I don’t mind a mixed review of my book (Contemporary Sociology), but it does bother me when a reviewer calls my participant-observation research a “major flaw.” It’s like a man who doesn’t like olive oil, fish, and lamb bashing a Greek restaurant for being too “Mediterranean.” If you don’t like the concept, don’t review it. Basically, goes the tired old…
Tag: sociology
Dorm Room Dealers
There’s a great new academic book out by A. Rafik Mohamed and Erik D. Fritsvold: Dorm Room Dealers: Drugs and the privileges of race and class. Too many books (my own included) treat drug crimes like it’s some black thing that whites wouldn’t understand unless some kind-hearted interpreters explain to “us” those strange things “they” do. Well it ain’t like…
Ghetto Reading List
In a footnote (p. 215) in Cop in the Hood, I list what I consider essential books in urban sociology (they’re not all about the “ghetto”). Somebody was nice enough to take the time to put this list on Amazon. It’s nice to see all these books in one place.
More Prison, Less Crime?
If you look at this chart, it’s not hard to think that the great crime drop was caused by locking up all the criminals. A student brought this up in class. In the 1990s, it looks pretty convincing: But just looking at the 1990s misses the big picture. Here’s the same data going back to 1925. Crime went up and…
A story of no story
The other night I had a minor but perhaps brilliant idea. What if there were a correlation between the numberof prisons in a state and that state’s incarceration rate? Perhaps the more prisons there are, the greater the political influences that play in a state, leading to more people locked up! Prison-Industrial-Complex shit I’m talking about! Of course, biggerstates would…
Those Slippery Stats
Somebody tried to do to me what I tried to do to the Heritage Foundation. I was accused of playing fast and loose the numbers in my Washington Post op-ed. In the old days I could have just challenged him to a duel. I’d feel pretty confident going into that battle! Instead I have to defend my honor with a…
Incarceration
Nothing new here. But it’s good to have a refresher course every now and then. It’s too easy for prisoners to be out of sight and out of mind. (plus these are the neatest diagrams I’ve found in the subject) Now it’s 2,300,000 behind bars. The increase is all since 1970 and the war on drugs. It has little relationship…
Teach Grammar!
Stanley Fish gets to the issues on teaching the craft of writing in “What Should Colleges Teach?” I was blessed to have good English teachers throughout my Evanston public-school education. I also had good and literate parents. Collectively, they somehow taught me skills I use pretty much every day: write, type, and edit (though I must have been sick on…
Sentence Length [or lies from the Heritage Foundation]
In a Heritage Foundation foundation report by Charles Stimson and Andrew Grossman, I learned a very surprising fact: Convicted persons in the United States actually served less time in prison, on average, than the world average and the European average. Among the 35 countries surveyed on this question in 1998, the average time actually served in prison was 32.62 months.…
So You’re Going to be on TV?
Today was my third time on TV. I loveradio interviews. TV? I’m still not comfortable with it. Radio is kind of like real life. TV is a bizarre and totally different creature. In case you’re going on TV, here are a few things I wish somebody had told me before my first time. 1) Make sure you’re going to be…