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

Alternatives to Prison (Part 3 of 3)

Laissez-faire Criminology is my assertion (on this blog) that you do not need to react to every wrong or harm, either against yourself or someone else.  Defining “human” as “rational animal” and given that violent offenders lack self-awareness, they cannot be considered human.  Self-righteous punishment of a criminal is no more meaningful than scolding a coyote or attempting to corral a tornado.  (Indeed, prisons are nothing if not corrals full of tornados.)  Sometimes the best thing you can do is to cut your losses and mind your own business.

Private treaties are one way that corporations deal with white collar crime.  Of all the harms that individuals visit on each other, white collar crime perfectly matches the theory of the rational actor.  White collar criminals are planfully competent.  They are privileged, educated, economically comfortable.  Therefore, the remediations are individualized and based on profit.

 “In responding to and resolving the criminal behavior of employees, organizations routinely choose options other than criminal prosecution, for example, suspension without pay, transfer, job reassignment, job redesign (eliminating some job duties), civil restitution, and dismissal...
“While on the surface, it appears that organizations opt for less severe sanctions than would be imposed by the criminal justice system, in reality, the organizational sanctions may have greater impact...  In addition, the private systems of criminal justice are not always subject to principles of exclusionary evidence, fairness, and defendant rights which characterize the public criminal justice systems. The level of position, the amount of power, and socio-economic standing of the employee in the company may greatly influence the formality and type of company sanctions.  In general, private justice systems are characterized by informal negotiations and outcomes, and nonuniform standards and procedures among organizations and crime types.”
(Hallcrest Report cited in Introduction to Private Security, Hess and Wrobleski, West Publishing, St.Paul, 1982, 1988. The Hallcrest Report I and II, by William C. Cunningham and Todd H. Taylor, et al., Butterworth-Heinemann, Boston, 1985 and 1990.)
 

When Nothing Works

Robert Martinson is famous for “What works? Questions and answers about prison reform” (The Public Interest 35.2; 1974: 22-54).  His research was immediately recast as “nothing works.”  Martinson found that every attempt at rehabilitation in prison had failures, often in greater proportion to their successes.  Successful treatments tended to work only for various minorities, often poorly identified or defined. 

Eventually, the claim that “nothing works” generated another response.  Among very many articles, consider:

·       “Beyond ‘What Works?’ A 25-year Jubilee Retrospective of Robert Martinsons Famous Article,” by Rick Sarre, in Australian & New Zealand Journal of Criminology 34: 38-46.

·       “Does Correctional Treatment Work? A Clinically Relevant and Psychologically Informed Meta-Analysis” by D.A. Andrews, Ivan Zinger, et al., Criminology, Volume 28, Issue 3, Pages 369–404, August 1990. 

Reduce your problem population as much as you want, eventually you will find individuals for whom nothing we know of will solve their problems.  What do you do with the unregenerate?

Perhaps we should just kill them.  We would save ourselves the trouble and expense.  Consider that we know that a child who is cruel to animals grows up to be a violent offender.  Would it be right to kill a child for abusing a family pet?  Ideally, the offender would be remediated and re-integrated with one of the other responses.

The therapies and remedies discussed above may not work in all cases.  Ultimately, we are left with an intractable problem. We build very many small spaces for internal exile.  In Russia, they have all of Siberia for internal exile.  That may remain the best solution for the worst cases.

ALSO ON NECESSARY FACTS

Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part I

Active Defense and Passive Aggression, Part II

A Forensics Bibliography

Junk Criminology as Pseudo-Science

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)