Browsing by Subject "Crime"
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Item An ordinary metropolis: the evolution of criminal justice in London, 1750-1830(Texas Tech University, 1998-12) Balch-Lindsay, Virginia SuzanneThis dissertation examines England's transition from a system of criminal law enforcement that relied on individual initiative to one that relied on state-centered institutions. Between 1750 and 1830, London experienced a confluence of events, and ideas, that promoted new goals forhumanity law enforcement. The prevention of crime, not only its punishment, became an achievable goal. Reform of the criminal was another. Efficiency, effectiveness, and, combined to push England's governors toward a more rational, more enforceable code of law.Item "Arming the Good Guys?": An Examination of Racial Framing in Students for Concealed Carry on Campus(2014-07-25) Couch, ToddOver the last several decades, issues relating to gun rights have received growing attention from the academic community. Much of this research focuses on the importance of masculinity and violence and shaping modern gun culture in the United States. While these studies are important, they fail to analyze the importance of race in development of the modern gun rights organization. Addressing this gap in the literature, I engaged in 30 in-depth interviews with members of the student-based gun rights organization Students for Concealed Carry on Campus (SCCC). Based on my conversations with the members of SCCC, I discovered a very intense pro-white/anti-other racial framing guiding much of SCCC membership.Item Careful crackdowns : human rights and campaigning on public security in Latin America(2012-05) Uang, Randy Sunwin; Hunter, Wendy; Weyland, Kurt; Dietz, Henry; Madrid, Raul; Greene, KennethCrime and violence are regularly seen as being ripe for politicians to turn into campaign issues and win votes. This study argues, in contrast, that success on public security is not so automatic: human rights values constrain the use of security and the winning of votes on it. Even in Latin American countries, where voters' concerns about rampant crime and violence are among the highest in the world, considerations of human rights combine with low trust in security forces to restrict the viability of the issue in key ways. Examination of presidential campaigns in Colombia in 1994, 1998, 2002, and 2010 supports this claim. Success on security is a two-step process: invoking the issue and then gaining voter support on the topic. Usability depends on the absence of recent repression and the degree of organization of security threats. Then, winning votes on it depends on having a civilian background, a campaign that balances security with other issues, and messages of careful enforcement. These messages of careful enforcement promise targeted, deliberate use of security forces' enforcement activities in a way that pays attention to human rights, rather than promising unbridled enforcement, increased punishment, or programs of long-term prevention. This study therefore shows how candidates are forced to walk a fine line between promising to establish order and promising to protect basic rights and liberties. These findings are powerful, providing an understanding of public security in electoral campaigns that maintains a much closer fit with empirical reality than existing research. The results also provide a critique of the sociological school of vote choice and points to ways in which ownership of the issue of security may be leased away. Furthermore, because the results are driven by the spread of human rights values, the results demonstrate the importance of quick shifts in political culture as a factor that explains changes in political patterns.Item Creating the vilest places on Earth : public resource, crime and the social geography of Buenos Aires, 1880-1920(2010-05) Bates, Juandrea Marie; Garfield, Seth, 1967-; Twinam, AnnThis Master’s Report explores how the social geography of Buenos Aires transformed between 1887 and 1910 and how these changes affected the city’s development. It argues that despite the state’s purported willingness to provide security and sanitation services to its citizenry, changing settlement patterns and expanding democratic participation led to the unequal distribution of public resources and the decay of neighborhoods in the south and west of the city. It argues that as public works removed inexpensive housing in the city’s downtown and transportation networks linked the city’s peripheries closer to the nucleus, members of the middle class and elites increasingly congregated in center and north of the city. Buenos Aires’ neighborhoods became segregated increasingly along class lines and patronage networks broke down. Members of the working class, now concentrated in their own neighborhoods, were unable gain the same resources. Inequality in the allocation of government benefits created clear physical and cultural barriers between rich and poor segments of the city. Unequal access to security forces played an especially important role in stigmatizing poor regions. While the police department vigilantly protected safety, private property and order in some parts of the city, they did not provide enough officers to complete the same tasks in others. Crime went unchecked in poorer regions. The municipal government published statistics and commentary on crime in the southern and western districts of the capital. This imagery cast the area’s residents as threats to public safety and sanitation that the state should control and maintain segregated rather than aid. By casting them as a threatening “other,” city officials denied inhabitants of poor neighborhoods’ future claims to public resources.Item Essays on mechanism design, safety, and crime(2014-05) Shoukry, George Fouad Nabih; Abrevaya, Jason; Stinchcombe, MaxwellThis dissertation uses theoretical and empirical tools to answer applied questions of design with an emphasis on issues relating to safety and crime. The first essay incorporates safety in implementation theory and studies when and how safe mechanisms can be designed to obtain socially desirable outcomes. I provide general conditions under which a social choice rule can be implemented using safe mechanisms. The second essay is an empirical study of how criminals respond to changing profitability of crime, a question that informs the policy debate on the most effective crime fighting methods. I find that the price elasticity of theft is about 1 in the short term and increases to about 1.2 over a seven-month horizon, suggesting that policies that directly affect crime profitability, such as policies that shut down black markets or those that reduce demand for illegal goods, can be relatively effective. The third essay shows that any standard implementation problem can be formulated as a question about the existence of a graph that solves a graph coloring problem, establishing a connection between implementation theory and graph theory. More generally, an implementation problem can be viewed as a constraint satisfaction problem, and I propose an algorithm to design simple mechanisms to solve arbitrary implementation problems.Item "I Never Thought It Would Happen Here": White Privilege and Assumptions of Safety(2014-05-03) Varela, Kay SCriminology and media scholars over the last two decades convincingly argue that crime is one of the major social problems of this era. Racialized constructions of safety and space, however, continue to be the dominant paradigm through which crime is viewed and the hypervigilance of people of color legitimized. I argue that depictions of white communities as pure, homogenous, and calm spaces permit and facilitate whites? tendency to link danger and violence to people of color, which not only reinforces existing stereotypes that associate people of color with the dangerous side of the safety continuum, but also harks back to a history when white space was violently protected and its isolation legally sanctioned. Using 155 newspaper articles taken from four Chicago area newspapers from January 2008 to January 2013 (The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Defender, La Raza Chicago, and The Daily Herald), I conduct a structurally contextualized critical discourse analysis and engage several different categories of frames, particularly in three areas: 1) neighborhood contextualization; 2) safety concern of the article; and 3) how the incident being reported on is described and understood in terms of locality. My analysis highlights the white supremacist logic found and upheld in newspaper discourse; a discourse that focuses on white normative standards of safety while also structuring the way in which people and communities of color experience safety. As such, my analysis indicates demonstrates discourse surrounding safety and crime indicate an often unnoticed privilege?the privilege of being able to presume safety?that is denied to people and communities of color and almost guaranteed to whites and white communities.Item Issues in urban America : factors related to perceptions of self-reliance and lower crime(2001-05) Wheeler, Sean; Butler, John S. (John Sibley)For over a century, researchers have studied methods for revitalizing urban communities. Many studies show that entrepreneurship plays a vital role in sustaining valuable resources that are necessary for community development. The current study adds to previous research by identifying factors that are related to self-reliance and lower crime. I analyze data from the 1991 National Race and Politics Study, which explored attitudes on various issues related to community development and politics. My findings indicate that jobs, more say in government decisions, and hard work are significantly related to self-reliance, while small business, neighborhood organizations, care for the homeless and job training are significantly related to lower crime. These results support the work of previous researchers by showing that crime and neighborhood organizations play important roles in community development. The study goes a step further to identify additional attitudinal variables that are related to self-reliance and lower crime. These results should assist policy makers in determining what factors may help revitalize urban communities that suffer from high levels of unemployment and crime.Item The Strategic Nature of Politics(2011-02-22) Ramirez, Mark DanielScholarship shows that the social construction of crime is responsible for the public?s demand for tougher criminal justice policies. Yet, there remains disagreement over several key issues regarding the relationship between strategic communication and the punitiveness of the mass public. Little is known about the magnitude and direction of changes in punitive sentiment over the last 50 years. Moreover, there is disagreement over when the public began to demand punitive solutions to crime over alternative policies. Many scholars point the racial turmoil of the 1960s, but none have shown conclusive evidence of any fundamental change in punitive sentiment. Finally, there is disagreement over what type of strategic appeal is most effective at shaping public opinion. The argument of this research is that the democratic nature of American pol- itics creates an environment where the competition of ideas flourish. Political ac- tors can use several types of strategic communication (agenda-setting, persuasion, priming, framing) to shape political outcomes. The effectiveness of an appeal does not remain constant over time, but should evolve around systematic social changes? environmental conditions and social norms. Thus, there is a time varying relationship between various appeals and public opinion. A content analysis of crime news in the New York Times provides measures of four types of strategic messages. Instrumental factors such as the economy and public policy are also shown to influence the public?s desire for punitive criminal justice policies. A Bayesian changepoint model provides a means to test when, if any,fundamental change occurred in the public?s punitive sentiment. Contrary to most accounts, the changepoint model identifies 1972 as having the highest probability of a breakpoint suggesting a public backlash against the Supreme Court?s Furman vs. Georgia decision to abolish the death penalty. Estimates from a state-space model show that different types of messages in the media shape punitive sentiment and that the effectiveness of racial primes and presidential attention to crime changes over time. Moreover, these changes are shown to be a function of changes in social context and norms suggesting ways to improve political communication.