Nos últimos trinta trinta anos, houve profundas mudanças na forma como compreendemos o crime e a justiça criminal. O crime tornou-se um evento simbólico, um verdadeiro teste para a ordem social e para as políticas governamentais, um desafio para a sociedade civil, para a democracia e para os direitos humanos. Segundo David Garland, professor da Faculdade de Direito da New York University, um dos principais autores no campo da Sociologia da Punição e com artigo publicado na Revista de Sociologia e Política , número 13, na modernidade tardia houve uma verdadeira obsessão securitária, direcionando as políticas criminais para um maior rigor em relação às penas e maior intolerância com o criminoso. Há trinta anos, nos EUA e na Inglaterra essa tendência era insuspeita. O livro mostra que os dois países compartilham intrigantes similaridades em suas práticas criminais, a despeito da divisão racial, das desigualdades econômicas e da letalidade violenta que marcam fortemente o cenário americano. Segundo David Garland, encontram-se nos dois países os “mesmos tipos de riscos e inseguranças, a mesma percepção a respeito dos problemas de um controle social não-efetivo, as mesmas críticas da justiça criminal tradicional, e as mesmas ansiedades recorrentes sobre mudança e ordem sociais”1 (GARLAND, 2001, p. 2). O argumento principal da obra é o seguinte: a modernidade tardia, esse distintivo padrão de relações sociais, econômicas e culturais, trouxe consigo um conjunto de riscos, inseguranças e problemas de controle social que deram uma configuração específica às nossas respostas ao crime, ao garantir os altos custos das políticas criminais, o grau máximo de duração das penas e a excessivas taxas de encarceramento.

http://www.scielo.br/pdf/rsocp/n20/n20a15.pdf

The culture of control: crime and social order in contemporary, society

Sampson, Robert J. 2012. Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN-13: 9780226734569. pp. 552, $27.50 cloth. Robert J. Sampson’s ...

Great American city: Chicago and the enduring neighborhood effect

Thirty-three brothels in rural and small-town Nevada, which contain between 225 and 250 prostitutes, are legal or openly tolerated and strictly controlled by state statute, city and county ordinances, and local rules. Twenty-two of the brothels are in places with populations between 500 and 8,000, and the remaining eleven are in rural areas. The legal and quasi-legal restrictions placed on prostitutes severely limit their activities outside brothels. These restrictions in conjunction with historical inertia, perceived benefits of crime and venereal disease control, and the good image of madams contribute to widespread positive local attitudes toward brothel prostitution. Interactions between clients and prostitutes in brothel parlors are also restricted and limited to a few basic types which are largely determined by entrepreneurial philosophy. KEY WORDS : Nevada, Political geography, Prostitution, Restricted activity spaces.

ANNALS of the Association of American Geographers

Meta-analysis is a method to obtain a weighted average of results from various studies. In addition to pooling effect sizes, meta-analysis can also be used to estimate disease frequencies, such as incidence and prevalence. In this article we present methods for the meta-analysis of prevalence. We discuss the logit and double arcsine transformations to stabilise the variance. We note the special situation of multiple category prevalence, and propose solutions to the problems that arise. We describe the implementation of these methods in the MetaXL software, and present a simulation study and the example of multiple sclerosis from the Global Burden of Disease 2010 project. We conclude that the double arcsine transformation is preferred over the logit, and that the MetaXL implementation of multiple category prevalence is an improvement in the methodology of the meta-analysis of prevalence.

Meta-analysis of prevalence

Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class. Mary Patillo-McCoy. Chicago, 1L, and London, UK: The University of Chicago Press, 1999. xii. 276pp. (Cloth US$25.00; PaperUSS15.00)

Black Picket Fences: Privilege and Peril Among the Black Middle Class

Racial bias in predictive policing algorithms has been the focus of a number of recent news articles, statements of concern by several national organizations (e.g., the ACLU and NAACP), and simulat...

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/pdf/10.1080/2330443X.2018.1438940

Does Predictive Policing Lead to Biased Arrests? Results From a Randomized Controlled Trial

In this article we identify social communities among gang members in the Hollenbeck policing district in Los Angeles, based on sparse observations of a combination of social interactions and geographic locations of the individuals. This information, coming from Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) Field Interview cards, is used to construct a similarity graph for the individuals. We use spectral clustering to identify clusters in the graph, corresponding to communities in Hollenbeck, and compare these with the LAPD's knowledge of the individuals' gang membership. We discuss different ways of encoding the geosocial information using a graph structure and the influence on the resulting clusterings. Finally we analyze the robustness of this technique with respect to noisy and incomplete data, thereby providing suggestions about the relative importance of quantity versus quality of collected data.

Community Detection Using Spectral Clustering on Sparse Geosocial Data

This article is a post-print copy of the final article, which can be accessed at DOI: 10.1177/1362480613476986.

/pdf/policing-the-progressive-city-the-racialized-geography-of-c0yesb0snk.pdf

Policing the progressive city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement

In this article we identify social communities among gang members in the Hollenbeck policing district in Los Angeles, based on sparse observations of a combination of social interactions and geographic locations of the individuals. This information, coming from LAPD Field Interview cards, is used to construct a similarity graph for the individuals. We use spectral clustering to identify clusters in the graph, corresponding to communities in Hollenbeck, and compare these with the LAPD's knowledge of the individuals' gang membership. We discuss different ways of encoding the geosocial information using a graph structure and the influence on the resulting clusterings. Finally we analyze the robustness of this technique with respect to noisy and incomplete data, thereby providing suggestions about the relative importance of quantity versus quality of collected data.

Community detection using spectral clustering on sparse geosocial data

Territorial behavior is often found in nature. Coyotes and wolves organize themselves around a den site and mark their territory to distinguish their claimed region.
Moorcroft et al. model the formation of territories and spatial distributions of coyote packs and their markings in [31].
 We modify this ecological approach to simulate spatial gang dynamics in the Hollenbeck policing division of eastern Los Angeles. We incorporate important geographical features from the region that would inhibit movement, such as rivers and freeways. From the gang and marking densities created by this method, we create a rivalry network from overlapping territories and compare the graph to both the observed network and those constructed through other methods. Data on the locations of where gang members have been observed is then used to analyze the densities created by the model.

http://teamcore.usc.edu/projects/security/lauraDCDS12.pdf

Matthew Valasik

Papers

Does Predictive Policing Lead to Biased Arrests? Results From a Randomized Controlled Trial

Community Detection Using Spectral Clustering on Sparse Geosocial Data

Policing the progressive city: The racialized geography of drug law enforcement

Community detection using spectral clustering on sparse geosocial data

Adaptation of an ecological territorial model to street gang spatial patterns in Los Angeles