Qualifiers

[BG45]

LoBasso (2011) Topic: Castle Doctrine
1) Governor Corbett of Pennsylvania signs "common sense" Castle Doctrine Bill
2) Citizens no longer need be in their home/castle to act. If they feel threatened ANYWHERE they can legally kill an attacker/someone they think is about to take their life.

[BG45]

Skinner (2011) Topic: Human Trafficking

1) TIME magazine article
2) Budget against trafficking for a year is equal to one day of the budget for the War on Drugs.
3) Budget against trafficking is being cut despite biparitsan support, the War on Drugs budget is being increased again despite candidate Obama's promises.

[BG45]

Warren (2011). Topic: Economics, race, and crime
1) Need community and police to overcome distrust of one another. See: Boston Ten Points model, African American ministers helped police and community overcome historic distrust.

[BG45]

Lauritsen & Heimer (2010) Topic: Economics, race, and crime
1) Disaggregated crime data from NCVS over the past 30 years
2) Violence drops across all races around early 90s

[BG45]

Martinez (2011) Topic: Economics, Race, and Crime
1) Latinos are primarily ignored as a racial group outside of immigration research despite being the largest minority group in the United States
2) Latino violence has decreased despite the immigration boom, this coincides with virtually every study of immigrant crime from Sutherland in the 1930s onward, that first generation immigrants tend to be law abiding despite stereotypes to the contrary.

[BG45]

Clear (2010) Topic: Public Criminologies
1) Public criminologies is a term used to denote the writing and conducting of studies with the aid of practitioners. This goes against what many in the "Ivory Tower" advocate, but is necessary to be taken seriously in the public policy arena.

Personal note for the thread that isn't on a notecard: Dr. Todd Clear is probably one of my favorite academic authors. He has a no-nonsense, no poo poo strategy when it comes to saying we need to make work that is relevant and accessible to real world applications and has written a great deal on the topic, as well as on the War on Drugs. His writing, to that end, is often accessible and easier to read due to less pilings of verbose filler material that serves no purpose. He currently serves as the President of the American Society of Criminology, where I will be presenting a juvenile justice paper this coming November.

[BG45]

Uggen & Inderbitzen (2010) Topic: Public Criminologies
1) Public Criminology must be given more acceptance and legitimacy in the field.
2) Vibrant public criminology will help bring new voice to discussions while addressing common crime myths and misconceptions
3) Some feel that writing to be publicly accessible dilutes the science and makes it more of a political lap dog.

[BG45]

Rock (2010) Topic: Public Criminologies

1) Dr. Rock can't say anything in under 500 words per point.
2) Warns from several personal experiences with the European Union member states that politics is fickle and will always muck up any attempt at public criminologies to unite practitioners with theorists.
3) Criminology is an inherently skeptical field of study, better suited to puncturing ideas as poor than providing good ones.
4) Relevance is subjective.

[BG45]

Land (2010) Topic: Public Criminologies
1) Public criminology is a good idea, but it needs to have actual support
2) Proposes the creation of think tanks with either groups in DC or between the American Society of Criminology and the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences to provide research briefs for policy makers.

[BG45]

Loader & Sparks (2010) Topic: Public Criminologies

1) Criticize how we put our work into boxes
2) Notes the divisions within the field already, as expressed by the 9 working groups of the European Criminology Society.

[BG45]

Tonry (2010) Topic: Public Criminologies

1) "We academics, however, have no special standing that entitles us to have our views given
special weight. We are as entitled as anyone else to express our views about controversial issues,
but we should do it on the basis that we favor or disapprove particular policies for empirical,
policy, normative, or ideological reasons and not on the basis that officials have misread or
disregarded the evidence or have not been guided by our wisdom."
2) There has been a long history of public criminologists, just not by that name.

[BG45]

Mears (2010) Topic: Public Criminologies
1) Need to have a balanced portfolio of research
2) We need more policy oriented research
3) We must never stop with the basic science research though, because then we just become one more interest group

[Laudate_Dominum]

Phil,

Maybe you can answer something I was wondering in a discussion on another site. Why do some states seem to have waaay more sex offenders than others?

Michigan: 4,609 sex offenders per million people; Minnesota: 48 offenders per million. Montana: 4,979 offenders per million; Oregon: 195 per million. ?? ([url="http://www.familywatchdog.us/OffenderCountByState.asp"]source[/url])

[BG45]

Braga (2010) Topic: Homelessness and Crime
1) Safer Cities Initiative in Los Angeles deals with the policing of disorder in Skid Row
2) Police should help the homeless connect with services such as shelters, non-profits, etc.

Personal Note for Thread: For what it's worth, this article touches on something I've heard with almost every practitioner I've talked to in the field, as well as those who later went into academia. People like to imagine the police always solving crimes and such, but the majority of time is spent dealing with paperwork and acting in a social work capacity to an extent; working with the homeless to find them shelter, drug treatment, or employment is hardly an uncommon occurrence.

[BG45]

[quote name='Laudate_Dominum' timestamp='1311199085' post='2271988']
Phil,

Maybe you can answer something I was wondering in a discussion on another site. Why do some states seem to have waaay more sex offenders than others?

Michigan: 4,609 sex offenders per million people; Minnesota: 48 offenders per million. Montana: 4,979 offenders per million; Oregon: 195 per million. ?? ([url="http://www.familywatchdog.us/OffenderCountByState.asp"]source[/url])
[/quote]

Short Answer: I honestly can't tell you.

Long Answer: If I had to take a guess, I would say that it depends on the variation of sex offender laws and how they're enforced. There is no uniform set of sex offender laws (even regarding registration) other than the Adam Walsh Act, which required people to register as a sex offender with a federal database or face federal charges. That and research shows that registries tend to be horribly out of date with as many as 1 in 10 sex offenders failing to register after they move, if they ever bothered to at all in the first place.

Mind if I post this to my FB as a question for the cohorts ahead of mine and my own to see if they can give me a good answer?