Does protest help a group’s cause? Do cities with strong Black protest movements improve their policing practices in Black communities? Do police respond more repressively in places with strong Black movements? Does mass incarceration reduce the capacity for Black protest? To answer these questions, we need to know how to
Read moreVideos for activists from social movement scholars
The Mobilizing Ideas blog has partnered with Jenn Earl’s Youth Activism Project which (as the name implies) studies activism by younger people) to provide advice to young activists by way of videos of top social movement scholars addressing important issues in organizing, supplemented with suggestions for further reading. The series
Read moreSome thoughts about building community trust of police
A local reporter sent me an email asking my opinion of proposals to increase community trust of police. My “some general comments” turned out to be really long, so I decided to put them in a blog post. Then I edited it a bit more. As I write, this has
Read moreSolitary Confinement
Administrative segregation–solitary confinement–in Wisconsin prisons and the Dane County jail are issues today. Extended periods of solitary confinement (defined as 15 days or more) is considered torture by many human rights conventions, as is any time in solitary confinement for a mentally ill person. US prisons and jails routine use
Read moreCommunity Control Over Police
M Adams and Max Rameau have a forthcoming article titled “Black Community Control Over Police in the Wisconsin Law Review that they were kind enough to let me see in advance of publication. (UPDATE: Publication available here.) The key argument of the article is that traditional ways of thinking about
Read moreLiberation Capital and Insurgent Intellectual Networks
I have a review of Aldon Morris’s The Scholar Denied coming out in a forum in Contemporary Sociology, but I promised I would not scoop the journal by pre-publishing my essay.* I wrote my essay without reading other reviews, but now that I have read them, I find that although
Read moreNuisance, Criminal History, and Housing Discrimination
In many cities, one of the sources of homelessness for many people is nuisance ordinances that fine landlords if there are too many police calls to a property. Desmond and Valdez’s 2013 article “Unpolicing the Urban Poor: Consequences of Third-Party Policing for Inner-City Women” published in the American Sociological Review
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