I feel like the problem that needs to be addressed is re-entry into society, and the age-old problem of prisons – how do we balance punishment with reasonable leniency Continue reading
Google Fusion Tables
Google’s new Fusion Tables is a data visualization app that we will use to map publicly available data.
Before you get started, there are a few things you’ll need in place:
1) A Google Docs account
2) Download your desired data files. Info on acceptable formats for use in Fusion Tables can be found here, but typically you’ll use spreadsheets (.xls, .xlsx or google spreadsheets) or CSV files
3) Connect to the Fusion Tables app: In Google Docs, click the red “Create” button, then click “Connect more apps” and select Fusion Tables
In order to map your data, you will need a file with geocoded (location) data
1) In Google Docs, click “Create” and select Fusion Tables
2) Choose your first data file to import into Google Docs (if you have a .csv file, make sure the “comma” is selected as the Separator character), click Next
3) Review the preview, click Next
4) Give your table a name, attribution information, and a description. Click Finish. You should then see your data as a Fusion Table
5) If your data already has location data, you will see a tab for an automatically generated map. If your data needs location data, you will need to fuse your data file with a geocoded table (one that contains latitude/longitude, zip codes, countries, states, or cities, etc.)
To fuse your table with another location data set:
1) In your Fusion table, click “File” then “Merge…” Select the location file and click Next
2) Confirm the source of match, and click Next
3) Select the columns you want to merge, and click Merge
4) View your newly merged table, which will now have a “Map of latitude” tab with an automatically generated map
5) You should now be able to change the map styles and manipulate the map in various ways
*Note: if your location file contains names of countries, states, cities, etc., then those names will be highlighted in yellow in your Fusion table. You will have to change those names into geocoded locations. To do so, click File, then “Geocode”. Click here for a video tutorial (geocoding starts at around minute 3).
Resources
Fusion Tables video tutorials (see especially the video by Kathryn Hurley)
About Fusion Tables
Help & Troubleshooting
NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene
NYC Department of City Planning public data
statistics from NYCLU
Great Issues–But are all Alexanders Statistics Correct?
“The New Jim Crown” by Michelle Alexander focuses on a central issue of our time: the penal system. Increasingly research into criminology seems to tell us that putting non-violent offenders behind bars has little positive effect on crime rates and only further hardens them, making them more likely to become possible violent offenders. Sociologists and economists will talk about the economic effects of mass incarceration, both at a macro and micro level: at a macro level, it is costing our nation between $30,000-$40,000 a year for every one of the 2 million behind bars—at a micro level it devastates African American communities and prevents families from ever accruing any real markers of wealth. Research into psychology also should lead us as a nation to question how culpable some of these criminals truly are. Surely many need to be contained, rehabilitated, or monitored—however as in the case of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally handicapped man executed under the Clinton administration who “had so little conception of what was about to happen to him that he asked for the dessert from his last meal to be saved for him until the morning,” clearly we are treating punishment as the de facto response, rather then recognizing that many criminals likely suffer from mental illness of some sort or the other, questions of free agency aside (56).
While I do not believe I can truly disagree with many of Alexander’s assertions, I do slightly take issue with the motives she believes underlie our massive penal system. Alexander believes slavery transitioned to Jim Crow Segregation, from there to engineered class antagonisms and social and economic discrimination, which then led to the mass incarceration of blacks today, what she deems the “New Jim Crow.” The motivation she believes is racism. While I agree racism is likely a predominant factor, I do not think it is the only one, and perhaps not even the primary one. This is because the politicians engineering these “tough on crime” laws and rhetoric are doing so for personal political gain—it is all self-serving. If interest served them, they probably would throw Lithuanians as a people under the carpet. I think the motivation is more personal political fame and wealth, and the people seeking this will do anything to obtain it, including stoke class or race antagonisms. While I agree with Alexander that many of the politicians egging these incarceration laws forward are morally bankrupt, I also thinking that a good deal of them are likely too intelligent to truly believe racist rhetoric themselves—that based on phenotypic differences some people are inherently better than others—rather I think they simply want to further themselves and will do so by any method possible.
The one issue I take with Alexander is that many of her statistics seem cherry picked, or that she simply misunderstood them. In the introduction, she states that while between the 1960’s and 1970’s Germany, Finland, and the US had approx. the same crime rates, the US prison rate dwarfed that of Germany and Finland. From the brief research I’ve done, she seems to be conflating petty crime with violent crime. Yes, they may have had overall similar crime rates, but not murder rates or gun violence—given that both Germany and Finland don’t make it easy to obtain guns—which to some extent could explain why the US imprisoned more (only to an extent). Additionally, she states that Blacks and Hispanics are no more likely to commit crimes than whites, statistically. While it is true that of course no race is naturally more violent than another, if you look simply at homicides in NYC, over 85% are perpetrated by blacks and Hispanics, as are the victims over 80% black or Hispanic. Naturally this is due to socioeconomic circumstances. I don’t have a specific reference here, but in the last seminar class we did some research into this phenomenon. These were just two statements regarding stats in the intro that I took issue with, though reading further there are too many to count.
The question I would ask you is do you know someone in prison and do you think they deserve to be there?
-Jesse Geisler
Is today really a New Jim Crow era?
When reading the thoughts of Michelle Alexander on today’s racial injustice particularly towards the African-American group, I sensed that she is rather biased and therefore, only finding ways to defend for her fellow righteous African-Americans and their ancestors. While there is no doubt that the slavery and the establishment of the Jim Crow laws in American history were extremely harsh and unfair towards this racial group, I think comparing those historical events to African-Americans subjected to underprivileged and less favorable conditions due to criminal activity and record is not exactly the right correlation. It just so happens that there is a much higher percentage of African-Americans falling into this category of felons, and that is out of their own doing and actions to become those felons, not because another racial group forced them to commit such crimes. In my eyes, people are judged by what they have actually done nowadays because we don’t have ‘mass incarceration’ just because they are simply of African descent. No matter which President we have, a white, black, asian, etc. one, criminals are going to be treated the same way to get what they deserve for their wrongdoings. However, I am not objecting the fact that there are loopholes in the American criminal justice system, especially when racial stereotyping is put into play, but as with life, we have to fight for what is right.
The racial caste system is an interesting perspective. Alexander says that “We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.” (2) Of course, there are still minorities all over this country and ‘white’ people are considered the majority. I’m not going to deny that minorities usually have to put a greater effort to achieve greater political power in this country. However, I think with the election of President Obama, it shows that many racial boundaries have broken and that they don’t exist anymore as the way we have understood those boundaries for many years. Everyone has a chance to exercise their rights and they are not taken away from us unless we let them get taken away. Do you think there is a clear racial caste system in our society today? Do you think there is a “continuing legacy of slavery and Jim Crow” that has led to Alexander’s arguments thus far?
The New Jim Crow
My first thought upon reading through the Introduction and first chapter of this book was that this is a subject matter that people are afraid to discuss. The election of Barack Obama in 2008 seemed to be the ultimate achievement for an oppressed class, the fact that an African-American took the highest office in the most powerful country in the world, finally erased the boundary between blacks and whites. Well, It didn’t.
Mass incarceration, to be quite honest, isn’t good for anyone. First, it encourages racial profiling and discriminatory sentencing, and second, the cost of this large-scale incarceration puts a further strain on the economy, while not effectively inhibiting crime. My question is: how can we change the justice system to make it do its job in both an equal and effective way?
The New Jim Crow
As I read through the first chapters, I immediately realized how true the words written were. I decided to analyze for myself a little bit of my views on today’s society and realized, although we’ve come a far way, we still have a way to go. As I read through, I realized that this book isn’t unlike Professor Molina’s view. There are a lot of commonalities between the way we’re “using” the criminal justice system, and the way banks used zip codes and other redlining techniques to keep their businesses safe. The idea that the Blacks are dangerous is still a very powerful theme in today’s society. I myself will be feel more safe walking home at night if I saw a White man walking by than if I saw a Black man. But that’s completely illogical because of the fact that I know a few Black people and all of them are the sweetest people I know.
My father relayed to me a story once where he was driving on the highway when his car broke down. He was not far from the hospital he was working at, and apparently this was in a bad neighborhood. He needed a boost and no one on the highway stopped for him. My father said that he was worried as it was late at night and no one would be able to get to him before two hours. After fifteen minutes of waiting for someone to help him, a car pulled up near my father and this really big Black man stepped out of the car. My father was terrified because he thought he was going to get mugged. The man asked my father what was wrong with the car, and my father told him what had happened. The man brought his car over, boosted my father’s car, and then told my father that the area he was in was very dangerous. The man gave my father the cables he used to boost my father’s car with and said that in case of any emergencies, it helps to be prepared. The man, who knew nothing of my father, was, in my father’s terms, the most respectful nice gentleman ever. Looking back on it, my father thought of how silly it was that he was afraid of such a nice man.
Another key concept which I saw throughout the chapters was the idea of the cycle which we saw in Dr. Wallace’s paper. The poverty and inaccessibility is further exacerbated by the fact that the system keeps these people locked in this vicious cycle. Once again we see the trend of cause and effect, and the effect which gives rise once again to the cause.
My question to the author is, as a citizen of a country whose human rights movements seem to be extremely important, why is it that it takes so much effort to change something when the facts are so obviously clear? Is it really that many Americans are just plain stubborn?
The New Jim Crow
I found the idea of the New Jim Crow interesting. I’ve never looked at incarceration as another form of Jim Crow even though the numbers of those in prison are overwhelmingly African Americans. I however think her ideas are exaggerated. To compare incarceration due to someone committing a crime to slavery and Jim Crow laws that only applied to African Americans seems a bit extreme. I do however agree with her that racial discrimination is still extremely apparent in America today. In the big cities in America, it may be less apparent but once you travel more South, you can see that many people still hold onto the ideas of pre civil war days which is quite sad.
The idea that we’re stuck in a caste system is intriguing especially since America is known for the idea of there being social mobility. I think that people are not indefinately bound to their social class and there is social mobility, however it get’s harder as you go down the social class pyramid and especially harder for those who have been incarcerated to make it up the pyramid again. There should be better ways for those who have been incarcerated to integrate back into society.
Feedback on The New Jim Crow Introduction and Chapter 1
The reason why I have been looking forward to reading The New Jim Crow was because I have been focusing on the dangers of the Stop and Frisk law in New York City and across the United States recently, which not only violates against our civil liberties, but also is an act of racial profiling. What interested me even more was learning about how such a practice, in addition to the controversial “War on Drugs” came to be.
Deep-seated racism from white supremacist extremists that eventually become into the hegemonic norm is what causes such discrimination against black people, whether it was in the form of Bacon’s Rebellion, the failure of the Populist Party and its ideals, and the backlash to the Civil Rights Movement from segregationists that eventually manifested into “color-blind” racism through effective tactics from conservative leaders. The latest tactics included the portrayal of black people in the media as violent thugs, moochers, and welfare queens as a way to view “crime” as a problem instead of poverty, a problem which is rearing its ugly head today. The tactic of viewing black people negatively was what caused President Reagan to become extremely popular by many Americans, which caused him to deregulate corporations, leading to the immense class divide today.
The problem of poverty will not be solved unless racism is unlearned, and eventually eradicated. Poor and working class people would not be able to stand up against economic injustice in this society if there are racial tensions and conflicts among them.
What is even worse is that the problem with poverty disproportionately affects certain racial groups and black people are especially affected. The fact that black people are disproportionately arrested for drug crimes and other crimes amount for much more black prisoners, leading to lower voting rates, higher unemployment rates, and higher HIV rates. Even if there is not a change so radical as unlearning racism in the United States, there should at least be a more just criminal justice system.
Intro and Ch. 1
In the preface, when Alexander wrote that she is writing this book for people like her, people who cared about racial equality, it almost gave me chills. The reason why is because racial equality, to me, is so natural. Obviously, whites and blacks should have the same rights and be treated equally. For someone to go against that seems “not normal”. I quickly became interested in what Alexander’s “new” Jim Crow laws were.
I especially liked Alexander’s writing style and how she introduced Cotton and then traced back to his great grandfather and the rights that he, too, were denied. It helped to tie how racial issues were still prevalent today, especially in the criminal justice system. I never would have thought of this new Jim Crow law of mass incarceration. It is interesting to see how policies and ideas that were prevelant during slavery are still prevalent in America, today.
“The language of case may well seem foreign or unfamiliar to some” (Alexander 13). It does seem foreign because Americans are constantly fighting for equal rights and criminals should also deserve their rights after they have done their time. Otherwise, there is always a potential that the same crimes may be done and the reality that they will not be able to support themselves or their families.
My question is, how well spread in America is this notion that mass incarceration is a form of inequality.
