Local Sheriff Research Articles

Institutional factors driving citizen perceptions of AI in government: Evidence from a survey experiment on policing

AbstractLaw enforcement agencies are increasingly adopting artificial intelligence (AI)‐powered tools. While prior work emphasizes the technological features driving public opinion, we investigate how public trust and support for AI in government vary with the institutional context. We administer a pre‐registered survey experiment to 4200 respondents about AI use cases in policing to measure responsiveness to three key institutional factors: bureaucratic proximity (i.e., local sheriff versus national Federal Bureau of Investigation), algorithmic targets (i.e., public targets via predictive policing versus detecting officer misconduct through automated case review), and agency capacity (i.e., necessary resources and expertise). We find that the public clearly prefers local over national law enforcement use of AI, while reactions to different algorithmic targets are more limited and politicized. However, we find no responsiveness to agency capacity or lack thereof. The findings suggest the need for greater scholarly, practitioner, and public attention to organizational, not only technical, prerequisites for successful government implementation of AI.

Illegally Sold: The Josefa Segunda and Its Captives in New Orleans, 1818–1832

ABSTRACT In April 1818, U.S. officers seized the Spanish brig Josefa Segunda, which they found ‘hovering’ in the Mississippi, and brought her to New Orleans. On board were 152 enslaved Africans. Barely a year later, the enslaved people were sold by the local sheriff, as permitted by the court under Louisiana legislation. What followed the sale of the captives was a series of legal battles in which the multiple parties involved tried to secure a financial advantage for themselves, including the Josefa Segunda cases heard by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1820 and again in 1825. However, in 1830, the Supreme Court decided that the sale of the captives had been illegal under the 1819 ‘Act in addition to the Acts prohibiting the slave trade’, which had not been applied in the previous appeals. The 1819 legislation decreed that any such captives should be turned over to the federal government and sent to Africa. This article illustrates some of the tensions and contradictions in the early U.S. effort to curtail the trade in African captives and offers clues for a future effort to trace the lives of people who were, as recognized by the Supreme Court, illegally enslaved.

Engineering Approach to Unintentional Firearm Discharges

Unintentional discharges (UDs) of a firearm had been a common phenomenon among law enforcement, increasing the number of injured police, and sometimes it’s fatal. The objective of the current study is to evaluate the trigger finger shelf device proposed by Sheepdog Knife and gun ergonomically and individual preferences. A total of 16 participants from the local Sheriff department participated in this study. The participants were run in pairs through a series of shooting drills testing a series of 8 weapons, including an AR-15, Remington 870, Glock 17, 1911 varying in distance, and several targets using an EMG and video recording to track their performance. Results showed that the use of the trigger shelf did not negatively impact the accuracy and performance of the participants. Also, the trigger shelf assists significantly in decreasing muscle activity. These findings prove that the existence of the trigger shelf does not affect the user’s performance, aiding users ergonomically, and it is a potential future design to help reduce the unintentional discharges.

Going National: Immigration Enforcement and the Politicization of Local Police

ABSTRACTThis article develops a theory of when and how political nationalization increases interest in local elections using evidence from county sheriff elections. A quintessentially local office, the sheriff has long enjoyed buffers from ideological or partisan politics. However, many sheriff elections since 2016 were waged on ideological grounds as progressive challengers—often backed by outside money—linked their campaigns to opposition to President Trump. I argue that this “redirected nationalization” becomes possible when a salient national issue impinges on a local government service, enabling challengers to expand the scope of conflict against valence-advantaged incumbents. In the highly nationalized 2018 midterm election, the question of cooperation with Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the nation’s jails provided a compelling link between local sheriffs and national politics, infusing new interest and energy in these races. Although redirected nationalization can help align local policies with voter preferences, the politicization of local law enforcement also might undermine police professionalism and credibility.

The Rise and Fall of the Southern Tenant Farmers Union in Arkansas

James D. Ross Jr. provides an important addition to literature on the Southern Tenant Farmers Union (Stfu) during the union's heyday from 1934 to 1937. The Great Depression devastated sharecroppers and tenant farmers in the union's base in Arkansas, while the New Deal's Agricultural Adjustment Administration (Aaa) subsidized landowners to plow under crops to raise the price on the market. Without passing along part of the subsidies to agricultural workers, as the Aaa legislation dictated, plantation owners used the money to replace workers on the land with machines and low-paid day laborers. After the union won increases in day-labor incomes by organizing a strike during the 1936 harvest season, local sheriffs and vigilantes shot, killed, beat, and terrorized people, crushing the union. Ross puts a new spin on these events by delving deeply into letters from union members, showing that they had a clear moral vision, based in evangelical Christianity, that all people had a right to a decent existence and that they should all help each other attain it. Their letters are heartrending, pleading for relief from homelessness, cold, and starvation, yet union leaders had no assets to help them. Ross critiques historians and the Stfu founder Harry L. Mitchell for overemphasizing the union's success in overcoming racial divisions and for focusing too much on the leaders and their socialist ideology. He points to a union survey showing that the majority of members favored a return to sharecropping, in contrast to Stfu leaders who demanded government intervention to create cooperative farming enterprises. Ross also emphasizes racial conflicts, segregation of locals, and black dissatisfaction with white leadership, and concludes that many members left because they felt socialist leaders had become out of touch with their interests and beliefs. (Interestingly, he does not see communist-socialist leadership conflicts as a major cause of union decline.) Most historians of the Stfu would agree with his overview but probably question his thesis that the idea of cooperative farming was a major cause of union decline. I suspect that rank-and-file unionists would have supported anything that worked, but by 1937 it was impossible to go back to sharecropping, and repression had effectively destroyed the union.

Florida BH agency, law enforcement partner to divert arrests

Citing a recommendation from the local sheriff's office to identify individuals who may be falling through the cracks in Florida's law enforcement system, a community‐based behavioral health care organization is partnering with the agency to provide mental health support and divert them from arrest.

Traversing the Intermezzo: Demonic Archetypes in Jesús Carrasco's Intemperie

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes Jesús Carrasco's debut novel, Intemperie, with emphasis on its relationship to demonic imagery and space. Set in an unidentifiable Spanish locus and time, the novel portrays a dystopian world bereft of hope for a young boy and an elderly shepherd who flee through the desert from a repressive local sheriff. Carrasco's highly allegorical work presents the plight of the boy who continually negotiates the open moral ground symbolized by the imposing wasteland throughout the text. My study highlights the ways in which demonic archetypes outlined by Northrop Frye, as well as writings by Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari, and Henri Lefebvre on space and nomadology, inform Carrasco's narrative vision. The smooth space of the intermezzo, a world “in-between,” stands apart from the strictures of striated space and serves as the backdrop for Intemperie. I conclude that Carrasco fashions a wasteland freighted with disorder and injustice.

Lynching as an American Tragedy in Theodore Dreiser

Lynching as an American Tragedy in Theodore Dreiser Kiyohiko Murayama Considering how often the word "tragedy" appears in Theodore Dreiser's writing, there has been little serious scholarly attention paid to its role in his impressive body of work. This essay is an attempt to examine several writings by Dreiser, from earlier pieces he wrote as a freelance journalist in the 1890s to his monumental work, An American Tragedy (1925), in order to explore his idea of tragedy and what significance it had to his development as a novelist. Dreiser's tragic vision, I suggest, may have been instigated by the prodigious rise of lynching after the Civil War through the early twentieth century. According to the statistics Arthur F. Raper cites in The Tragedy of Lynching, in the United States from 1889 to 1932, 3,745 lynchings (of whites and African Americans) occurred. During the said period, the peak year with 255 total lynchings was 1892, and the largest number of African American victims per year was 155, reached in both 1892 and 1893 (480-81). After the turn of the century, Raper observes, the number of lynchings decreased, and "lynching [became] more and more a Southern phenomenon, and a racial one" (25).1 Against this backdrop, "Nigger Jeff." (1901/1918), one of the earliest short stories Dreiser wrote in the midst of the epidemic of lynching, assumes particular importance as a result of his literary endeavor to forge an American tragedy with lynching as its pivot. "Nigger Jeff." begins as a young reporter, Elmer Davies, is sent to cover a possible lynching in the rural community of Pleasant Valley, located in a state abbreviated as Ko., a thinly disguised Missouri, where Dreiser himself worked as a young newspaperman. Davies discovers that a farmer's daughter, Ada Whitaker, allegedly has been attacked by a black man and that her father, Morg Whitaker, and [End Page 163] brother, Jake, are leading a mob in pursuit of the suspect in order to lynch him. To carry out his assignment as a reporter, Davies has to follow the hastily collected posse as if he himself were "(perforce) one of a lynching party—a hired spectator" (82). That he is concerned about his own complicity in the lynching is remarkable. As Jonathan Markovitz notes, "In important ways, the power of spectacle lynchings actually increased as their frequency declined, since modern communication technologies made it possible for images and narratives of lynching to be disseminated to ever-larger audiences." Markovitz continues, "Because representations of lynching worked to extend and magnify the surveillant functions and the terror of the mob, they should be understood not as entirely separate entities from lynchings themselves but as key components of the power of the practice" (xxvii). As he engages in sending dispatches from the actual spot of the crime, Davies must deepen his sense of complicity not only as spectator but also as witness. After the incident, he is again depicted as being anxious: "The whole procedure seemed so unreal, so barbaric that he could scarcely believe it—that he was a part of it" (102-03). The black man, Jeff Ingalls, however, is apprehended by a local sheriff, Mathews, who wants to protect him until legal measures can be taken. The mob gathers in front of the sheriff.'s cottage, threateningly demanding Jeff, but in due time Mathews drives away the crowd led only by young Jake who is "not sufficiently courageous himself, for all his daring, and [feels] the weakness of the crowd behind him" (92). Davies is pleased to find that he has got "the story of a defeated mob," with the sheriff being "his great hero" (93). Shortly after Davies finishes writing his story, however, the mob returns. Now joined and led by Morg Whitaker, the mob eventually overpowers the sheriff and succeeds in hanging Jeff from a bridge. Davies is shocked at the white men's brutality and the horrific atrocities inflicted upon Ingalls. As Davies observes, "The crowd gathered about now more closely than ever, more horror-stricken than gleeful at their own work. None apparently had either the courage or the charity to gainsay what was being done" (102...

Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired by Bill Neal

Reviewed by: Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired by Bill Neal Bob Cavendish Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders: The 1894 Wells Fargo Scam That Backfired. By Bill Neal. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2015. Pp. 256. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index.) In the summer of 1962 during a visit with some of my grandmother’s friends in Vicksburg, Mississippi, the dinner conversation turned to the city’s surrender to Union general Ulysses Grant in July 1863. From the tone and tenor of their remarks, it seemed Vicksburg had fallen about ten minutes ago and they were still peeved. Some people know how to hold a grudge. And some things just will not go away, as Bill Neal discovered during a lecture in Canadian, Texas, where he encountered a woman who warned him to avoid a “that Isaacs mess,” a notorious local crime still fraught with suspicions and innuendo 115 years later. Fortunately for us, Neal took a closer look instead. Skullduggery, Secrets, and Murders begins in 1894 with the clumsy plot to swindle Wells Fargo out of $25,000 (in today’s money, $675,000) with a bogus loss claim, disguising the ruse with a straightforward train robbery. Instead, the train robbery never happened. Two murders, of the local sheriff and of a Wells Fargo undercover agent, are linked, somehow, to the attempted fraud. At the center of the action is George Isaacs, the dull-witted youngest member of a family of brothers moderately successful and presumably unaware of George’s scheme. George and two minor villains were arrested for the murders, and one additional “associate” turned state’s evidence, but trials only provoked more questions. Who was the mysterious, tall, light-skinned man who remained in the background of key events? Who assisted in the jailbreak that nearly put one of the suspects beyond reach? What was compelling enough about three pennyante desperados to create the territory’s best legal defense team, one that included Sam Houston’s son, by now a formidable attorney? The murders in Canadian, Texas, were part of a white-collar fraud conspiracy not usually associated with wild west lawlessness. Whereas tracking horse thieves and bank robbers could mean lengthy pursuit over hostile terrain, this chase involved following a money trail. George Isaacs’s kin had engaged certain impressive (and expensive) courtroom advocates for George and two other defendants. But, Neal asks, why not George only? Was there something else at stake? And how had the brothers Isaacs amassed that kind of fortune in frontier Canadian, Texas? Without making direct accusations, Neal alludes to circumstances—the “old west’s” lack of law enforcement—that made the Isaac’s fortune possible, much as Joe Kennedy later benefited from Canadian booze running during Prohibition. The George Isaacs-Wells Fargo plot intrigued Neal, whose curiosity about a local taboo uncovered a complex affair with a modern ring: a bungled scheme, a mysterious stranger, a fugitive, and covert legal funding. Neal’s wry wit and fascination with this cold case (note the extent and [End Page 399] variety of sources in the bibliography) propel the narrative even as it takes occasional zigs and zags. Skullduggery is not a toss-off western frontier law-and-order tale but an American crime saga more interesting than stagecoach holdups or horse thieves. Television does not look to the old west so much these days (outside of Lonesome Dove and Tombstone) but within this yarn lies a good miniseries that would do HBO proud. Bob Cavendish Buda, Texas Copyright © 2015 The Texas State Historical Association

Difficulties in collecting fish tithe

This paper sheds light on the problems that emerged in the 19th century Faro- ese society when radical changes in population, production, trade as well as culture took place. The author follows the rising difficulties in collecting the fish tithe, as it is described in the biannual reports from the local sheriffs, legal disputes, correspondance with the governmental offices in Copenhagen as well as documents from the prolonged considerations in the local parliament, the Løgting. It becomes clear that not only changes in the ways the fishing was performed had an impact. The diverted changes in people´s culture and conception of law lead to a situation where old customs and moral altered. The old law on fish tithe had to be rescinded. It happened in 1892 after 17 years of debate in the local parliament.

Learn when you may disclose information under health and safety emergency provision

In 1992, a University of Iowa graduate student killed several UI faculty and staff members and a student. As a result of that action, from 1993–2013, UI officials disclosed nondirectory information without students' written consent to the local county sheriff's office whenever a UI student applied for a gun permit.

Space, Aesthetic Power, and True Falsity in The Known World

On the wall of a small jail in Edward P. Jones's fictional Manchester County hangs a map of World. Florida does not exist on the sixteenth-century map; North America is too small, and nameless. But the map's owner, local sheriff John Skiffington, is satisfied with the Known as he knows it, flawed or not (Jones 174-75). Skiffington is holding together a flawed world of his own in Manchester, where wealthy landowners control the law, vindictive slave patrollers flout the law, and black slaveholders severely complicate the law. It is this last group, the black slaveholders, who confound and fascinate both the characters of Jones's 2003 novel and its readers. One slave overseer, Moses, [takes] more than weeks to come to understand that someone wasn't fiddling with him and that indeed a black man, Henry Townsend, two shades darker than himself, owned him and any shadow he made (8-9). Most critics and scholars have centered their work around this issue of black slaveholders, (1) along with the book's long view of time, which allows readers to see what the future holds for many of Manchester's large cast of characters (as well as the fate of the doomed county itself). (2) Sheriff Skiffington's out-of-date map, however, also points toward a type of geographical rubric at play in the novel, which draws attention to a marriage between space and structures of power. Throughout, The World highlights the roles of space and place in establishing and perpetuating systems of thought, and when we approach the novel from that angle, we find sketches for a productive action of resistance against those systems that is rooted in aesthetic power and modeled by the novel itself. The key form of resistance Jones's novel will position against the categories and boundaries that insist we can know the world--and the form of resistance that has been little discussed beyond reference to its climactic instantiation on the book's final pages--is an aesthetics that resists linearity and the idea of space as stable, truthful, and natural. It is this aesthetics I will describe as insisting upon a that reveals and reinscribes the systems of thought that underlie, manufacture, and disguise the arbitrary nature of the boundaries and borders with which we construct and assign meaning to space. Systems of power tend to benefit from a double move--a false falsity--by both constructing space and disguising its constructed nature. The true falsity modeled in and by The World reinscribes systems and spaces while highlighting (in fact, celebrating) the impermanent and arbitrary nature of inscription. That is, a true falsity is a falsity that is not disguised. In this view, productive action insists on staying in-production: a permanent productivity demands a permanent instability and a never-fully-known world. Productive action, then, cannot be defined as following one specific trajectory or philosophy. Productive action must be action that refuses the convenient stability of closure or definition. For all its radical refusal of closure, however, this model functions happily in an apparently stable (intricately-plotted, in fact) novel. The World is coherent and comprehensible to a degree not often seen in works with such a postmodern agenda. This coherent instability is perhaps among its most important contributions to the contemporary novel. It illustrates and demonstrates the work of art that does more than simply expose or explode our conceptions of truth and art. It holds the ideas of time, space, and structure up for interrogation while utilizing the productive possibilities of such restricted forms as the novel and the sculpture. In this way, it refuses surrender or submission to anarchy as options in a world where unchallenged systems of power create real-life horrors. Productive art, in this model, straddles the same line as productive action: it exposes the realities of artistic space and then reinscribes that space in a way that insists no inscription is permanent. …

Anthony Milner Lane

Anthony Milner Lane, one of the leading theoretical nuclear physicists of his generation, died from cancer at his home in Oxford, UK, on 9 February 2011. From the 1950s to the 1970s he made many significant advances in the theories and understanding of nuclear reactions and structure.Tony was born in Trowbridge, UK, on 27 July 1928, and in 1946 he was awarded a grant to attend Selwyn College at Cambridge University, where he graduated in mathematics in 1949 and physics in 1950. Although he began his research in nuclear physics at Cambridge for his PhD, he completed it at Birmingham University under Rudolf Peierls, one of the innovators of nuclear science. His thesis was entitled “The Application of the Shell Model to Nuclear Reactions.” Tony joined the theoretical physics division at the Atomic Energy Research Establishment in Harwell, which spearheaded nuclear science research in the UK. At the time, the division employed many talented physicists, including Tony Skyrme of skyrmion fame, John Hubbard, and John Bell, known for the hidden-variable theorem.During the 1950s and subsequent years, Harwell had many reactors and particle accelerators, and Tony soon revealed a talent for interpreting the data obtained from nuclear reactions induced by neutrons and charged particles. He rapidly became an expert in theories of both nuclear reactions and nuclear structure. He was invited by Victor Weisskopf to spend 1954–55 at MIT, and while there he took time to visit Princeton University to work with Eugene Wigner and Robert Thomas. In 1956 he collaborated with Thomas at Los Alamos National Laboratory and in 1957 visited Oak Ridge National Laboratory. For Reviews of Modern Physics, he wrote an article in 1957 on nuclear reactions, and in 1958 he and Thomas wrote a definitive review of the rigorous R-matrix theory of resonances; it became one of the journal’s most cited reviews ever published.In nuclear structure, Tony collaborated with J. Philip Elliott in 1958 to write about the nuclear shell model in an extensive article that makes many comparisons with nuclear data. Tony was unconventional for a theorist in that he examined experimental literature and noted in a “little black book” unusual observational features that he couldn’t understand from existing theory. Those notes enabled him to develop new theories and identify new nuclear states—mainly collective states of nuclei and isobaric analogue states—seen in nuclear reactions. With Eric Lynn and other Harwell colleagues, Tony made significant advances in 1959–60 in the theory of nucleon-capture reactions and in 1964 discovered the importance of a two-stage mechanism in which the initial nuclear excitation of a giant dipole state greatly enhances subsequent photon emission.Tony was in great demand abroad for lectures and consulting, and he spent many extended periods away from Harwell at numerous institutions, including several universities in the US, the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research in India, the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, and universities in Australia and South Africa.In the early 1980s, Tony took up atomic theory related to the separation of isotopes by laser light. His several fundamental contributions included a 1986 proof that the multichannel quantum defect theory of atomic physics could be straightforwardly derived from R-matrix theory. Until his retirement from Harwell in 1989, he also worked on theories on the formation of meso-molecules related to the possibility of muon-catalyzed fusion. His more than 100 publications included the widely used textbook Nuclear Theory: Pairing Force Correlations and Collective Motion (W. A. Benjamin, 1964). He never had an interest in working in an administrative post.Tony was a very kind person and a great family man. He endured some major illnesses, including tuberculosis, heart disease, and cancer, but he never let those setbacks quash his interest in work and enjoyment of life. A lifelong hiker, he enjoyed long walks wherever he happened to be living. In 1954, for instance, he made a day trip down and up the Grand Canyon. A snowstorm near the top exhausted his resources, and he was rescued on horseback by the local sheriff, at a cost of $25. And when he visited his in-laws in Israel, they shook their heads at the mad Englishman who would go for postprandial hikes in temperatures of 38 ˚C. He will be remembered by his many friends and colleagues as a modest man with a penetrating intellect and with many accomplishments.Anthony Milner LanePPT|High resolution© 2011 American Institute of Physics.

The architecture of US policing: variations among the 50 states

This article describes how the structure of US policing varies greatly among the 50 states. The states differ substantially in their levels of police employment, the degree to which their police systems are fragmented, and the extent to which they rely on different types of police agencies, such as local police, sheriffs, and state police. The article classifies the states along these dimensions and suggests avenues for further research. In particular, it would be useful to know whether these different structures make any difference in police efficiency or effectiveness.

The Ghost of Jim Crow: How Southern Moderates Used Brown v. Board of Education to Stall Civil Rights. By Anders Walker. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. xii, 241 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-19-518174-6.)

Brown v. Board of Education (1954) is often seen as fueling violent resistance by southern whites, but in Anders Walker's The Ghost of Jim Crow, “moderate” southern governors sought instead to maintain segregation by discouraging extremism, promoting law and order, and burnishing their state's image. These methods, they hoped, would avoid harsh northern media attention that fueled political pressure for stronger federal civil rights enforcement. The book illuminates this political dynamic through portraits of governors J. P. Coleman of Mississippi, Luther Hodges of North Carolina, and LeRoy Collins of Florida. Walker argues that these governors used “strategic constitutionalism,” interpreting Brown in a way that enabled them to justify maintaining segregated schools while at the same time opposing extreme actions that they felt would draw federal involvement. As governor of Mississippi, Coleman did not simply resist Brown but sought to “orchestrate a reinterpretation of it” (p. 14). Coleman contended that Brown forbade states from using race as an overt feature of school assignment policies but did not preclude states from adopting other criteria, such as academic performance and “moral” background. Relying on facially neutral criteria, school districts could maintain substantial racial segregation without the threat of federal court interference. To strengthen his state's ability to avoid federal intervention, Coleman promoted law and order and opposed violence (such as the 1955 killing of Emmet Till). He sought to expand the state highway patrol, a police force under the governor's direction that might help rein in the power of local sheriffs.

A Multilevel Analysis of Individual, Household, and Neighborhood Correlates of Intimate Partner Violence Among Low-Income Pregnant Women in Jefferson County, Alabama

We examined individual, household, and neighborhood correlates of intimate partner violence (IPV) before and during pregnancy. We used multilevel modeling to investigate IPV among 2887 pregnant women in 112 census tracts who sought prenatal care in 8 public clinics in Jefferson County, Alabama, from 1997 through 2001. Data were collected from the Perinatal Emphasis Research Center project, the 2000 Census, and the local Sheriff and Police Departments Uniform Crime Reports for 1997 through 2001. Participants were predominantly young, African American, on Medicaid, and residents of low-income neighborhoods. The prevalence of past-year male partner-perpetrated physical or sexual violence was 7.4%. Neighborhood residential stability, women performing most of the housework (lack of involvement among partners), being unmarried (being in an uncommitted relationship), and alcohol use were positively associated with elevated IPV risk. Significant protective factors for IPV included older age at first vaginal intercourse and a greater sense of mastery (e.g., the perception of oneself as an effective person). Both neighborhood contextual and individual and household compositional effects are associated with IPV among low-income pregnant women. The results imply that combined interventions to improve neighborhood conditions and strengthen families may effectively reduce IPV.

Keeping out the other: a critical introduction to immigration enforcement today

Foreward: Justice and the Outsider by David ColeAcknowledgmentsList of Abbreviations1. Open Markets, Militarized Borders?: Immigration Enforcement Today (Philip Kretsedemas and David C. Brotherton)Part I: The Expansion of Immigration Enforcement: Before 9/112. Unchecked Power Against Undesirables: Haitians, Mariel Cubans, and Guantanamo (Mark Dow)3. Immigration, Terrorism, and Secret Pirsons (Dan Malone)4. Democracy and Immigration (Ira J. Kurzban)Part II: Noncitizens as Security Threats: After 9/115. Racializing, Criminalizing, and Silencing 9/11 Deportees (Irum Sheikh)6. Presumption of Guilt: September 11 and the Americal Muslim Community (Arsalan Iftikhar)7. American and British Constructions of Asylum Seekers: Moral Panic, Detention, and Human Rights (Michael Welch and Liza Schuster)Part III: From Incarceration to Deportation8. Exiling New Yorkers (David C. Brotherton)9. Invisible Removal, Endless Detention, Limited Relief: A Taste of Immigration Court Representation for Detained Noncitizens (Abira Ashfaq)10. Why Black Immigrants Matter: Refocusing the Discussion on Racism and Immigration Enforcement (Tamara K. Nopper)Part IV: Inside the Immigration Prison Systems: Activist Perspectives11. Rafiu's Story: An American Immigrant Nightmare (Malik Ndaula with Debbie Satyal)12. Familes for Freedom: Against Deportation and Delegalization (Subhash Kateel and Aarti Shahani)Part V: Looking for Illegals13. Bordering the Other in the U.S. Southwest: El Pasoans Confront the Local Sheriff (Kathleen Staudt)14. Framing the Debate on Taxes and Undocumented Workers: A Critical Review of Texts Supporting Proenforcement Policies and Practices (Jorge Capetillo-Ponce)15. What Does an Undocumented Immigrant Look Like?: Local Enforcement and the New Immigrant Profiling (Philip Kretsedemas)Conclusion: Immigration Reform at a Crossroads (Philip Kretsademas and David C. Brotherton)Appendix: An Annotated List of Immigration LawsGlossaryAbout the ContributorsIndex

Locally Elected Sheriffs and Money Compensation

This study uses OLS and a large sample of U.S. counties to empirically assess diverse explanations for pay allocated to local sheriffs. After statistically holding constant effects of agency size and functional specialization, including jail operations, this study isolates diverse environmental sources of variation in money wages allocated to the elected sheriff. A strong tax base helps local sheriffs, as does income inequality associated with the presence of high income earners, but local conservative political support is associated with reduced wage allocations. High crime rates and local unemployment are closely associated with expanded money wages, but pay is limited in counties with a large impoverished population. The empirical results are consistent with an environmental contingency model. One implication from this analysis is that county sheriffs are compensated at rates that reflect patterns of uncertainty in the organization's localized external environment.

Geographic Exclusion

In the state of Ohio, House Bill 180, Senate Bill 175 and Senate Bill 5 collectively form Megan's Law. This law requires individuals convicted of a sexually oriented offense to register with the local sheriff 's office at least twenty days prior to the move-in date of the offender. Beginning July 31, 2003, Megan's Law prohibited an offender of a sexually oriented offense from establishing or occupying a residence within 1,000 feet of any school-related properties. A major social concern with this law and its subsequent enforcement is the belief that the geographic constraints placed on registered sex offenders effectively eliminate nearly all residential housing options. The purpose of this paper is to explore issues of geographic exclusion by conducting a spatial analysis of registered sex offenders in Hamilton County, Ohio. Analysis using geographic information systems (GIS), proximity evaluation and basic statistical techniques enables the impacts of this law to be assessed.

The Mason County "Hoo Doo" War, 1874-1902

Post-Reconstruction Texas in the mid-1870s was still relatively primitive, with communities isolated from each other in a largely open-range environment. Cattlemen owned herds of cattle in numerous counties while brand laws remained local. Friction arose when the nonresident stockmen attempted to gather their cattle, and mavericking was common. Law enforcement at the local level could cope with handling local drunks, collecting taxes, and attending the courts when in session, but when an outrageous crime occurred, or depredations in a community were at a level that severely taxed or overwhelmed the local sheriff, there was seldom any other recourse except a vigilante movement. With such a fragile hold on civilization in these communities, it is not difficult to understand how a “blood feud” could occur. During 1874 the Hoo Doo War erupted in the Texas Hill Country of Mason County, and for the remainder of the century violence and fear ruled the region in a rising tide of hatred and revenge. It is widely considered the most bitter feud in Texas history. Traditionally the feud is said to have begun with the intention of protecting the families, property and livelihood of the largely agrarian settlers in Mason and Llano counties. The truth is far more sinister. Evidence shows that the mob was contaminated from the outset by a criminal element, a fact the participants failed to recognize. They believed they were above the law. They were not above vengeance. The feud began in 1874 with the rise of the mob under Sheriff John Clark, but it was not until the premeditated murder of rancher Timothy Williamson in the spring of 1875, a murder orchestrated by Sheriff Clark, that the violence escalated out of control. His death drew former Texas Ranger Scott Cooley to the region seeking justice, and when the courts failed, he began a vendetta to avenge his friend. In the ensuing months, Sheriff Clark used the mob to secure his political position by ambushing ranchers George Gladden and Moses Baird, which drew gunfighters such as John Ringo into the violence. As more men were killed, new forces joined the spiral of death. Local and state officials proved powerless, and it was not until the early 1900s that the feud burned itself out. Johnson has proven a diligent researcher in locating information concerning the Hoo Doo War. Using contemporary newspaper accounts, letters, diaries, and official reports, he analyzes the myths and legends surrounding the feud and presents the unvarnished truth of what happened in Mason County. This book is the definitive account of the Hoo Doo War, as well as a case study in frontier violence of the bloodiest kind.