Subculture Of Violence Research Articles

LAW ENFORCEMENT LEADERS AND THE RACIAL COMPOSITION OF ARRESTS

This paper introduces a novel avenue of study for understanding the mechanisms behind racial discrimination in law enforcement. I exploit a new 25‐year panel history of the race of every U.S. sheriff to shed light on the potentially important role of managers who make hiring decisions and set departmental priorities. Comparing agencies that experience racial transitions to agencies with overlapping jurisdictions reveals that the ratio of Black‐to‐White arrests is significantly higher under White sheriffs. Heterogeneity analysis indicates that the effects are driven by arrests for less‐serious offenses and by targeting Black crime types. (JEL J15, K42, M54, H76)

Against the law: Arthur Maimane’s pioneering hard-boiled black detective fiction in Drum Magazine

ABSTRACTThis article sets out to re-examine, and recover, South Africa’s first hard-boiled crime fiction created by a black writer: Arthur Maimane’s crime stories published in Drum magazine in 1953. Maimane wrote a series of stories about a black PI, styled on the American hard-boiled genre for Drum, a popular South African magazine aimed at a black audience, known for its borrowing from American popular culture. Mamaine’s fiction has been widely dismissed by generations of Drum critics, as “derivative” “imitation.” Repositioning the stories within the broader context of crime fiction suggests quite a different reading. Maimane’s stories reveal how tensions between the genre and laws in apartheid South Africa resulted in radical alterations to the hard boiled formula. Since Maimane’s stories precede Chester Himes’s African-American novels, they should be recognized as a pioneering example of black crime fiction that demonstrates the relationship between race and genre.

The Voice of Protest in Native Son

Native Son is the masterpiece of Richard Wright, black American novelist (1908-1960). It is thought as the landmark of American black literature. After its publication, the novel shakes the American literary circle and American society as well. The thesis analyzes the psychological cause of crime of black, and takes apart the social cause of black crime, points out that racism is the social cause of black crime. Blacks begin to fight against the unequal social system. This is also the voice of protest of the novel.

Connecting setting and subculture: A qualitative examination of violent incidents related to gangs, race, and other personal issues from the incarcerated youth perspective

Violent behavior within correctional settings has been a prominent topic in criminological scholarship. Violence is common among gang members within correctional facilities and scholarship has found that violence also occurs due to race issues. Additional research shows that violent incidents in adult correctional settings may also stem from other personal issues. But there has been little research addressing the characteristics of violent incidents related to gangs, race and other personal issues within youth correctional facilities. The current project fills this research gap by utilizing interviews from over 260 incarcerated male youth, which include over 700 violent incident narratives. Qualitative thematic analyses are conducted on the relationship between the institutional setting and violence, and whether there is a distinct violent subculture. The results highlight similarities and differences in situational characteristics and dynamics of violent incidents motivated by gangs, race, and other personal issues. Implications for theory, policy, and programming, and directions for future research are discussed.

‘Culture Is Inseparable from Race’: Culture Wars from Pat Buchanan to Milo Yiannopoulos

‘Culture Is Inseparable from Race’: Culture Wars from Pat Buchanan to Milo Yiannopoulos

The code of the street and cooperation with the police: Do codes of violence, procedural injustice, and police ineffectiveness discourage reporting violent victimization to the police?

PurposeFew quantitative studies have tested Anderson's (1999) suggestion that reliance on codes of violence and mistrust in the police reduce the likelihood of cooperating with the police after being victimized. We examine whether perceived codes of violence, perceived police effectiveness, and perceived procedural injustice influence the decision to report crime to the police. We also examine whether these relationships interact with individual or situational characteristics. MethodsThis study applies binary logistic regression to a sample of 687 victims of violence from the Seattle Neighborhoods and Crime Survey. ResultsThe results indicated that procedural injustice had significant effects on crime reporting, though this relationship was conditioned by victim injury. Codes of violence and police effectiveness were related to crime reporting, but only among Black crime victims. ConclusionsTaken together, the results underscore the importance of police-community relations, as poor perceptions of the police and reliance on oneself for protection and justice reduce cooperation with the police, especially among minorities.

The Spectacle of Lynching: Rituals of White Supremacy in the Jim Crow South

AbstractFrom 1890s to the 1930s, white mobs tortured and killed thousands of African Americans across the South. These lynchings, even those committed by the smallest of mobs, were ritualistic and performative, enacting and reinforcing the core beliefs of white supremacy. The narratives and photographs produced after lynchings likewise created and circulated representations of white domination and black subordination. Lynching was thus more than a social or political form of violence; it was a cultural spectacle that conveyed meaning to its white participants and spectators. This article, adapted from the author’s 2009 book, examines the forces that gave rise to lynching spectacles and the cultural work those spectacles performed. It argues that, although the spectacle was reinforced through modern technologies, such as photography, lynching ultimately arose as a reaction against the transformations that modern life had brought to the South. Industrialization and urbanization had destabilized the racial hierarchy and fueled white fears of a black crime wave. Lynching was a violent means to assert order in the face of potential disorder. As such, it was rooted in traditional practices, such as notions of popular justice and public executions, and white southerners interpreted lynching spectacles through local customs and beliefs. Over time, the dissemination of lynching spectacle nationally through modern media by anti‐lynching activists contributed to the decline of mob violence.

Subcultures of violence and African American crime rates

A re-examination of the relationship between socioeconomic adversities and crime, especially when focused on violent crime by African Americans over long time periods, suggests that the prevailing reliance on purely structural analysis is insufficient and that analysis relying in part on cultural factors will be advantageous in explaining elevated or relatively low violent crime rates of particular social groups.

Behavior of Bonek Supporters in the Perspective Subculture of Violence

Behavior of Bonek Supporters in the Perspective Subculture of Violence

Junkies and Jim Crow: The Boggs Act of 1951 and the Racial Transformation of New Orleans’ Heroin Market

This article details the origin and passage of the Boggs Act of 1951, as well as a similar drug law passed at the state level in Louisiana. Both laws featured strict mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes, which led to a demographic transformation of New Orleans’ heroin markets in the early 1950s: As New Orleans’ Italian-American Mafiosi retreated from the lower echelons of the heroin economy, entrepreneurial African Americans took their place. In turn, many black leaders came to support both stricter drug laws and increased police focus on crime in black neighborhoods. This demand was rooted in African Americans’ frustration with the New Orleans Police Department and its Jim Crow practice of ignoring intra-racial black crime. It also became important for black leaders to distance themselves from the “criminal element”—an otherwise potent political symbol for white segregationists.

Examining the race, poverty, and crime nexus adding Asian Americans and biosocial processes

This article examines race, poverty, and criminal behavior ignoring criminological orthodoxy adding two features that spoil the politically correct mantra that black crime results from white racism. Adding East Asians, who surpass white Americans in almost every index of prosocial behavior despite experiencing a history of prejudice and discrimination aimed at them, casts serious doubt on that contention. To be consistent with structural arguments for black poverty and crime, proponents would have to attribute Asian successes and low crime rates to pro-Asian bias on the part of whites to their own detriment. The second addition is biosocial science. This perspective links criminology to other more advanced disciplines and research methodologies and uses their theories, techniques, and technology, such as allostasis, epigenetics, DNA analysis and neuroimaging. No group has suffered more from poverty and crime than African Americans, and no group will benefit more from a forthright examination of its causes.

“Mighty Like A River”: The Black Protestant Church and Violence in Black Communities1

ABSTRACTLittle empirical attention has been devoted to the link between black Protestant adherence and crime, despite significant public and political interest in the correlates of offending in black communities, as well as both historical treatments of the black church and prominent sociological theories pointing to black Protestantism as working to mitigate social problems. Using 2010 Religious Congregations and Membership Survey and county-level crime data, we examine whether black Protestantism is negatively associated with homicide, robbery, burglary, and larceny, especially in more disadvantaged black communities. We conclude by discussing the ongoing public debate surrounding the future of the black Protestant church, and we suggest directions for future research.

From Subcultures to Toolkits: Ethnicity and Violence in Israeli Prisons

Research on violence in US prisons frequently finds higher rates of violence among ethnic minorities compared to whites. Explanations focus on a “subculture of violence,” sometimes referred to as an honor culture or code of the street, whereby minorities import a deeply internalized, violent subculture into prison. Subcultural theories of violence have been challenged by scholarship that views culture as providing a “toolkit” of frames and scripts that individuals draw upon in different social contexts. According to this model, the importation of violence is far from inevitable, because violence results from the interplay between social context and cultural toolkits. We assess the ability of these two cultural models to explain ethnic differences in prison violence in a different national context by comparing rates of violence among Arab Muslim and Jewish criminal prisoners in Israel. Subcultural models lead us to expect higher rates of violence among Arab Muslim prisoners, while a toolkit-based explanation that draws on social identity research predicts lower rates of violence. We test these hypotheses using both logistic regression and propensity score matching on data covering over 16,000 prisoners, supplemented by in-depth interviews with prisoners and staff. Our results conflict with the expectations of subcultural theories and lend support to culture-as-toolkit explanations. We conclude by discussing the relevance of our findings for research on prison violence, theories of the relationship between culture and violence, and the usefulness of incorporating social identity into toolkit theory.

Lunacy and Liberation: Black Crime, Disability, and the Production and Eradication of the Early National Enemy

Lunacy and LiberationBlack Crime, Disability, and the Production and Eradication of the Early National Enemy Andrea Stone (bio) Insanity is the saddest and most terrible of all diseases,—the most pitiable and helpless of all the states and forms of human helplessness. And yet it is a condition to which all men are liable, and into which any man may at any time fall with or without premonition. In its relation to crime it presents one of the darkest and most mysterious problems of medical and criminal jurisprudence. —George L. Harrison, Legislation on Insanity: A Collection of All the Lunacy Laws of the States and Territories of the United States to the Year 1883, Inclusive, Philadelphia, 1884 In 1795, a Massachusetts slave named Pomp confessed to having murdered his owner, Captain Charles Furbush, with an axe while the man lay sleeping in his bed. Pomp’s firsthand account of the murder was published in a broadside, the Dying Confession of Pomp, A Negro Man, Who Was Executed at Ipswich, on the 6th August, 1795, for Murdering Capt. Charles Furbush, of Andover, Taken from the Mouth of the Prisoner, and Penned by Jonathan Plummer (see fig. 1). As well as confessing to the killing, Pomp’s dying words testify to Furbush’s disreputable and abusive character and his ineptness as a farmer, contra Pomp’s expertise, and recount the floggings Pomp received at his owner’s hand after attempts to run away. The most striking aspect of the confession, however, is Pomp’s description of the “fits,” “lunacy,” and “voices” that afflicted him in the time leading up to the murder. In Pomp’s example, readers get a portrayal not only of black criminality but of black disability as well. Pomp’s narrative and confession highlight Furbush’s drastic attempts to dehumanize Pomp and demonstrate the early [End Page 109] Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Jonathan Plummer, Dying Confession of Pomp, 1795. Courtesy Phillips Library, Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, MA. The image displays the one-page broadside, grainy with four columns of type. The title displays the words “Dying Confession” in large type with the name “Pomp” and “A Negro Man” also emphasized. The woodcut shows a crude image of a gallows with a person hanging from it and a crowd of onlookers below. There appear to be two other figures atop the gallows. national American registering of the black outlaw as enemy—an even deeper threat than the criminal—his disability underscoring fears of social degeneration. According to William Nelson in Americanization of the Common Law, “criminal law served the function of enforcing puritanical religious and moral standards that continued to linger in the province as a whole and of reintegrating those who had violated the standards into the existing community structure” (40). Enforcing religious and moral standards and bringing violators back into the fold, crime narrative publications [End Page 110] and public executions had an instructional function. Beyond didacticism, however, the period saw the increased racialization of sin and the association of black people, in particular, with such religious and moral transgressions. Richard Slotkin argues (as Donna Hunter paraphrases), “blackness was used as a metaphor to describe class and generational disobedience (sin)” (qtd. in Hunter, Dead Men 82). Blacks came to symbolize sin and its consequence for white audiences and readers, as crime narratives implicitly or otherwise warned slave masters against treating slaves too leniently. After 1750, in the swirl of rumors about slave uprisings, increased fears leading up to the Haitian revolution, and the general context of a seeming obsession with the threat of black violence, crime narratives began to depict black people as degenerate. This essay’s reading of Pomp’s Dying Confession (1) interprets his fits and voices as suggesting at once disability and liberatory prophecy, (2) situates the confession in the context of early national anxieties about the loss of personal and national control and reason, and (3) supplements the reading with research into Pomp and his amanuensis Jonathan Plummer—the significance of which is rendered clear and visible against the horizon of the era’s print culture more broadly. Taken together, these aspects of the confession and context within...

Two Screenplays by Charles Burnett: <em>Bless Their Little Hearts</em> (1984) and <em>Man in a Basket</em> (2003)

No filmmaker has been more committed to showing that black lives matter than Charles Burnett, whose wide-ranging work has been devoted to such issues as urban poverty, police killings, slavery, and African revolution. Best known as the director of Killer of Sheep (1977), To Sleep with Anger (1990), The Glass Shield (1994) , and Nightjohn (1996) , Burnett is in fact a total filmmaker who has often written, photographed, and edited both his own films and those of his compatriots in the L.A. Rebellion. This essay concentrates on his relatively neglected talents as a writer, using two projects as examples: Bless Their Little Hearts , written for director Billy Woodberry, and Man in a Basket , which Burnett hopes someday to direct. The first might be described as an equally powerful companion to Killer of Sheep , and the second is arguably the finest screen adaptation of the black crime novelist Chester Himes.

The Impact of Judicial Elections in the Sentencing of Black Crime

This paper explores the possibility that criminal court judges engage in discriminatory sentencing in response to judicial elections. I use a research design that (1) distinguishes between the effects of judicial elections versus preferences and (2) separates the effects of judicial elections versus the elections of other public officials. I find that incarceration rates rise by 2.4 percentage points in the final six months of the election cycle, but only for black, not white felons. These effects are more pronounced in districts where the median voter is expected to have higher levels of racial prejudice toward blacks.

Internet-Based Radicalization as Enculturation to Violent Deviant Subcultures

ABSTRACTThis work examines the intersections of subcultural theories and radicalization theories from terrorism studies to identify how they may be improved through integration. To date there have been almost no efforts to merge these frameworks, though terrorism shares common characteristics of deviant subcultures. Both are driven by ideologies that are in opposition to that of their targets. We focus particularly on the process of online radicalization to assess how subcultural research in online environments may inform the process of enculturation into a terrorist belief system. We conclude by discussing the implications of this expansion for research on terrorism and subcultures.

How do “Subcultures of Violence” lead to violence? The interplay of internalization and prevalence of norms legitimizing violence in the explanation of youth violence

Sowohl die Internalisierung als auch die soziale Verbreitung gewaltlegitimierender Normen sind empirisch mit Gewalthandeln verknupft. Die genauen handlungstheoretischen Prozesse, uber die gewaltlegitimierende Normen handlungsleitend werden, sind jedoch bislang nicht geklart. Ausgehend von sozialpsychologischer, ethnologischer und soziologischer Forschung zu gewalttatigen Subkulturen werden zum einen die Befolgung internalisierter Normen und zum anderen Statusabwagungen als relevante handlungsleitende Prozesse identifiziert und mit Hilfe des Modells der Frame-Selektion in ein allgemeines handlungstheoretisches Modell integriert. Zum Test der abgeleiteten Hypothesen werden Daten zu Gewaltintentionen und Responsezeiten eines faktoriellen Surveys analysiert, die im Rahmen einer Schulerbefragung (N = 2635) erhoben wurden. Die Ergebnisse von Multilevel-Modellen bestatigen das erwartete interaktive Zusammenspiel der individuellen Internalisierung gewaltlegitimierender Normen, der sozialen Verbreitung gewaltlegitimierender Normen sowie des Provokationsgrades einer Situation in der Erklarung selbstberichteter Gewaltintentionen und der Antwortgeschwindigkeit der Befragten.

Constructions of Gender in Contemporary South African Crime Fiction: A Feminist Literary Analysis of the Novels of Angela Makholwa

This article offers a feminist literary analysis of Angela Makholwa’s two crime novels, Red Ink (2007) and Black Widow Society (2013), in order to explore how a black female author represents gendered constructions of identity and gender violence in the genre of crime fiction. Over the last few decades, crime fiction has received increased scholarly attention in academic circles, both locally and abroad. In the South African context, scholars have tended to focus their analytical gaze on a few, well-known and established crime writers. I seek to extend the critical debate about South African crime writing by turning my attention to the work of a black female crime writer. Although Makholwa’s novels make a number of observations about the salience of race in the South African milieu, this analysis focuses on her fictional representations of contemporary gender assumptions and relations. In particular, I consider how her literary representations of gender violence invite readers to trace the violence back to the gendered ordering of female characters’ lived experiences. A close reading of her novels reveals that misogyny is rife and that, regardless of where they are located on the socio-economic ladder, female characters must negotiate their way in terms of very prescriptive and fundamentally gendered scripts. Rather than regarding violence against women as aberrations, these texts suggest that such violence is pervasive and that the brutal instances of physical violence are merely extreme manifestations of discursive and structural gender oppression that shapes every aspect of the female characters’ lives. This article follows an interdisciplinary approach and I utilise founding and contemporary gender theory as well as sociological gender research to enrich the literary analysis of Makholwa’s texts.

„Wir schlagen wie eine Faust“: Die Bande als Lebensform sowjetischer Straßenkinder unter Stalin

The phenomenon of besprizornye, street children, has been explored several times by scholars as one of the gravest social problems of the early Soviet and Stalinist times. However, the strategies of survival and self-empowerment of these waifs have either been omitted or remained on a purely descriptive level. This article deals with the state’s struggle for hegemony on the streets and the resulting repression of street children on the one hand, and with the besprizornyj gang life on the other. Waifs usually formed gangs to survive on the street, often mingling with the criminal underground. Their everyday life was deeply shaped by violence, due to their criminal subsistence and violent clashes with the police or the general population, but also to gang fights and practices of ritual violence ensuring internal hierarchy and discipline. Violence began to shape the waif’s profile and communication, so that these everyday practices led to the formation of a subculture of violence. Although street children were marginalized and repressed by the Stalinist state, the criminal underworld or the GULAG were not the only outcome for them. The communication and power structures the besprizornye grew up with did also equip them well for the Red Army, the NKVD or the Party apparatus in general - all three of which gladly recruited among former children’s home inmates. This double compatibility of street children with the criminal world and state apparatuses shows how the Stalinist regime, by repressing and marginalizing these children, driving them into violent subcultures, had in fact formed subjects perfectly adapted to Stalin’s system of violence.