMU, the school motto is “Education first.” If your name is in the book, then you are the person standing in front of the class. In my last year there (2010), plans were made to allow graduate students in physics to do some teaching but it was then a notable exception. Like Texas State University here in San Marcos, EMU was the old Normal College, the school where teachers were trained. When EMU sought to ramp up its game by joining a sports conference with more television money, they hired an athletic director at three times the salary of a department chair, $300,000 versus $90,000 per year. Wags with spray paint went around campus: Education first—and 10! 

 

So, it is here at UT. You can find a webpage about our Nobel laureates: https://news.utexas.edu/2019/12/09/longhorn-laureates/ In fact, none of them is here. The last two on campus both died. Steven Weinberg was enticed to retire here. He continued to write essays. John Goodenough taught chemistry at the the UT Cockrell School of Engineering and among his achievements was the invention of the lithium-ion battery. As for the other Nobel laureates, biology professor Hermann J. Muller was forced out for being a communist. (After quick turns in Germany and then the USSR, he returned to the USA. Later, Carl Sagan was one of his students.) UT alumnus John Maxwell Coetzee earned his doctorate here in 1969 and then went to South Africa. He was not allowed to come back because he had published a protest against the war in Viet Nam.

 

Back in 2005, when Weinberg was reputed to be the highest paid professor at $400,000 football coach Mack Brown was paid $2.1 million. Today, coach Steve Sarkisian is paid $10.6 million and quarterback Arch Manning earns $1.6 million from Name Image and Likeness (NIL) under NCAA rules in place since 2021. Weinberg was awarded a $3 million Breakthrough Prize in 2020 just one of several such honors over the years. That being as it is, the fact remains that an undergraduate playing football earns three times more than the best paid professors and eight times more than the average professor’s salary. (See: https://texascollegesalaries.com/institution/17)

 

A card-carrying criminologist will tell you that crime knows no neighborhood. In other words, there are no bad neighborhoods, just different crimes in them. In the suburbs, they don’t beat up strangers, rob the corner liquor stores or snatch purses, they just work at corporations that dump toxins into the aquifer and then they try to delete their emails. That being so, it remains that you don’t find a lot of broken windows and absentee landlords in the suburbs. In poor neighborhoods, the people lack more than anything else social status and social capital. The broken windows theory explains why the sociology department does not welcome outsiders into their academic ghetto. You can argue the cause and effect of broken windows and broken homes but when a culture, a society, is in decline, fixing the windows will not solve the deeper problems.

 

PREVIOUSLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

 

The Pretense of Sociology 

Sociology: A Defense and a Call for Reform 

Sociology is a Science 

Karl Marx and the Dustbin of History 

 

Alternatives to Prison (Part 1 of 3)

Introduction:  For almost 200 years, the treatment and punishment of convicted criminals was defined by blending the Pennsylvania System and the New York System.  And, of course, it did nothing to remediate either the offender or the harms.  People came out of prison worse than when then went in.  They re-offended.  And their victims often were the same people they hurt before.  It is a cliché in corrections that prisoners are returned to within 100 yards of where they were arrested.  However, we have made progress.  Community corrections, moral reconation therapy, and reintegrative shaming are among the new modes that provide successful outcomes.

Failure Modes

Historically, transgressors were exiled.  The modern prison solves that problem with topology: we lock them in, not out.  However, the modern prison system does not have deep roots in history.  Until America in the 18^th century, prisons were only for holding people until they were brought forward for punishment.  Some people might never leave prison, but incarceration was not the intended punishment for the crime. 

The modern prison began in 1788 with the Penitentiary House of the Walnut Street Jail in Philadelphia.  The purpose was specifically to reform the penitent.  The intention to remake and rehabilitate the offender led to the construction of the Eastern State Penitentiary in 1829.  Separating convicts into solitary cells was a radical idea, consistent with the social theories of the Enlightenment.  Cesare Beccaria’s On Crimes and Punishments (Dei delitti e delle pene, 1764) launched the modern study of penology within criminology.  Beccaria argued against capital punishment and torture. His ideas were incidentally consistent with Quaker theory on salvation.  For them, solitary confinement was supposed to allow the penitent to come to terms with God.

However, an alternate model also informed penology:  convicted offenders should live and work communally under close supervision coupled with physical punishment for non-compliance.  That was the Auburn System created in New York following the appointment of Elam Lynds as warden of the prison in 1821. When flogging finally was prohibited in 1847, different punishments were invented. The striped uniform was another innovation in the Auburn System.

From chain gangs and work farms to separate facilities for low, medium, and high-risk offenders, prisons in America achieved little except to keep some people out of the sight of others.  Generally, prisoners themselves controlled their daily routines, usually with the most violent preying on anyone less aggressive.  Illegal drugs passed into prisons through corrupt guards.

Radicals and Reformers

Following the intellectual ferment of the 1960s, new methods for remediating harms slowly advanced within criminology; and they have found some success.  The basic assumptions of their sociology often are informed by some school of socialism, whether Marxist, neo-Marxist, or postmodern.  For them, crime is a response to oppression. For the classic Marxist, economic exploitation reduces the proletariat to criminal activity.  In point of fact, we have found that when the economy improves, crime goes up.  The current long recession (from 2001 to the present) has seen crime go down. 

However, their point is well-made because the outcomes of criminal action are different for different classes. And class correlates with race, though correlation is not cause.  See Our Kind of People: Inside America's Black Upper Class by Lawrence O. Graham (HarperCollins, 1999).  When suburban kids are caught shoplifting, or shooting out streetlights with a pellet gun, or using drugs, their outcomes are different from that of their inner city cohorts. Suburban offenders receive many of the treatments and remediations outlined here.  The poor get prison. 

Moreover, we all offend.  Newt Gingrich once said that for most Americans, the posted speed limit is a benchmark of opportunity.  The only relevant questions are: Whom did you hurt? And what are you going to do about it?

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Firefighters

All Volitional Beings Deserve Rights

Eyewitness Testimony: Popper, Wittgenstein, and the Innocence Project

Wolf DeVoon

Alternatives to Prison (Part 2 of 3)

Reintegrative Shaming was developed by John Braithwaite based on his experience as an administrative regulator of pharmaceutical firms in Australia.  It was quite simple.  If you go in with a warrant, you only meet the lawyers.  If you sit down for tea with the plant manager, you gain voluntary compliance.  “Sitting down for tea” meant getting the manager to acknowledge out loud that he knew about the violation, and knew that it was wrong. Then, he would promise to fix it, and usually did. 

Braithwaite followed those encounters with research into the anthropology of offense.  He found many examples from history and modern first peoples where the offender was brought back into the community after admitting the transgression and apologizing to the victim, making restoration where possible. 

Sometimes, it is not possible.  An Eskimo man killed his wife; and when her brother complained about that, he killed her brother.  So, his friends invited him to go hunting.  Four went out; three came back.  (Hoebel, E. Adamson. 1967. The Law of Primitive Man: A Study in Comparative Legal Dynamics. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.).  Usually, the outcomes are better for everyone because most harms are smaller than murder. 

Even though less than homicide, assault is a violent crime.  Victims suffer multiple traumas, deeper than the physical wounds and scars.  Howard Zehr is a photographer.  He created Transcending: Reflections of Crime Victims (Good Books, 2001).   Zehr presented the portraits and the stories of 39 courageous victims of violent crime.  Not all of the encounters brought closure.  In two, the attackers continued to mock their victims.  In one, the subject was a man whose son was killed in prison.  For three dozen other cases, both the victim and the offender found that they could overcome their suffering.

Community Corrections

The Midtown Manhattan Community Court opened in 1993. The Red Hook Community Justice Center in Brooklyn opened in the summer of 1998.  Red Hook’s success has served as a model for many other efforts.  Greg Berman invested two years of daily work, laying the social foundation for the center before it opened.  He met with groups.  He met with individuals. His salary came from a grant by the New York City Housing Authority to the Center for Court Innovation and the King County District Attorney’s Office.

The Red Hook court brings offenders and victims together.  The usual harms are domestic violence and shoplifting.  They also get public indecency cases when men are caught urinating in an alleyway.  Their theory on that is that there is no such thing as a victimless crime.   Every transgression harms the community.

In cases of personal crime, perpetrators confront their victims, apologize, and make whatever restitution is possible.  For offenses against the public order, the guilty apologize to an appropriate authority, acknowledge the harm they caused, and perform community service work. 

In many community corrections programs house arrest with electronic tethering is a common judicial sentence, especially for otherwise non-violent offenders such as the habitual drunk driver.  Community programs find work for them.  Their whereabouts are monitored.  It costs less for us, and keeps them integrated to the community.

Self-Awareness

That assailants are also victims is a fact of crime.  In the first place, a police investigation often reveals that the victim was only the last person to get hurt the most.  Whether a fight in a bar or a feud between neighbors, they had a personal interaction that played out over time.  Either one could have withdrawn completely, but neither did. 

Domestic assault is different than that.  There, a lifelong violent offender finds a lifelong victim of violence.  Typically, both grew up in abusive homes, as did their parents.  That is how they learned their roles.  To them, it seems perfectly normal. 

Moral Reconation Therapy is one of the most successful treatment programs for domestic and drug abuse cases.  Not surprisingly, they go together, especially with the drug of choice is alcohol; and MRT is also employed for treating drunk drivers.  MRT is the work of Gregory L. Little and Kenneth D. Robinson.  Launched in 1988, it was based on five years of research in the Tennessee prison system.  Research continues across problem areas and the many multi-year follow-up studies on recidivism place it high on the list of evidence-based therapies. 

The process is simple.  Following a tested and proven workbook, counselors direct clients in small groups to explore their own attitudes, beliefs, and emotions.  For them self-awareness is a new experience.  Ayn Rand most cogently pointed out that the root of all evil is the failure to choose to think.  Thinking is not automatic.  It is volitional.  People blank-out, evade, and repress unpleasant thoughts, especially about themselves.  For a child, it does not take many years for them to become fogged into a reactive life of the immediate present.  Non-violent people become dysfunctional neurotics.  The violent ones become aggressive criminals.  Self-awareness cures that in about half the cases.

For over thirty years, MRT and other evidence-based practices typically have had success rates in the mid-fifties percent.  The National Registry of Evidence-Based Programs and Practices (http://www.nrepp.samhsa.gov) is part of the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration (http://www.samhsa.gov).

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Employee Theft

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops

The Fallibility of Fingerprinting

20% of Scientists are Crooks

Laissez-faire Criminology

Of the many theories of crime, none is based on doing nothing. Every theory assumes that someone has a duty to act to punish wrongs or remediate harms or save the sinner. Traditional studies of victimology come closest to a laissez faire theory that problems in our social environment are only analogous to problems in our physical environment: we protect ourselves from the elements; but we do not seek to punish storms, either for their own good or as general deterrence to any other bad weather.

Altruism informs criminology. Even more than the golden rule, the parable of the Good Samaritan tells us all that we are our brother’s keeper. And no one is kept better than someone in prison.

When Sir Robert Peel formed the London Metropolitan Police Service in 1829, crime was a political problem outlined by morality based in religion. Today, criminology resonates within sociology. A hundred years ago, Marxists criticized Max Weber in particular and sociology in general for being concerned only with church, family, and state. Today, those critical sociologists and critical criminologists control the content of most university programs: racism and sexism are caused by capitalism; end of story.

Even libertarians and objectivists who generally do not care what you smoke or with whom you sleep insist on the enforcement of property rights specifically as the punishment of those who violate the rights of others. Within those circles, self-identified “anarcho-capitalists” engage in long arguments with advocates of constitutionally limited government (“minarchy”) attempting to prove that a completely free market in protection and adjudication would still bring justice in the form of punishments to wrong-doers. That should seem peculiar. It is self-contradictory to claim that you are completely responsible for your own life, but someone else must be punished for your losses.  A completely consistent criminology based on individualism is centered on victimology: understanding your risks in society and taking preventive and preparatory actions to avoid losses.

Altruism has a range of definitions. Objectivists and libertarians cite the inventor of the word, Auguste Comte, and take him literally. Comte was a political Platonist who advocated for a secular civic priesthood to rule a common humanity that was united in complete concern for others – and no concern for self. Comte was explicit. Later philosophers softened this. After all, Jesus commanded us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves. Self must come first before benevolence can be extended to others. Today, altruism is mere politeness and civility, common grace, and simple decency. That seems harmless enough.

But what happens when that fails?

I am a fan of public transportation and ride one or more buses to work or play most days. “Pardon me”, “excuse me”, and “sorry” are important acknowledgements of small harms. Criminal justice is based on the expectation of larger and more complicated apologies for harms of greater consequence.

We generally understand others as extensions, projections, reflections, or reiterations of ourselves. “Do unto others as you would have others do unto you” assumes that others share your values. More deeply, it assumes that others think as you do – even that they think at all. Our propensity for copying the behaviors of others runs far deeper than “monkey see, monkey do.” In point of fact, researchers found that given a puzzle and a ritual, and later shown the short-cut, chimpanzees abandon useless actions, while humans repeat them for no apparent reason. Thus, everyone seems to be able to learn how to drive a car (or ride a bus), use a computer or a cell phone, and learn a foreign language. So, when you are harmed by someone else, you assume that (like you) they had no intent of harm; and having committed a transgression they are remorseful: they cannot be content until they have rebalanced themselves with some propitiation.

Why?

And if that other person has no such inner needs, where do we find the motivation (“political right”) to redirect that person’s body, mind, and soul?

Why do we feel differently about losses caused by other people than we do about losses caused by storms?  If we protect ourselves from nature, why do we not also protect ourselves from human nature?

Design of a "speed bump" (USA) or "sleeping policeman" (UK)

MORE RECENTLY ON NECESSARY FACTS

Syriaphobia: the latest fad in collectivism

Alternatives to Prison (Part 2 of 3)

Brian Krebs' Spam Nation

Newton versus the Counterfeiter

Integrating Criminologies

Crime is the sine qua non problem of every society.  What a culture regards as harms and how people respond to harm defines them even more than their achievements.  

In the Bible and Hesiod’s Theogeny, human error is given.  Modern criminology, originating in the Enlightenment with Cesare Breccaria’s Crimes and Punishments (1763), assumes that crime is exceptional and remediable because human nature is perfectible.  Even recent theories –the “critical” school (i.e., Marxists) and post-modernists – claim that crime is a natural response to capitalist oppression and that if we did away with property (and those who own it), we would all live happily ever after.  No laissez faire criminologist asserts that what we mistakenly were told were harms and crimes are only the benefits of an Invisible Hand of Human Action.  

Integrative Systems Theory (Robinson) and Integration Theory (Barak) attempt to bring order to the many theories of crime.

Most integrators of crime and/or punishment agree that integration involves connecting, linking, combining, and/or synthesizing the relations and fragments of other models and theories into formulations of crime and crime control that are more comprehensive than the more traditional and one-dimensional explanations that have been perpetually elaborated on for some forty years. Despite this abstract agreement on the meaning of integration, actual approaches to integration vary significantly. -- "Integrative Theories, Integrating Criminologies" by Prof. Gregg Barack on his website here.

Integration is a formidable task because different hypotheses rest on different assumptions. Criminologists argue past each other because they are expressing different paradigms.

 

Integrative criminology correctly identifies what all harms have in common. It resolves conflicts within the individuals involved, as well as remediating their externally apparent problem, and integrates the actors into their society.

Different schools of thought stem from different sets of data.  The collection of data has always been driven by theory.  Unlike scientists who discover some previously unperceived phenomenon – nebulae through a telescope; germs via a microscope – criminologists absorb their social contexts long before they learn methods of investigating their own and other cultures at university.  From the medieval lecturers to online interactions, academic cultures always range within the collectivist models based on the assumption that only altruism defines ethics because it is identical with morality. Those rest on erroneous epistemologies.  Among the few islands of individualism in the sea of unquestioned assumptions are Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Abraham Maslow’s Theory of Human Motivation, and Ayn Rand’s Objectivist Ethics.

In his apologia for chemistry, The Same and Not the Same, (Columbia University Press, 1995) Nobel laureate Roald Hoffmann asserts that no two hemoglobin molecules are identical. So-called “identical twins” are not. Individualism is objectively real: both empirically knowable and rationally explainable.  Yet, even the proposed integration criminologies do not take this fact into account.

Epistemological integration is the unifying of discrete elements into a single concept.  The individual person is the unit of society.  Therefore, successful criminology begins with the individual.  Most often, crimes are identified when individuals are united by a shared harm.  However, the state’s compelling interest in the welfare of the individual recognizes the problem of self-harm.  Diagnosed with a terminal illness, you have the right to end your life when you choose.  You do not have a political right to do that by jumping from a building. The difficulty is not the violation of the building owner’s right to property and contract; and it is not the violation of laws against littering the sidewalk.  Any individual who chooses such an obviously harmful public display is internally conflicted and lacking integration.  Thus, other people (via the police power of government) have a compelling interest to act.

When individuals come into conflict, one of them (certainly) and all of them (likely) are internally unintegrated or else the problem would not exist.  But not all problems are solvable. Whether a dishonest accountant is genetically cursed, or the product of a broken home, or differentially associated with a criminogenic corporation, or simply chooses to gain at the expense of others may be the bottom line.  It ends there.  Whether we can walk away from the harms and accept them as metaphysical facts is the essential problem of criminology. 

Some Theories of Crime

The Classical School - The Positive School - The Chicago School - Rational Choice

Lifestyle - Cognitive - XYZ Chromosome - Sociobiology

Social Learning - Modeling/Imitation

Differential Association - Differential Conditionality - Differential Identification
Differential Reinforcement - Differential Opportunity 

Social Learning - Psychoanalytic - Moral Development - Criminal Personality

Strain - Social Strain - General Strain - Social Disorganization - Anomie

Subculture - Culture Conflict - Subculture of Delinquency
Techniques of Neutralization = Subculture of Violence - Focal Concerns  -Routine Activities
High Delinquency Areas  - Labeling  -Tagging
Primary & Secondary Deviance
Developmental Career Model

Radical Non-Intervention - Social Control  - Containment - Social Bond  - Opportunity     
Power-Control - Instrumental - Low Self-Control 

Peacemaking  -Reintegrative Shaming  - Radical Feminist  - Conflict - Marxist          
Social Reality - Liberation
 

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Laissez Faire Criminology

Private Security in the 21st Century

Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops

Locksporting

Physical Security for Data Centers (Slideshare View)

Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part 1

Intentional cruelty is of particular concern because it is an indication of psychological distress and may be a sign that an individual has already experienced violence or may be predisposed to committing acts of violence. - San Bernadino County California link here

The roots of violence are deep. Our front teeth are incisors. We kill to survive. (Yes, carrots have feelings, too.) But there is a difference between that and cruelty. Among hunter/gatherers it is common that men kill each other, usually over women, occasionally over status; and they kill women, also. That said, it remains that hunters have propitiating rituals. They thank their prey, or beg forgiveness, or sometimes blame the other tribe. We do none of that when we kill an herbivore from a blind 3 meters up and 100 meters away. So, when a police officer accidentally kills the wrong fleeing felon, there is no restoration. The officer does not apologize; and the state which empowered the homicide admits no harm and pays no compensation.

The Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity, and derivative philosophies such as Objectivism hold that only humans have souls (or free will or reason). Thus, what is done to an animal is less important.

However, we know that causal links tie violence against animals to predation upon family, neighbors, and strangers. Cruelty to pets correlates to domestic violence. Children who abuse animals will later victimize people.

• “Bringing Peace Home: A Feminist Philosophical Perspective on the Abuse of Women, Children, and Pet Animals,” Carol J. Adams, Hypatia, Vol. 9, No. 2, Feminism and Peace (Spring, 1994), pp. 63-84
• "Dogs'/Bodies, Women's Bodies: Wives As Pets In Mid-Nineteenth-Century Narratives Of Domestic Violence,” Lisa Surridge, Victorian Review, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Summer 1994), pp. 1-34.
• “Exploring the Link between Corporal Punishment and Children's Cruelty to Animals,” Clifton P. Flynn, Journal of Marriage and Family, Vol. 61, No. 4 (Nov., 1999), pp. 971-981
• “Why Family Professionals Can No Longer Ignore Violence toward Animals,” Clifton P. Flynn, Family Relations, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Jan., 2000), pp. 87-95
• “Contesting Tradition: The Deep Play and Protest of Pigeon Shoots,” Simon J. Bronner, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 118, No. 470 (Autumn, 2005), pp. 409-452.

Do the police need to be armed? Should they be empowered to commit homicide? Does anyone need a gun … of any caliber? To me, if you need to put meat on the table, and if you live in the woods, then hunting deer with a rifle makes sense. But if you are doing it to validate your masculinity, then get a knife, run the buck down, and face him like a man. And apologize to him.

In North America an address of pardon or apology to the bear is reported for the following peoples: Montagnais-Naskapi, Malecite, St. Francis Abenaki, Eastern Cree, Northern Saulteaux, Tate de Boule, Plains Ojibway, Ottawa, Menomini, Sauk, Fox, Ojibway,. The Tlingit and possibly the Winnebago may also be mentioned in this connection. … It seems worth while to record the statement of Mr. Frank Gallenne of Seven Islands, P. Q., who has been a resident there for forty years and speaks one of the Naskapi dialects. He told me that he had been with the Indians when they hunted bear and that on more than one occasion they asked the animal's pardon before killing it. He cited it as one of the most curious of their superstitions. Comeau (p. 85) writes that "when caught in a steel trap or seen at a distance, he (the bear) is spoken to and asked that vengeance be not taken for his death."

The hunter "tells a bear before he kills it that he is sorry that he is in need of food and has to kill it."… "I killed you because I need your skin for my coat, and your flesh so that I can eat, because I have nothing to live on." … The bear hunter explains that nothing but hunger drove him to kill it and "begs the animal not to be offended," nor "permit the spirits of other bears to be angry." … The hunter approaches the lair and says, "I am thankful that I found you and sorry that I am obliged to kill you," promising the spirit of the beast a sacrifice of maple sugar or berries. … "When they kill a bear they make feast of its own flesh, they talk to it, they harangue it, they say, 'Do not leave an evil thought against us because we have killed thee. Thou hast intelligence, thou seest that our children are suffering from hunger. They love thee and wish thee to enter into their bodies. Is it not a glorious thing for thee to be eaten by the children of captains'." … The animal is told that the "killing was accidental or else that he must forgive him this one offense for his poor family is starving." … Although a Bear (sib) man may kill a bear, he must first address himself to it and apologize for depriving it of life.... "Should an Indian of the Bear totem, or one whose adopted guardian is represented by the bear, desire to go hunting and meet with that animal, due apology would be paid to it before destroying it." … In Asia we may refer to the Kamchadal, Yukaghir, Ostyak (Ugrian). … Among the Ainu, a speech of this type is an important feature of the bear festival." --  “Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere,” Irving Hallowell, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Jan. - Mar., 1926), pp. 1-175.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part 2.
Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security
Minimizing the Likelihood of Bad Cops
Laissez Faire Criminology
Integrating Criminologies

Employee Theft

Here in Ann Arbor, the Cafe Luwak of Ypsilanti closed its doors after nearly six years, finally driven out of business by internal fraud and larceny.  The full story is on their blog.  The demise of a cool coffee shop that served a nice array of ice cream and a terrific offering of outstanding deli was a loss to the community. 


 Restaurants are a challenge even when the economy is expanding.  The economy was never good since they first opened in February 2005.  Yet they survived.  Ypsilanti's Depot Town is a good location. Cafe Luwak had popular bars and retailers for neighbors, a short drive or a summer walk from the campus of Eastern Michigan University.  In entrepreurship seminars, they teach that most new businesses fail within five years, most of those in three.  Cafe Luwak survived the critical curve, but were taken down by employee theft.


Retailers know that shoplifters are less damaging than employees. University of Florida criminology professor Richard Hollinger specializes in retail crime.  His 2009 survey of one hundred shops found that 43% of losses come from employee theft and 35% from shoplifting.  In restaurants and bars customers have no easy access to storage or the till, so employee theft is even more of a problem.  Luwak's losses came to $40,000 last year in inventory and cash combined. 


Crime has many explanations.  In the past two generations, criminologists offered over fifty separate hypotheses.  Among the weakest are the "critical" theories of Marxist conflict which remain popular with many academic criminologists and sociologists.

Now in a 9th Edition from Prentiss-Hall



In economics text books, Karl Marx has been relegated to the margins, to balance the laissez faire theories of Hayek and Mises. In economics, the commanding heights belong to Milton Friedman and the Chicagoists.  But in sociology and criminology, Marx is still taken seriously.  For the critical criminologist, crime is a response to oppression.  People steal out of need or vengeance, retaliating against exploitation. 

The facts tell a different story.  Consistent statistics across decades from the Uniform Crime Report show no correlation between the general economy and crime generally. 


Admittedly, the UCR has some structural problems. It is only a summary of crimes as reported by local authorites. When police departments want more funding, they can make crime go up.  When they need to look successful, they can make crime go down. 

For example, burglary is a felony because by definition it is two crimes: (1) breaking and entering (2) with intent to commit a felony.  But the easy solutions is for the burglar to admit to the B&E, and the prosecutor will drop the felony.  The perp gets jail, not prison; and the wheels of justice grind on.  

The National Crime Victimization Survey is a random sampling report about harms and wrongs, about half of which never come to the attention of police. Bearing in mind the limitations, it is still interesting that as the economy worsened, the UCR showed a general decrease in all crimes (except rape and sexual assualt in some cities), and especially so, regarding burglary, larceny, theft, and other property crimes.  Even though we are in the worst depression in three generations, property crime is decreasing.  

People do not steal out of need or vengeance.  They steal from greed and opportunity.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS
Hacking Computer Security: BSides Austin 2013
Locksporting
Shifting the Paradigm of Private Security
Misconduct in Science and Research


Some theories to explain crime:

The Classical School, The Positive School, The Chicago School, Rational Choice, Routine Activities, Lifestyle Theory, Cognitive Theory, XYZ Chromosome, Sociobiology, Differential Conditionality, Social Learning Theories, Modeling/Imitation, Differential Association, Differential Identification, Differential Reinforcement, Social Learning Theory, Psychoanalytic Theories, Moral Development Theories, Criminal Personality Theory, Social Strain Theories, Strain Theory, General Strain Theory, Social Disorganization, Anomie Theory, Subculture Theories, Culture Conflict Theory, Subculture of Delinquency, Cloward & Ohlin's Differential Opportunity, Focal Concerns, High Delinquency Areas, Subculture of Violence, Labeling Theories, Tagging, Primary & Secondary Deviance, Developmental Career Model, Radical Non-Intervention, Social Control, Containment Theory, Social Bond Theory, Techniques of Neutralization, Low Self-Control Theory, Peacemaking , Reintegrative Shaming, Radical, Feminist, Conflict Theories:, Crime, Sex, Inequality & Power, Marxist Theories, Social Reality, Liberation Theory, Opportunity Theory, Power-Control Theory, Instrumental Theory.


For essays in objective (rational-empirical) criminology, follow the links on my criminology and sociology website, Washtenaw Justice.