Deputy Sheriff Research Articles

POLICING THE BIG BEAT: AN OBSERVATIONAL STUDY OF COUNTY LEVEL PATROL AND COMPARISONS TO LOCAL SMALL TOWN AND RURAL OFFICERS

ABSTRACT The vast majority of research literature concerning the street-level behavior of police has focused almost exclusively on the work of officers employed by large, municipal police agencies. Given this tendency for researchers to focus on “big city” police, the work of county-level policing, primarily done through the office of the county sheriff, has often been overlooked as a subject of study. This gap in the literature is especially salient because of the distinctive political and organizational features of the office of county sheriff. Using data collected through the systematic observation of deputy sheriffs and a comparison group of small-town and rural local municipal officers located within the same Ohio county, the present study provides data concerning the work routines and citizen interactions of these officers. Comparisons concerning the work of deputy sheriffs, the small-town and rural local officers, as well as their more-often studied urban counterparts are discussed.

Screaming With the Cannibals by Lee Maynard (review)

NEW APPALACHIAN BOOKS REVIEWS Lee Maynard. Screaming With the Cannibals. Morgantown, WV: Vandalia Press, 2003. 261 pages. Hardcover. $25.00. Often when I come across mention of Lee Maynard's cult classic Crum, I also find a brief quotation from my introduction to the work in its 2001 edition from West Virginia University Press. This introduction has even been misquoted by reviewers who don't like the book- one writer quoted me calling Crum "foulmouthed, sexist, scatological hillbilly-stereotyping" without the rest of the sentence that said it is one of my all-time favorites. People are passionate about Crum, the gritty story of a teenager's life in a tiny town in West Virginia. Lee Maynard's new novel, Screaming With the Cannibals, picks up the story where Crum left off. Fans who couldn't get enough of Crum will leap at the opportunity to find out what happened to Jesse. And, yes, the narrator of the first book finally gets a name in Cannibals. This is part of a general distancing of the author and reader from the events of this book. Screaming With the Cannibals has several beginnings that also serve this purpose: an epigraph; a foreword; and a tall tale about the passing of a moonshiner named Uncle Long Neck whose almost immediate exit is spectacular—literally a bolt from the blue. Neither novel is strictly realistic—both are peopled with exaggerated characters and wildly raw and humorous events, but in Crum the events had the singleness and momentum of one young boy's vivid world view. In Screaming With the Cannibals, you feel that an older Jesse is looking back at the youthful Jesse, telling and retelling the events of his life. Young Jesse himself is presented as a sort of archetype of all those young adventurers who need to see what is on the other side of the next ridge. He wants to move on, to escape from everything old, especially Black Hawk Ridge in Wayne County, West Virginia, where he lived even before he went to high school in Crum. The archetypical young man with no ties he cares to acknowledge strikes off for adventure. He gets as far as Kentucky in the second part of the book, and then, in the final part, to South Carolina. Wherever Jesse goes, he finds himself in peril: it might simplybe a physical danger like getting drowsy and almost wrecking his motorcycle, or it might be 64 his ignorance of the facts of nineteen-fifties race relations in the South. Often, he is faced with a malevolent enemy who hates him for reasons that seem to be beyond the normal human scale of emotion. In Kentucky, it is the husband of an overwhelmingly lustful woman, but in South Carolina, it is a less motivated and much more dangerous figure, a racist Southern deputy sheriff who stays on Jesse's tail wherever he goes, popping unexpectedly out of the shadows. Repeatedly Jesse is made to undergo physical suffering. He is stripped naked, beaten up, thrown from the hood of a moving car, knocked around, scraped, and variously smashed, bashed, and bruised. The final section of the novel is called "South Carolina—Bleeding on the Sand." He also usually finds a woman to bind up his physical wounds, to nurture him, and often to take him to bed. There is a whole element of wish fulfillment in both the repeated survival of mortal danger and in the frequent sexual encounters. Once, for example, while Jesse is a lifeguard, he rescues a woman who is probably trying to commit suicide, but no one seems to appreciate his efforts—they take the woman to the hospital and leave the hero alone on the beach. And then—the woman he loved back in Crum, who has serendipitously turned up in the next town, comes to take him to her place to recover. This reappearance of Yvonne as well as other marvels and coincidences—like the repetition of large men who are gargantuan eaters—signal that we are not in the commonplace world where most of us labor day to day. Yet, there is a powerful psychological truth underlying Jesse's adventures...

Death in the Everglades: The Murder of Guy Bradley, America's First Martyr to Environmentalism. By Stuart McIver. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003. xvii + 187 pp. Notes, bibliography, index. $24.95

is a fascinating account of Florida plume hunters, devastation they wrought, and slow, painful progress--exemplified bravely on hunting grounds by Guy Bradley--of bird protection movement that ultimately succeeded.--Oliver H. Orr, Jr., Library of Congress (retired), and author of Saving American Birds: T. Gilbert Pearson and Founding of Audubon Movement A moving account of a raw frontier and a hero who lost his life trying to enforce law.--Paul S. George, editor, Tequesta Death in Everglades chronicles demise of one of 20th-century Florida's most enduring folk heroes. The murder of Guy Bradley represents a milestone not only in saga of Everglades but also in broader history of American environmentalism. This fascinating biography of his abbreviated but eventful life is emblematic of struggle to tame Florida frontier without destroying it. As Stuart McIver unfolds story behind this famous but little-known crime, he also provides a window into Florida history during creation of modern South Florida. Born in Chicago in 1870, Bradley moved to Florida as a young boy in 1876. Nineteen years later his father became associated with developer and railroad magnate Henry Flagler, and in 1898 family moved to isolated coastal village of Flamingo. Situated on southeastern fringe of Everglades, Flamingo was a flash point in an emerging ecological battleground that drew Bradleys and other pioneer families into a conflict later dubbed the Plume Wars. At turn of century, mass killing of egrets and other plume birds for feathers to adorn women's hats was a serious concern among nation's growing cadre of environmentalists, especially among those who belonged to Audubon Society, a conservation organization founded in 1886. In 1901, at urging of Audubon Society leaders and American Ornithologists' Union, Florida legislature enacted a bird protection law that provided for hiring of local game wardens, and a year later Guy Bradley assumed dual role of Monroe County's game warden and deputy sheriff. For next three years, from 1902 to 1905, Bradley matched wits and sometimes weapons with an array of plume hunters and other nefarious characters, some of whom were strangers but many of whom were friends or acquaintances of warden or his family. In end, Bradley was shot and killed by Walter Smith, a man he had known for nearly a decade. How this murder came about, what happened to Smith and others left behind, and how Bradley's demise and subsequent controversies affected environmental movement are intriguing questions that frame McIver's richly textured narrative. With instincts and skills of a master storyteller, McIver--long one of Florida's most historically minded journalists--has recaptured a tale for ages, a story of personal sacrifice and collective awakening that altered course of state's natural and human history. Bradley should not be forgotten, and this book should not be overlooked by anyone seeking a full understanding of how Everglades became a treasured but imperiled place. Stuart B. McIver was a prolific journalist who also wrote numerous books, more than 500 magazine articles, and documentary films, for which he also worked as producer.

Giant under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, Texas, in 1901

How did they do it? How did a profligate who killed a deputy sheriff before reforming, a mining engineer who went AWOL from the Austrian Navy, and three East Texas drillers join forces with other equally colorful characters to drill on Spindletop hill? Giant Under the Hill is a scholarly work firmly rooted in the narrative tradition, a great story intriguingly told by three Beaumont historians: Jo Ann Stiles, Ellen Rienstra, and Judith Linsley. Using material collected over decades, much of it never before published, they bring to life the efforts of Pattillo Higgins, Anthony Lucas, Al and Curt Hamill, and Peck Byrd to master the Spindletop salt dome that culminated in the discovery of the great Lucas gusher. Their find subsequently transformed not only the state of Texas but the entire oil industry. Giant Under the Hill is the definitive story of one of the most significant and colorful moments in Texas history. The authors delved deeply into available records and found treasures at every turn. As news of their work spread, people came forward from all over the country with even more photographs and documents. This exhaustively researched book focuses on the Lucas gusher in Beaumont in 1901, as well as the events leading up to it and the immediate aftermath. It's all here -- the challenge and frustration of the search, the excitement of the discovery, the euphoric chaos of the boom, and the genesis of the giant companies. After the gusher came in, life would never be the same.

Deputy sheriff or independent ally? Evolving Australian–American ties in an ambiguous world order

The policies of Australia’s current government have been so close to the United States as to invite comparisons to an Australian ‘deputy sheriff’ executing the interests and policies of a US global marshal. Advocates of the ANZUS alliance disagree, citing the immense politico-strategic benefits Australia extracts from that relationship and insisting that ANZUS objectives are commensurate with a stable and just world order. Recent developments in international security politics such as the Iraq conflict and the persistence of global terrorism may now challenge that proposition and test the Australian electorate’s future support for the American alliance. A greater determination by Australia to cultivate a more balanced approach to alliance politics will underwrite its national security interests more effectively than a sustained and rigid adherence to alliance loyalty under any circumstances.

Solidarity, but without limits? - Australia and the debate on the US missile defense plans

The Commonwealth of Australia (with New Zealand), the only "Western" country in the South-East Asian region, has a fifty-year tradition of working closely together with the United States of America, both militarily and economically. The ANZUS-Treaty of 1952 serves as the basis of their bilateral relationships for both parties. The Bush-Administration's Missile Defense project, and Australia's potential and actual commitment to this undertaking are good indicators of the extent to which Canberra can already play the role Washington would like to see it play: that of trustee of America's interest in the Western Pacific. The Howard government is sitting on the fence between its "Engaging With Asia"-policy and its quest to be a "deputy sheriff" for the American hegemony.

Deputies caught on the wrong side of the law.

Looters of archaeological sites in the United States are often petty criminals with a history of convictions for theft and other offences. But an Arizona case has exposed a different breed of 'pot-hunters': a couple of sheriff's deputies, one of whom learned archaeology from a government scientist.

Call for help.

Call for help.

Hands Across the Border: The Abortive Extradition of Solomon Moseby

Four years after the abolition of slavery within the British Empire in 1833, the government of Upper Canada authorized the return of Solomon Moseby, a fugi­tive slave, to Kentucky. Moseby had escaped slavery in Kentucky by stealing his master’s horse and riding to Buffalo, where he had then crossed the border into Upper Canada and, as he believed, to freedom. Alexander McLeod, the deputy sheriff of the Niagara district, took Moseby into custody and confined him in the Niagara jail until he received the orders to deliver Moseby into the hands of his former American master, who had journeyed to Canada to reclaim him. The local population of African Canadians had other ideas. They were not going to let a brother who had successfully made the journey to freedom on British soil be returned to slavery by British authorities. Led by their preacher, Herbert Holmes, a group of determined men and women mounted a vigil at the jail for three weeks in late August and September 1837 to prevent the authorities from sneaking Moseby across the border. When McLeod finally received orders to extradite Moseby, he surrounded himself with special armed constables and some soldiers from the nearby British detachment at Fort George. With this armed escort, he then tried to deliver Moseby to the Americans. What happened next constitutes the first race riot in Upper Canada.

Images of Scottsboro

In his poem Too Is Worth Its Song, the Harlem Renaissance poet Countee Cullen complains that poets raised no cry against the injustice suffered by the Scottsboro boys in contrast to their sharp and pretty tunes for Sacco and Vanzetti.(1) Granted, no artist memorialized the Scottsboro boys to the degree Ben Shahn did the two anarchists in his painting that repeatedly appears in art history texts to illustrate the American social realist movement; yet, contrary to Cullen's claim it is doubtful that any victims of alleged legal oppression touched as many socially conscious artists as did the nine African Americans accused, while riding a train as hobos, of raping two white women. In March 1931 nine black youths boarded a train in Chattanooga, Tennessee, as did some young white men. When the train stopped in Paint Rock, Alabama, sheriff's deputies arrested the blacks for fighting with the whites, and when two young white women, Ruby Bates and Victoria Price, also left the train, one accused the nine black youths of raping them, a charge the other did not deny. Transported to the Scottsboro jail and held there until their trial, the young blacks narrowly escaped lynching, and with little solid evidence for rape--let alone gang rape--a Scottsboro jury nonetheless convicted all nine of the poor ignorant youths of rape within twelve days. Each of the defendants, except one who was thirteen-years-old, received a death sentence. The case continued throughout the 1930s with numerous retrials and only ended decades later with Governor George Wallace's pardon of the last defendant in 1976.(2) For much of the 1930s, artwork in various media became propaganda clamoring for release of the Scottsboro boys and against the widespread injustice of lynching. Socially engaged northern artists seized specific aspects of this widely publicized case and created imaginative renditions in plays, poetry, song, and graphics that used a variety of persuasive artistic strategies to project themes idealizing the defense and vilifying Alabama and the rest of the white U.S. South. Viewed together these works portray a cruel, fallen South, warped by bigotry, ruled by a powerful white male elite allied with capitalist interests, ready to crucify young black men who await a proletarian redemption. Much in this artistic phenomenon can be attributed to activities of the Communist Party (CP), which made the Scottsboro case an international cause celebre. As two major histories of the case have explained at length, the Party, through its legal arm, the International Labor Defense (ILD) vied successfully with the NAACP to represent the boys in appealing the verdicts. The CP also launched an enormous publicity campaign, urging mass protest and pressure. This publicity probably supplied the major stimulus for artistic expression; such stimuli, however, had to reach sensitive, willing receptors. Some artists were Communist Party members, but in the early 1930s, the nadir of the Great Depression, many more sympathized with some part of the Communist agenda or its critique of an American society that seemed to have failed economically and politically under capitalism. News of Stalin's atrocities had not yet dampened Communist idealism and hope for a just, egalitarian society. Sympathetic artists agreed with the Communists that American society needed radical change and committed their work to increasing awareness of that need. The spirit behind many artistic efforts on behalf of the Scottsboro defendants was predominantly humanitarian rather than political. Along with the misery caused by the Depression, leftists believed that the oppression of blacks, particularly in the southern states, constituted the most flagrant eyesore on the American social landscape. The Scottsboro case seemed to exemplify the most egregious form of racial discrimination prevailing in the South: a black male accused of raping a white woman was presumed guilty and risked lynching if only to serve as an example to other black males. …

Profiling those impacted by organizational stressors at the macro, intermediate and micro levels of several police agencies*

This study examines job events with a tri‐level analytical framework of isolate those incidents within the organizational context perceived as problems by law enforcement personnel. The Police Stress Survey was developed to assess job events within the macro‐, intermediate‐, and micro‐levels of the organization. The survey was distributed to police officers and deputy sheriffs during traditional roll call meetings, with a final sample of 402 from various assignments and ranks. Factor analysis and stepwise regression analysis was used to determine which level within the organizational context best predicts perceived stress scores. Eight factors are identified within the tri‐level analytical framework to include: organizational policies and structures, work overload/resource allocation, role ambiguity, organizational processes, intraindividual and interpersonal conflict, role conflict, security and pay, and job changes. A model of organizational stress is developed incorporating the contributions of each level within the organizational context. The model suggests that organizational structures and processes are the best predictors of perceived stress. The standardized measurement instrument is reliable, cost effective, and time efficient for developing intervention policy. It can be used to identify organizational levels at which to focus policy for delivering individual or organizational services. Recommendations for communication, hierarchical structure, and participatory decision‐making are identified to diminsh the effects of problem job events at the macro‐level of the organization. By determining which factors and their organizational level that most affect officers’ stress, agency resources can be allocated to improve service to citizens and decrease stress induced problems.

The effects of work orientations on job satisfaction among sheriffs’ deputies practicing community‐oriented policing

Numerous prior studies have explored the level of job satisfaction of police officers. Some research has also focused on officer perceptions of community policing as practiced in municipal police agencies. There has been little empirical research on either topic conducted in sheriffs’ offices throughout the US. The present study examines the relative effects of work orientation on levels of job satisfaction among deputy sheriffs in an urban sheriff’s office which practices community policing on an agency‐wide basis. Our findings suggest service‐oriented deputies are somewhat more satisfied with their jobs than their crime control oriented counterparts.

The Making and Unmaking of a Folk Hero: The Ellie Nesler Story

Thanks to Ellie Nesler, God bless her, There's one less molester around. (Delacy and Cole 1994) Jamestown, Calif., April 2, 1993: I am twiddling my thumbs in the Tuolumne County bureau of the Modesto Bee, waiting for news to happen, when I hear traffic on the scanner about a shooting in the Jamestown court. I grab a camera and notebook and run down the street. Moments later, a woman in handcuffs, flanked by two sheriff's deputies, emerges from Jamestown Community Hall. I hold my camera in my palm, ready to shoot. Then I recognize the woman. I met Ellie Nesler in 1984. I had just arrived in Tuolumne County after a two-year stint as a graduate student in Folklore and Folklife at the University of Pennsylvania. My plan was to write my dissertation about the conversations I would record among the old-timers who stopped by Bub Dambacher's mobile home every day to drink coffee and talk about the past. One of Bub's regulars was a skinny old joker named Ellsworth Starr. Among the occasional visitors were Ellsworth's three married daughters, Jan Martinez, Marrietta Adams and Ellie Nesler. That fall of 1984, Ellie, her husband and her young son left for Liberia to mine gold. As evidence of the gold fever that was sweeping the Mother Lode during those years of soaring gold prices, I mentioned the Liberia bound Neslers in my dissertation. The following spring, still dissertating, so running low on dough, I to work for the local newspaper, liked it, and stayed with it. As a result, I continued stopping for coffee at Bub's long after I finished my research. I don't think I went native, exactly. to see people every day for a year and more, and then suddenly stop seeing them, was to admit, if only to myself, that establishing rapport was wholly a matter of fieldwork strategy, that there was a sunset provision on my interest in my sources-a journalist's word that I prefer to the folklorist's informants-that having done with them, I had no reason to go on seeing them. And so, out of habit, out of fondness, out of an unwillingness to confront and confirm the exploitative dimension of fieldwork, I kept visiting, kept running into Ellie's father until he died, kept seeing Ellie's sisters and, when she came back from Africa, occasionally met up with Ellie herself. And that is why, when I saw a shackled Ellie Nesler flash me a rueful smile as she slid into the backseat of the patrol car, I could not take her picture, though I had no trouble clicking off a few shots moments later when they brought out the body of Daniel Driver on a gurney.1 That day, and in the days, weeks and months that followed, I found myself in the awkward position of trying to get information from family members who were trusting me, as a of the family, not to write anything that would harm Ellie, the woman who carried a gun into a court of law and killed the man accused of molesting her son. Sometimes during my frequent telephone and face-to-face conversations with Ellie's sisters they would reveal tantalizing details about the case, only to say, at the end, But don't put any of that in the paper, or, Save that for the book. And we would have to go back over the conversation and figure out just which bits could be printed and which could not. On several occasions Ellie herself made astonishing revelations only to touch me on the arm and say that what she had told me was friend to friend. Worse still were the eye-popping conversations I had with Ellie or her sisters where nothing whatever was said about what was on or off the record but it was just assumed that I would use my own judgment and somehow know what was and was not suitable for publication. My editors at The Bee felt just as uncomfortable with the situation as I did. On one hand, they knew my relationship with the family was giving me precious access to key players that other reporters did not have. On the other hand, they feared that my relationship with the family would compromise my journalistic objectivity. …

Three Fatalities Involving Phosphine Gas, Produced as a Result of Methamphetamine Manufacturing

In August of 1996, Sheriff's deputies investigated the deaths of three individuals suspected to have been overcome by phosphine gas. Phosphine is an extremely toxic gas, and is generally seen in the farming industry where it is used as a grain fumigant. It can also be generated as a by-product during the manufacturing of methamphetamine. Chemicals and equipment consistent with the manufacturing of methamphetamine were noted at the location, as well as an apparent reaction mixture heated to near dryness. Dräger tubes detected an atmospheric phosphine concentration in excess of 0.3 parts per million (ppm), the Threshold Limit Value. Deputies had initially assessed the scene with no protective equipment, raising concerns about phosphine toxicity and the effects of exposure. The objectives of this paper are to describe how phosphine is formed during the manufacture of methamphetamine, to review the toxicity, health effects and symptoms of exposure, to address the safety concerns regarding potential exposure to law enforcement personnel, and to describe the protective equipment available for personnel who respond to clandestine laboratories.

Lending a Hand to Labor: James Myers and the Federal Council of Churches, 1926–1947

On 31 September 1929, James Myers, the industrial secretary of the Federal Council of Churches (FCC), arrived in Marion, North Carolina, to investigate the causes for the continuing industrial unrest that had swept across the southern textile industry since the spring. Shortly after Myers's arrival, as the textile workers attempted to picket the plant, sheriff's deputies fired into the crowd, killing six strikers and wounding twenty-five others. Myers's eulogy for the slain workers admonished the mill owners for the harsh working conditions and low wages, but mostly for their opposition to their workers' right to organize. He also scolded clergymen who argued that industrial conflict was “not the Church's business.” Over the ensuing months, Myers set an example of Christian involvement in labor unrest. He investigated the strike's impact on the community, he met with the governor, and he offered to help mediate the conflict. Dismayed by the suffering that he had uncovered, Myers also organized a relief campaign among church people on behalf of the families of the striking workers. Reflecting on Myers's efforts, the Christian Century declared that Myers stood “almost alone as representative of any active concern in the churches” in the midst of “appalling industrial warfare.” Otherwise, “the forces of organized religion would have to confess to an amazing indifference when confronted by the most acute industrial conflict of the year.”

Occupational tuberculosis among deputy sheriffs in Connecticut: a risk model of transmission.

The purpose of this study was to identify risk factors for tuberculin skin test conversions among non-infected deputy sheriffs in Connecticut and during an out-break in an urban lock-up. 377 tuberculin skin-test negative sheriffs statewide in 1994-1995 and 37 sheriffs in the lock-up in 1995 were screened and questionnaires administered. Cellblock volumetric air flow was measured. The Wells-Riley model of airborne transmission [C = S(1-e-Iqpt/Q)] was applied to the epidemiologic and ventilation data. Statewide, of 377 sheriffs screened, 22 (5.8%) had positive skin tests. Risk factors included older age (p < .0075) and longer tenure (p < .036). In the lock-up, of 37 sheriffs screened, 4 (10.8%) had positive skin tests. Measured mean outside air flow per occupant (8.0 cfm; S.D. = 2.2) was below design (15 cfm) and recommended (20 cfm) standards. Mathematical modeling estimated that TB transmission would be reduced by 62.5 percent with ventilation at design specifications. Inadequate ventilation may increase the risk for occupational transmission of tuberculosis. Since lock-ups do not have the time to conduct inmate TB screenings, supplemental engineering controls may be required.

"We Have Just Begun": Black Organizing and White Response in the Arkansas Delta, 1919

ON THE LAST NIGHT OF SEPTEMBER 1919, Phillips County deputy sheriff Charles Pratt and two assistants traveled twenty miles south out of Helena, Arkansas, in apparent pursuit of a bootlegger. Shortly after stopping-reportedly to repair a flat tire-in front of a small church at Hoop Spur, just north of the town of Elaine, a shot rang out, followed quickly by a volley of gunfire. Inside the church, a group of black farmers was meeting to consider plans to demand a better price for their cotton and a fairer settlement from their landlords. Many had recently joined the Progressive Farmers and Household Union of America, a local group that had organized chapters of black workers in several Phillips County communities. Interrupted in their discussions by the shooting and believing their union to be under attack, the men hastened to the windows, loaded their weapons, and joined the fray.1 After receiving news of the initial clash at Hoop Spur, public officials, local businessmen, and plantation owners in Helena organized a campaign to crush the black union. Their efforts, aided by the intervention of more than five hundred federal troops, marked the bloodiest clash of a tumultuous year of racial violence and labor strife in the United States.2 Joining armed posses from three states, the troops raided homes, chased sharecroppers into the woods,jailed and interrogated hundreds of black men and women, and forced hundreds more back to work in the fields and sawmills. Army reports acknowledged twenty-five African Americans were killed. Unofficial reports place the death toll much higher.3 In the aftermath of the Elaine Race Riot, sixty-seven African Americans were hurriedly sentenced to prison terms for their participation in a purported rebellion and twelve were condemned to death for the murder of five white people who died in the fighting. All the sentences were overturned after a highly-- publicized five-year legal battle that reached the United States Supreme Court.4 Looking back across eighty years, the attempt by African American workers to organize a union in the Arkansas delta might appear foolhardy, even self-destructive, given the overwhelming political, social, and economic power of the white elites. It would be easy to fall back upon popular stereotypes of black southerners in explaining the surprising upsurge of militancy in Phillips County. Their efforts might be dismissed as the tragic result of the assumed rural isolation, ignorance, and naivete of black delta farmers. Similarly, it would be easy to rely on popular representations of white southerners to explain the murderous reaction of Phillips County whites. Most contemporaneous press accounts and some historical treatments have considered the events in such a way. The southern press presumed that gullible sharecroppers had been duped into a money-making scheme by either Robert L. Hill, a charismatic black union organizer, or U. S. Bratton, a white attorney who had provided legal assistance to some of the union members.5 The national black press and liberal magazines emphasized the viciousness of the posses and law enforcement officials, but offered little to explain the motivations of Phillips County whites. Attempting to build popular support for the legal defense of the accused sharecroppers, these publications described the black men as simple and guileless victims of a racist hysteria.6 Much of the subsequent scholarship on Elaine, including two books and a half-dozen articles, has not proceeded much beyond these characterizations. The black farmers are portrayed as passive victims while whites remain a monolithic mob of reactionary hatemongers. The stereotypes, however, obscure the very distinctive conditions shaping the actions of both blacks and whites in Phillips County in 1919. At the end of the First World War, county residents confronted radically changing economic and social conditions. Under these circumstances, blacks and whites developed conflicting visions of Phillips County's future and their role in it. …

An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression

An Appalachian New Deal: West Virginia in the Great Depression. By Jerry Bruce Thomas. (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1998. Pp. x, 316. Acknowledgment, introduction, illustrations, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $36.95.) Great Depression is the central event shaping American life in the twentieth century. More dramatic than industrialization in the nineteenth, the Depression left a political legacy still controversial today. For far too long the event has been treated as a national phenomenon, although each region of America was affected differently. When state boundaries crossed regions, anomalous conditions defying easy analysis resulted. In the twentieth century West Virginia has suffered from bipolar depression. One pole was its coal miners. Coal mining arrived in the late nineteenth century in competition with the established fields of Pennsylvania. West Virginia led the way in developing that system of southern industrialization popularized by Mississippi and copied in Arkansas that promised lower costs by being union-free. Soon absentee mine owners controlled the state government, owned most of the press, and dominated many counties through their deputy sheriffs. New Deal experienced real troubles in coping with the over-production of coal, though its labor legislation allowed John L. Lewis of the United Mine Workers to carry on a successful campaign of union recruitment. other depressed pole of West Virginia was agriculture. Mostly of the small, self-sufficient variety, West Virginia farmers had to endure the Drought of 1930 and then faced collapsing prices. When the Depression cut off the outside income from timbering or working in small coal mines that had helped sustain life on worn out, eroded land, West Virginia agriculture became a disaster area. Compounding the problem, thousands of ex-residents returned to their former homes, and the number of farmers actually increased during the Depression. Agriculture, too, was not well served by New Deal programs. Some experimental communities were set up, but the day of subsistence farming had already passed. In probably no southern state did the Rural Electrification Agency lose more battles to power companies. Indeed, the entire sorry saga of Depression-era West Virginia ranks as the worst in the South. state's geography created isolated communities, and in-grown politics, and generally retarded modernization. dominant coal companies prevented the adoption of severance taxes and starved government services generally. Arkansas readers may take some solace that The Wonder State ranked above West Virginia in public libraries and other signs of progress. …

The differential value of work experience versus pre‐service education and training on criticality evaluations of police tasks and functions*

This paper compares the differential value and effects of on‐the‐job socialization with pre‐service forms of socialization on officers’ criticality evaluations of different police tasks and functions. The study itself, based on part of a larger job task survey conducted under the auspices of a state criminal justice training council, includes over 70 percent of all patrol officers (municipal police, sheriff's deputies, and state troopers) and their first‐line supervisors in a rural New England state. Based on a review of the literature on police socialization, it is hypothesized that on‐the‐job socialization has a much greater impact on criticality evaluations than the combination of pre‐service factors.

Women Deputies and Jail Work

This article examines the adjustment problems and work strategies of female deputy sheriffs working in four county jails and three local adult detention centers. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 108 women deputies. The findings suggest that in their role as jail officers, women experience integration difficulties predominantly imposed on them by their male coworkers; these difficulties include gender stereotyping, role conflict, and differential performance expectations. This article explores the impact of and response to these work problems.