Pamela Oliver
As a citizen and human being, I have watched the recent news coming out of Charlottesville with the same horror as many others have felt. White nationalists displaying Nazi symbols, brawling, and someone purposely driving a car into a crowd are all upsetting. As a scholar of social movements and
Police use of force has recently stirred widespread public interest and concern. Recent use of force incidents have been well-publicized on social media due to the ability of the public to witness and video record police actions. However, owing to the fact that the operations of jails and prisons are
In my previous posts, I showed that White imprisonment has been growing more in rural areas than urban areas, and that this is tied to the fact that rural places are much more likely to have high poverty rates and low average educational levels. In this post, I follow up
In a previous post, I showed how the White imprisonment rate rose in rural counties even as the Black and White imprisonment rates in metropolitan areas fell. In this post, I show that the White rural-urban difference in imprisonment is linked to the White rural-urban difference in poverty and education,
The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo transferred the northern half of Mexico to US control.* It is a central document in US history, as well as in Mexican history. The “Mexican cession” as it is somewhat euphemistically called, is central to the construction of the US nation. Forgetting the cession is
Unremarked until very recently* , there is a hidden story to be told about the rise in White incarceration in the United States to supplement the story about the mass incarceration of Black people I and many others have been writing about for years. The White story has been going
The past is always with us. How we talk about our personal biography and how we talk about our city’s or nation’s history are part of how we function today. Kristen Lavelle’s Whitewashing the South: White Memories of Segregation and Civil Rights is based on interviews with older 44 White residents
In his Scatterplot post algorithmic-decisionmaking-replaces-your-biases-with-someone-elses-biases Sociologist Dan Hirschman has written a good summary (with links) of recent discussions of the problems with COMPAS, a “risk assessment” tool that is used to decide whether people are released from prison or jail. He calls particular attention to the story in Rebecca Wexler’s
A few readers may be interested in how I used Stata to create the color scheme for the offenses in the graphs I’ve posted recently. This is a “stats nerd” post that assumes the reader uses Stata, a statistical package. Everybody else may wish to give it a pass. Some
Hopefully the enormous costs will dissuade legislators from passing a bill that would require the Wisconsin Department of Corrections to automatically recommend revocation of anyone “charged with a crime.” The bill literally says “charged with a crime.” Not a felony, not a violent crime, “a crime.” Although ordinances that are