Pamela Oliver
SEE CORRECTION People who are not Black activists often believe that the Black movement went away after the late 1960s, either because it won or because people just gave up. And the available data certainly shows a steep decline in Black protest events as covered by the New York Times.
In studying protest events using news sources, it is important to recognize the non-equivalence of events and articles about events. Social movement researchers usually code information about protest events in news sources with the goal of drawing conclusions about the frequency and size of the actual physical events that led
Key findings: Of those leaving Wisconsin prisons for the first time, Native American Indians have about a 30% higher rate of crimeless revocations than Whites, and Blacks about 20% higher (comparable to disparity ratios of 1.3 and 1.2) while Hispanic and Asian revocation rates are lower than White. For second and
Key findings In Wisconsin, an estimated 35% of first spells in prison and 50-75% of second or later spells are crimeless revocations, depending on the criteria used for “crimeless”. A careful comparison of prison records suggests that roughly a third of prison admissions with no new sentence may have anticipated
There is a lot of confusion in understanding imprisonment data created by the failure to understand the difference between the characteristics of people sitting in prison at any one time (what are technically called the “stock”) and the characteristics of the people who have gone though prison (the flow). This
It is important to understand how long people stay in prison as part of understanding revocations. The graph below shows how long people stay in prison across all admission types. The vertical axis shows the cumulative percentage who have exited after the number of months on the horizontal axis. So,
There’s a new campaign you can read about at sentback.org to stop sending people to prison on crimeless revocations. The campaign is sponsored by Restoring Our Communities (ROC) Wisconsin, WISDOM and EXPO (Ex-Prisoners Organizing). According to a report by Health Impact Partners (short web summary or PDF full report), about 1/3 of the
A few days after Donald Trump won the electoral votes for president, some people started suggesting that pro-immigrant people in the US wear safety pins in emulation of the movement in Britain after Brexit to signal support for immigrants. A social media debate quickly ensured about what this might mean,
Madison and Dane County have an affordable housing crisis. On the west side of Madison, one new owner of a 90-unit complex has recently non-renewed two thirds of his tenants, leaving them to scramble to try to find housing in an impossible market for lower-income renters. In addition, recent changes
On August 24, 2016, I was interviewed by Wisconsin Public Radio regarding the explanations for Wisconsin’s high racial disparities rates. You can listen to the interview online or download it on the WPR web site