Harsh Punishment Research Articles

The (In)Visibility of Race in School Discipline Across Urban, Suburban, and Exurban Contexts

Background/Context: Racial disparities in school discipline represent a long-standing injustice in U.S. schools. Students of color, particularly Black students, are systematically subjected to harsher school disciplinary actions compared with their peers. A growing body of evidence demonstrates the severity of the problem and the negative consequences of harsh punishment, particularly given that students who are disciplined are more likely to be forced into the complex nexus of education and incarceration. Focus of Study: In this study, we aimed to understand how different racial contexts in urban, suburban, and exurban schools shaped responses to and understandings about racial disparities in school discipline. Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework that centers the visibility and invisibility of race (Artiles, 2019) throughout the disciplinary cycle, this study was guided by two research questions: (1) What are the similarities and differences in educators’ and students’ understandings of racial contexts and racial disparities in school discipline across urban, suburban, and exurban school districts? (2) How do urban, suburban, and exurban school districts’ racial contexts shape educators’ responses to racial disparities in discipline? Research Design: This research was part of a larger mixed-methods research–practice partnership that aimed to understand racial disparities in school discipline and how to address them across varying school contexts in Central Virginia. The qualitative portion of the study included individual and focus group interviews and classroom observations. The findings reported in this article focus specifically on 50 individual and focus group interviews with teachers, leaders, staff, and students. Findings: Our findings demonstrate the ways race was made visible and invisible in responses to and understandings about racial disparities in discipline. This was evident in the ways deficit perspectives were racialized and how race-evasive perspectives and ideologies dominated educators’ responses to the problem. We found these responses were mediated by the racial contexts of each school. For instance, we learned that educators at the urban middle school with a majority of Black and Latinx students were the most willing to discuss the role of race and racism in shaping racial disparities in discipline compared with educators at the suburban and exurban schools. Educators at the racially diverse suburban high school focused on socioeconomic diversity and relied on deficit cultural explanations for poverty. Contrastingly, educators at the exurban school openly discussed its racial homogeneity with its mostly White students, and their language regarding racial disparities was laced with race-evasive terms and some racist perspectives. Across suburban and exurban school contexts, many educators adopted race-evasive and deficit rationales for disproportionality in ways that failed to consider the role of the school in disciplinary outcomes. We also found that students across the three school contexts were more willing than educators to discuss the role of race and racism in explaining disparities in discipline. Conclusions/Recommendations: Findings from this study have important implications for how schools can respond more effectively to racial disparities in discipline. First, it is important that schools create policies and practices that provide clear guidelines to promote racial equity in discipline. Data should therefore be collected, shared, discussed, analyzed, and used to inform how to improve disciplinary practices and interventions at multiple intersections (e.g., by race, gender, socioeconomic status, and disability) given research that demonstrates disproportionality in discipline emerges among students of color and multiply-marginalized students. Second, schools must critically examine how their everyday beliefs about race become enacted in practice and ultimately institutionalized, thereby granting privileges to dominant groups. Third, schools can benefit from including and engaging with students as they reform disciplinary procedures to address racial disparities. Ultimately, disrupting racial inequities in discipline requires responses that include engagement with race and racism in ways that attend to both individual beliefs and school policies and practices.

공포와 관용 : 한국전쟁기 부역자 처벌의 이중성과 그 유산

During the Korean war, and after the Seoul city was retrieved from North Korean troops, the South Korean government began exacting punishments on collaborators who cooperated with the North Korean troops. In the Seoul area, not only open but also very public mass executions called ‘wholesale slaughters’ served as a fearful display for the population. At the time many reporters affiliated with foreign press, as well as the United Nations force, were present in the Seoul area, and the news of a mass execution would instantly be treated as international reports, but they were summarily silenced by South Korean authorities. In the meantime, throughout local areas, swift judgments and summary executions -accompanied by private and harsh punishments- were commonly occurring practices for known collaborators. In the wake of searching for and eliminating DPKR’s remnants, local left-wing supporters and partisan guerrillas, a lot of civilians were killed as well.BR Meanwhile, the South Korean government’s treatment of social elites or leaders in private and public sectors, such as national representatives(members of the national assembly), academic professors, literature authors and cultural figures, who all collaborated with North Korean authorities or troops in several capacities, were so tolerant and benevolent compared to the treatment ordinary citizens received from the government. Some of them were indeed judged or executed, but most of them were pardoned without any clear explanation. BR The punishment of collaborators by the South Korean government was triggered by many reasons. First, there was not only an administrative need for public punishment but also a practical necessity to ensure public security, as well as a sense of anger and revenge. Secondly, such punishments were also a continuation from overly excessive violence and tendency to suppress any kind of social disturbance that had continued since the year 1948. And finally, there was an ultimate political need to have the public turn a blind eye to the administration’s glaring political failures.BR There were differences in the South Korean government’s punishment of collaborators, not only between celebrities and ordinary people but between residents of the capital city and other local regions. Such polarity was caused by a series of elements. According to the nature of certain cases, some of them were opened to the public while some cases even involved foreign countries’ troops, media and governments. How the war was progressing also had to do with certain cases which unfolded as they did. And there was the issue of wartime propaganda, and the need to win over certain portions of the public, that also contributed to the eventual culmination of some cases. The overall polarity between cases did leave a long lasting legacy and repercussions on the post-war Korean society.

The effect of maternal education on parenting and early childhood development: An instrumental variables approach.

Maternal education is often considered an important determinant of children's early development. However, there is little empirical evidence on whether it is maternal education that contributes to better developmental outcomes or other ecological factors that relate to both education and children's development. This study used data on 4,874 mother-child (M age = 47.7 months) dyads from Uganda of the 2016 Demographic and Health Survey to assess the effects of maternal education on parenting and children's development. Taking advantage of a natural experiment with an instrumental variables approach, the study identified positive causal impacts of maternal schooling on children's development. Additional years of schooling also increased maternal engagement in stimulating activities, children's attendance to early childhood education programs, and reduced harsh corporal punishment. A mediation analysis suggested that increases in maternal stimulation and children's attendance to early childhood education programs and reductions in harsh corporal punishment partially explain the effects of maternal education on children's development. The positive impacts of education on parenting and child development indicate the need for more efforts to expand access to education in Uganda and other low- and- middle-income countries, including the abolishment of school fees for primary education. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Sama-Badjao Halaw from South Ubian, Tawi-Tawi, Philippines from 2000-2018: Narratives

Issues on Filipino migration are widespread across the world. But the most prevailing and crucial one is the migration among the Sama-Badjao people in South Ubian in the province of Tawi-Tawi or widely known as halaw issue. Sama-Badjao people illegally migrate to Sabah, Malaysia because of poverty and desire to give their children a better future. This study specifically seeks to answer the following queries: who are Sama-Badjao halaw? What are the factors that push them to migrate to Sabah? What are their experiences as halaw in Sabah, Malaysia? What are the effects of halaw to the socioeconomic condition of Sama-Badjao society in South Ubian, Tawi-Tawi? This study is qualitative, narrative and descriptive in design. Data were gathered through personal interviews using the researcher’s designed guide questionnaire and phone interviews. The travel documents and removal order from the Malaysian and Philippine governments of the identified key informants were presented to validate the halaw key informants’ personal information. The data show that Sama-Badjao halaw from the municipality of South Ubian easily entered Sabah without detection from both government authorities. However, while Sama-Badjao halaw work in Sabah, sacrificing for the sake of their families’ economic survival in the Philippines, many of them were apprehended and imprisoned by the Malaysian authorities. After spending months in Malaysian prison, they were deported to the Philippines. Anxiety and harsh punishments were among the indelible experiences of Sama-Badjao halaw under the Malaysian prison.

Stalin and the origins of mistrust

We examine current differences in trust levels within the countries of the former Soviet Union (FSU) and trace their origins back to the system of forced labor during Stalin, which was marked by high incarceration rates and harsh punishments. We explore whether those exposed to knowledge about the repressions became less trusting and transferred this social norm to future generations and communities. We argue that political repressions were more salient and visible to local communities living near forced labor camps (gulags), which symbolized the harshness of Stalin’s regime. Combining contemporary survey data with the geolocation of forced labor camps, we find that living near former gulags lowers present-day social trust and civic engagement. These effects are independent of living near places where Stalin’s victims were arrested. Moreover, they are above and beyond any experiences with war or civil conflict that the extant literature documents, indicating that the gulag system's repressiveness is a crucial trigger of the mistrust culture within the FSU countries today. As such, we furnish novel evidence on how past political repression matters for current socioeconomic outcomes.

Cheating on Unproctored Online Exams: Prevalence, Mitigation Measures, and Effects on Exam Performance

As online courses become increasingly common at the college level, an ongoing concern is how to ensure academic integrity in the online environment. One area that has received particular attention is that of preventing cheating during unproctored online exams. In this study, we examine students’ behavior during unproctored exams taken in an online introductory biology course. A feature of the learning management platform used for the course gave us the ability to detect cheating behavior involving students leaving the test page and viewing other material on their computers. This allowed us to determine what proportion of students cheated and examine the efficacy of various measures to mitigate cheating. We also explored the relationship between cheating behavior and exam performance. We found that 70% of students were observed cheating, and most of those who cheated did so on the majority of test questions. Appealing to students’ honesty or requiring them to pledge their honesty were found to be ineffective at curbing cheating. However, when students received a warning that we had technology that could detect cheating, coupled with threats of harsh penalties, cheating behavior dropped to 15% of students. Unexpectedly, we did not find evidence that students’ exam performance changed when their cheating behavior changed, indicating that this common form of cheating might not be as effective as students, or their instructors believe it to be.

Non-compliant Managers, Judging Citizens: An Experiment of Motives, Identities, and Public Reaction to Bureaucratic Rule Breaking

Despite the serious demands for public organizations to maintain political accountability and bureaucratic responsiveness, rule breaking persists among employees across all levels. Unlike our deeper understanding of corruption of elected officials, myriad questions remain regarding the nature of the public response to policy violations of government bureaucrats working in politically neutral administrative positions. This study uses a survey experiment to investigate factors influencing the intensity of citizens’ recommended punishments for rule-breaking local government managers, specifically testing the effects of managers’ demographic attributes of age, race, and gender as well as their motivations for the violations. Findings strongly suggest that motive matters to citizens in this context, with prosocial rule-breaking managers incurring significantly less harsh penalties than destructive rule-breakers for all age-race-gender profiles. However, an absence of demographic information nullifies penalty differences between prosocial and destructive rule-breaking managers. Among the demographic attributes, only the managers’ race predicted the severity of punishments favored by citizens. No interaction effects between manager attributes were present. Results suggest public communications emphasizing person and purpose are particularly important for local government managers in this context.

A new national environmental law with harsh penalties and regulated discretion: Experiences and lessons from China

Discretion given to local authorities is an essential feature when national governments delegate enforcement of environmental regulations/laws to the local authorities. Enforcement discretion, however, raises the concern about weak environmental enforcement at the local level, especially in developing countries where institutions are built on weak foundations in general and enforcement usually falls short of what is needed to address environmental challenges. Given that existing literature does not have a clear understanding of whether discretion helps or hinders enforcement, This paper uses a unique nation-wide dataset collected from more than 2,200 counties in China from 2015 to 2017 to empirically identify key factors considered by local environmental authorities when they exercise discretion in the enforcement of the new Environmental Protection Law. Main results from the econometric analyses show that the level of enforcement measured by the total number of penalties is significantly higher in counties with higher GPD per capita and larger government budget deficit. In contrast, the choice of penalty types is unlikely to be correlated with these two variables. The patterns above are quantitatively similar across geographical regions that have different natural, economic and environmental conditions. Similar to the case for which the central government issues a series of normative documents to limit local environmental authorities’ room to select the type of penalties to be imposed, it is also necessary for the central government to regulate local authorities’ discretion to decide whether to impose penalties.

What Must I Do to Be Saved? Punishment and Redemption under Incarceration

ABSTRACT This essay tells a story about how American Protestant theologies of sin and redemption, realized in a racialized caste system, have shaped an American culture of punishment where brutal forms of imprisonment have been and continue to be socially acceptable. To explore these Protestant traces, the founding theological vision of penitentiaries in the Northeast and its evolution into professional bureaucracy is described. I contrast this standard modernist account with the distinctive development of prisons in the Southern/Sun Belt states where white domination excluded African-Americans (and other non-white peoples) from redemption/rehabilitation. This Southern heritage of racializing criminal justice has been critical for the rise of mass incarceration, turning away from rehabilitation to support harsh punishment of those who are both “sinful” and a “risk” to “order.” The conclusion points to small signs of change in this discourse.

Sociotropic and Personal Threats and Authoritarian Reactions During COVID-19.

The authoritarianism literature is divided over whether perceived threats to normative social order (sociotropic threats) or threats to the individual's well-being (personal threats) activate authoritarian predispositions. In addition, while some approaches claim that perceived threats primarily trigger those high in authoritarianism, others claim that those who are low in authoritarianism are more sensitive to threats. Given the centrality of authoritarianism and threat on support for extraordinary policies in the context of COVID-19, this article sought to test to what extent different types of threats moderated the effect of authoritarianism on support for tough law and order policies and harsh punishments to contain the spread of coronavirus. Data from two preregistered survey experiments indicates that those high in authoritarianism were more willing to support tough law and order policies when primed with sociotropic threats while those low in authoritarianism became more willing to support such policies when primed with personal threats.

Advancing QuantCrit to Rethink the School-to-Prison Pipeline for Latinx and Black Youth

Latinx and Black youth are pushed out of school at a higher than average rate of 7.7% and 5.5%, respectively, compared to 4.1% of White youth. By “pushed out” we are referring to students who are labeled as “drop outs.” This language shift is important, as, “dropout” implies a choice made by students to leave school while “pushout” accounts for the various forces that lead to students leaving school. One factor that contributes to this alarming statistic is that harsh school punishment disproportionately affects racial and ethnic minority students in urban settings, rather than making school more accessible for them. Using data from the California Department of Justice and the Civil Rights Data Collection repository, we provide a descriptive analysis of the school-toprison pipeline in Southern California. This description is based on two innovative critical race methodologies: QuantCrit (quantitative) and Counterstorytelling (qualitative). These methodologies illuminate the experiences of thirty-nine former high school students who were pushed out of high school through the activity of counter-storytelling, these former high school students speak and remember how racism, sexism, and classism manifested in their schooling experiences. This study shows how to use QuantCrit and counter-storytelling in criminal justice education.

Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World

Heaven's Wrath: The Protestant Reformation and the Dutch West India Company in the Atlantic World

К ВОПРОСУ О РОЛИ Г. К. ОРДЖОНИКИДЗЕ ВО ВНУТРИПАРТИЙНОЙ БОРЬБЕ 1920-Х ГОДОВ

The article examines the role of Grigory Ordzhonikidze in the inner-party struggle of the 1920s. The purpose of the article is to determine what position Ordzhonikidze held at different stages of the inner-party struggle. The transcripts and other documents of the leadership of the Bolshevik Party, stored in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI), became the basis for the research. Contrary to the popular opinion in historiography, the author states that Ordzhonikidze acted independently and was not an obedient satellite of Joseph Stalin during the inner-party struggle. After being appointed the Chairman of the Central Control Commission, he tried to some extent to alleviate the severity of political conflicts and prevent the use of harsh punishments against Stalin's opponents. There is a version in historiography according to which in 1928, during the conflict between Stalin and the Rykov – Bukharin group, Ordzhonikidze initially supported the «right wing» of the Politburo, but then suddenly revised his views and supported Stalin’s position. Based on the analysis of archival documents, the author concludes that this statement is invalid. At the same time, Ordzhonikidze, although he was on friendly terms with Stalin and shared his views on the peasant question had a conciliatory attitude and was inclined to seek a compromise with the «right». Ordzhonikidze's conciliatory attitude disappeared after the Trotskyists published a recording of a secret conversation between N. I. Bukharin and L. B. Kamenev. This compromising material formed among the Bolshevik leadership the perception of the «right wing» of the Politburo as an opposition group capable of splitting the «monolithic unity» of the party. For this reason, at the beginning of 1929, when the supreme party court over the «right» was held at the joint meetings of the Politburo and the Presidium of the Central Control Commission, Ordzhonikidze acted as one of the main accusers.

Violence, Criminalization & Punitive Excess

Violence, Criminalization & Punitive Excess

Rola polityków i mediów w społecznym odbiorze przestępczości

One of the more important effects of the political transformation in Central and Eastern Europe is the emergence of the problem of criminality in the social awareness of the inhabitants of these countries. After a long period in which information on the risk of crime was controlled (unless it concerned crimes against the Socialist state) the societies of this part of Europe were deluged by information on criminal incidents and by opinions and discussions on the subject of criminality. Crime in itself became an article “sold” in the media and a political football. Fear of crime, which had scarcely existed prior to the transformation, appeared as a phenomenon in the social consciousness. Influencing the heightened fear of crime to a certain extent was a rise in criminality and a change in its nature, but more importantly a general state of uncertainty brought about by the deconstruction of life as it used to be and the established rules on which society functioned. Criminality and the related feeling of danger is already probably a permanent element in the public face of politicians mainly, but not exclusively, from populist parties. In light of the tough attitudes manifest in Polish society, supporting harsh punishment, it is unsurprising that politicians are quick to include punitive slogans in their election programs in hopes of boosting their opinion poll ratings. Their calls for the toughening up of criminal responsibility are founded on related public expectations. It is not a new phenomenon. It was also present in the communist years when the will of society, to which communist politicians referred to when justifying their increasingly absurd ideas about penal policy, was to a significant degree a propaganda creation made by the media they themselves controlled. It is still the same today, the only thing that has changed is how the media is “controlled” or shall we say “influenced” by the politicians. While there are many differences between the countries that in the last twenty years experienced the transformation from communism to democracy, they are starting to be subject to the same rules as “mature” Western European democracies. The same processes can be seen in the behavior of politicians with regard to troubling social phenomena and similar reactions by the media to crime and the reported fall in the fear of crime.

Legal Comparison against the Death Penalty Sanctions regulated in the Positive Laws of Indonesia and China

Corruption is a severe problem worldwide, so it takes a strict rule of law and strong law enforcement efforts to eradicate it. China's legal system has proven to be effective in reducing corruption among state officials. One of China's anti-corruption efforts is to impose harsh penalties on perpetrators, including the death penalty. In light of this success, this study will conduct a legal comparison with the death penalty, which is regulated in Indonesian and Chinese positive law. The type of research used is normative juridical with a conceptual and statute approach. The data processed in this study include primary data and secondary data with data collection techniques and management using a literature review. The findings of this study highlight the threat of the Death Penalty, as outlined in Article 2 Paragraph (2) of the Corruption Crime Act, which focuses on corrupt acts committed under certain conditions. In Indonesia, no one has ever been sentenced to death for corruption. The People's Republic of China's Criminal Law of the death penalty threat has existed since 1900 AD. Article 383 of the Chinese Criminal Code stipulates that anyone who accepts bribes is subject to the death penalty. A significant difference from this Comparison lies in the classification of capital punishment with a corruption amount of more than 50,000 Yuan and for bribery cases in Chinese regulations. Meanwhile, there is no such regulation in Article 2 paragraph (2) of the Indonesian Corruption Laws.

Pavojingi ryšiai? Nesusituokusių vyrų ir moterų santykiai Lietuvos katalikiškuose bažnytiniuose teismuose XVIII a.

DANGEROUS LIAISONS? INFORMAL RELATIONS BETWEEN UNMARRIED PERSONS AND THEIR TREATMENT IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY LITHUANIAN CATHOLIC ECCLESIASTICAL COURTS Recent decades saw historical scholarship to pay more attention to the phenomena which were earlier considered unimportant or, in some cases, non-existent. Intimate relations between men and women who were not yet married, extramarital affairs, cohabitation, etc. were rediscovered and reassessed as indispensable to the more accurate understanding of the formation of marriages, families and communities. Theoretically, physical and emotional intimacy could only take place in marriage, and as such all relationships that were extraneous to marital status were prosecuted by legal authorities – civil and ecclesiastical alike. This paper seeks to present how one group of these institutions – Lithuanian ecclesiastical courts – treated informal relations between unmarried laymen and women and what kind of penalties they imposed for such delinquencies. At the first glance it seems that neither canon law, nor the law of the Lithuanian Statutes or the Magdeburg law paid much attention to this kind of illicit sexual practices. The legal norms describe them rather vaguely and, as a result, the prescribed punishments seem to be unclear (except for the Third Lithuanian Statute, which, depending on the interpretation of the text, prescribed capital punishment for unmarried women). Analysis of the court material from three consistories (Vilnius, Samogitia and Trakai) has shown that Lithuanian Catholic consistories might not have been very concerned with such cases as there is only a handful of them mentioned and even less addressed. They seem to have been more common among the Catholic population of Samogitia, and men were likely to be condemned more often than women. The penalties for such crimes were mild – the delinquents mainly had to do public penance, pay fines, and observe fasting. The reasons behind such a low number of cases and even lower number of decisions are not clear, yet. It is possible, that while being mainly concerned with the marital litigation ecclesiastical courts left more initiative to the secular authorities, which could also act in the name of good Christian order and provide harsher punishments if necessary. Since most of the plaintiffs were parish clergymen, who generally initiated judicial processes against fornicators, it is plausible that they could take care of such delinquents themselves, without the help of the court. One must not forget that the Church had even more measures at its discretion – for example, missionary activities of the religious orders, during which the missionaries also attended to the illegal sexual practices of the population, and intervened with them. Keywords: the eighteenth century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, informal relations, fornication, ecclesiastical courts, consistories, canon law, the Lithuanian Statutes, the Saxon-Magdeburg law, gender relations.

Analyzing the Relationship between Mental Health Courts and the Prison Industrial Complex.

Mental health courts (MHCs) were designed to address the high rates of incarcerated individuals with serious mental illness in the United States by providing mental health treatment and social supports to those facing criminal charges. In the setting of national uprisings and grassroots demands for abolition of the prison industrial complex (PIC), which is the broad construct of economic and sociopolitical drivers of imprisonment, we draw upon the scholarship of community activists to examine the role of MHCs within the PIC. Specifically, we explore whether MHCs exacerbate harms caused by the criminal justice system or work to reduce its oppressive power. In this analysis, we argue that MHCs can perpetuate harmful assumptions about mental illness and crime, can legitimize the harsh punishment of individuals unfairly deemed undeserving of policy intervention, and can preserve power differentials between courts and court participants. Our analysis underscores the need for a critical reassessment of the role of MHCs in communities and in the PIC. We advocate for an open discussion between community members and advocates, policymakers, and health professionals about how to address the need for mental health treatment and social support without expanding and entrenching the power of the PIC.

Reconsidering Police in Schools

In this article on School Police Officers (SPOs), we showcase the link between SPOs and exacerbated racial disparities in justice involvement and youth being driven deeper into criminal justice systems. Yet SPOs have been linked with increased arrests for non-criminal, youthful behavior, fueling the school-to-prison pipeline. It is important to note that the presence of SPOs is notably higher in schools with higher percentages of Black or Latino youth. Singling out the concerning and ever-widening reach of the justice system, SPOs are frequently given authority to intervene when non-criminal school rules are broken. By engaging mostly in law enforcement tactics, such as arrests, rather than education and mentorship programs that can act as preventative measures to rule-breaking at school, SPO presence often results in overall harsher punishments and increased arrests for youth non-criminal behavior. These policing practices “disproportionately expose children of color to the justice system at a young age [and] are correlated with a higher likelihood of incarceration as an adult”. Given the long term consequences associated with a single arrest—increased likelihood of dropping out and long-term consequences in obtaining adequate employment—we present policy recommendations to help rethink investments toward the types of approaches that are more likely to make schools safe and away from SPO involvement. These include using counselors, social workers and teachers, and alternative and restorative justice practices to address problematic behavior in schools.

The 1960s, Always

The 1960s, Always