Showing papers in "Social Problems in 2019"

Damages Done: The Longitudinal Impacts of Natural Hazards on Wealth Inequality in the United States

Abstract: This study investigates a largely ignored contributor to wealth inequality in the United States: damages from natural hazards, which are expected to increase substantially in coming years. Instead of targeting a specific large-scale disaster and assessing how different subpopulations recover, we begin with a nationally representative sample of respondents from the restricted, geocoded Panel Study of Income Dynamics. We follow them through time (1999–2013) as hazard damages of varying scales accrue in the counties where they live. This design synthesizes the longitudinal, population-centered approach common in stratification research with a broad hazard-centered focus that extends beyond disasters to integrate ongoing environmental dynamics more centrally into the production of social inequality. Results indicate that as local hazard damages increase, so does wealth inequality, especially along lines of race, education, and homeownership. At any given level of local damage, the more aid an area receives from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the more this inequality grows. These findings suggest that two defining social problems of our day – wealth inequality and rising natural hazard damages – are dynamically linked, requiring new lines of research and policy making in the future.

Pervasive Penality: How the Criminalization of Poverty Perpetuates Homelessness

Abstract: A growing literature examines the extent to which the criminal justice system perpetuates poverty and inequality. This research examines how anti-homeless laws produce various forms of police interactions that fall short of arrest, yet have wide-ranging impacts on the urban poor. Our analysis draws on a citywide survey of currently and recently homeless people, along with 43 in-depth interviews, to examine and reveal the mechanisms through which consistent punitive interactions, including move-along orders, citations, and destruction of property, systematically limit homeless people’s access to services, housing, and jobs, while damaging their health, safety, and well-being. Our findings also suggest that antihomeless laws and enforcement fail to reduce urban disorder, but create instead a spatial churn in which homeless people circulate between neighborhoods and police jurisdictions rather than leaving public space. We argue that these laws and their enforcement, which affected the majority of study participants, constitute a larger process of pervasive penality— consistent punitive interactions with state officials that rarely result in arrest, but that do material and psychological harm. This process not only reproduces homelessness, but also deepens racial, gender, and health inequalities among the urban poor. K E Y W O R D S : homelessness; poverty governance; criminal justice; community-based research. In response to the explosive growth of homelessness across the United States in the 1980s, and the judicial overturn of Jim Crow, anti-Okie, “ugly,” and vagrancy laws that traditionally empowered Acknowledgements: This project was made possible by Human Rights Work Group at the San Francisco Coalition on Homelessness, especially by peer researchers Bilal Ali, George Bracey, Alejandra Cruz, T. J. Johnston, Zenah Rinehardt and Executive Director Jennifer Friedenbach. Isaac Martin provided crucial feedback on research design and writing at every stage of this project. Loı̈c Wacquant and Sandra Susan Smith provided important suggestions. Amy Smith and her students at San Francisco State University provided valuable transcription assistance. We also thank Colleen Rivecca, Paul Boden, Tony Sparks, Freja Sonne, Kelley Cutler, Nick Kimura, Shira Noel, Teresa Gowan, Bob Offer-Westort, Doug Ahlers, Marina Fischer, Sarah Rankin, Arefa Vohra, Andy Chu, Gary Lewis, Lt. Michael Nevin, Brenda Meskan, John Murray, Vilaska Nguyen, Leah Rothstein, Karen Shain, Joe Wilson, Dennis Woo, Kelley Winter, and the anonymous reviewers of Social Problems. Our research was supported by the Sociological Initiatives Foundation, UC Berkeley Center for Human Rights, UC San Diego Center for Global Justice, and the Center for Engaged Scholarship. Chris Herring and Dilara Yarbrough are equal first authors of this manuscript. All three authors contributed to the research design and collection of data. Please direct correspondence to Chris Herring at the Department of Sociology, 410 Barrows Hall, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720; email: christoph.herring@berkeley.edu. Dilara Yarbrough may be contacted at the Criminal Justice Studies Program, Department of Public Affairs and Civic Engagement, 261 HSS Building, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132; email: dilara@sfsu.edu. VC The Author(s) 2019. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com. 1 Social Problems, 2019, 0, 1–19 doi: 10.1093/socpro/spz004 Original Article ow naded rom http/academ ic.p.com /socpro/advance-articloi/10.1093/socpro/spz004/5422958 by Azona State U niersity user on 05 April 2019 police to manage the down-and-out, U.S. cities created new policies that restricted a wide variety of behaviors associated with homelessness, including panhandling, sleeping in parks, and sitting on sidewalks (Ortiz, Dick, and Rankin 2015). Thirty years later, these laws are spreading at an unprecedented rate in the United States and across the globe (see Evangelista 2013; Huey 2007; Johnsen and Fitzpatrick 2010). Most U.S. cities have municipal codes that punish the life-sustaining behaviors of homeless individuals. The National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty (NLCHP) found that more than half of the 187 cities in its study banned camping and sitting or lying in public, and over two-thirds carried bans on loitering and begging in particular places (2017). Between 2006 and 2016, bans on sitting and lying increased by 52 percent, city-wide camping bans by 69 percent, prohibitions on loitering and loafing citywide by 88 percent, and bans on living in vehicles rose 143 percent. Recent statewide studies by legal scholars have shown that most cities have multiple ordinances on the books (Adcock et al. 2016; Fisher et al. 2015; Frankel, Katovich, and Vedvig 2016; Olson, Macdonald, and Rankin 2015). For instance, California cities have an average of nine anti-homeless laws, while Los Angeles and San Francisco each have 21 and 24 respectively (Fisher et al. 2015). Each law taken on its own may seem limited in its strictures on targeted behaviors; collectively, they effectively criminalize homelessness. As legal scholar Jeremy Waldron presciently wrote over twenty years ago, “what is emerging – and it is not just a matter of fantasy – is a state of affairs in which a million or more citizens have no place to perform elementary human activities like urinating, washing, sleeping, cooking, eating and standing around” (1991:301). What are the impacts of these laws on homelessness and the reproduction of poverty more generally? Social scientists have devoted considerable attention to the politicization of a social problem (housing and social services) into a law enforcement problem (maintaining order) (Smith 1996; Vitale 2008; Wolch and Dear 1994), but far less attention has been given to the ramifications and impact of this transformation on homeless people. Among the first to empirically assess the effect of anti-homeless laws on people experiencing homelessness, this study evaluates some determinants and consequences of their enforcement. When analyzed in isolation, such move-along orders and citations may seem inconsequential, but when analyzed as part of a larger process of criminalization, what we term pervasive penality, anti-homeless enforcement proves to have detrimental consequences for wide swaths of the homeless population. Furthermore, our findings expose how pervasive penality not only reproduces homelessness, but also widens racial, gender, and health inequalities among homeless and precariously housed people. H O M E L E S S N E S S A N D C R I M I N A L I Z A T I O N Over the last 40 years, the United States has witnessed a jail and prison boom of colossal proportions. Surging over 500 percent from merely 380,000 inmates in 1975, U.S. prisons and jails today contain over 2.13 million people (U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics 2018). During this same period, homelessness transformed from a rare experience for a small collection of predominantly single men, to a phenomenon that affects a diverse assortment of over three million poor families and individuals in the United States each year (National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty 2017). As annual funding for public housing plummeted from $27 billion in 1980 to $10 billion at the decade’s end, corrections funding surged from nearly $7 billion to $26.1 billion (Maguire, Pastore, and Flanagan 1997) transforming the U.S. prison system into the primary provider of affordable housing and many of its jails into the largest homeless shelters in town (Wacquant 2009). In the wake of the rise of advanced homelessness and hyper-incarceration, social scientists have established various quantitative correlations between incarceration and homelessness. For instance, 23 percent of homeless people in New York City shelters had spent time in prison or jail in the previous two years (Metraux and Culhane 2006) and 49 percent of homeless people in a national survey disclosed having spent time in a jail and 18 percent having spent time in a state penitentiary compared to five percent of the general population (Burt et al. 1999). Researchers have found that 2 Herring et al. D ow naded rom http/academ ic.p.com /socpro/advance-articloi/10.1093/socpro/spz004/5422958 by Azona State U niersity user on 05 April 2019 homelessness was 7.5 to 11.3 times more prevalent among jail inmates than the general population (Greenberg and Rosenheck 2008). In San Francisco, between 10–24 percent of the jail population identified as homeless at the time of arrest (Applied Survey Research 2013). In sum, there exists an ever-tightening nexus between the criminal justice system and homelessness (see Metraux, Caterina, and Cho 2008). To explain the dynamics behind this penal/homeless nexus, scholars have examined the movement from prison or jail into homelessness and vice versa. On the one hand, scholars have shown how incarceration produces homelessness. This occurs both directly through policies excluding people with a criminal record from private and public housing (Carey 2004; Desmond 2012; Thacher 2008), and indirectly via barriers to accessing work (Pager 2003) and social services (Hays 2003). We also know that homelessness disproportionately exposes people to incarceration through the concentration of homeless services in over-policed inner-city neighborhoods, the temptation to commit crimes of desperation, and what John Irwin (2013) calls “rabble management:” the routine jailing of the disreputable and disaffiliated for minimal offenses in the interests of public order (Gowan 2002, 2010; Snow and Anderson 1993). Yet, while these scholars have traced the criminalization of homelessness as paths between the prison and the street, little is known about the far more frequent contact between homelessness and the criminal

Differentiated Threat and the Genesis of Prejudice: Group-Specific Antecedents of Homonegativity, Islamophobia, Anti-Semitism, and Anti-Immigrant Attitudes

Abstract: In this article we argue that an exclusive focus on the generalized aspect of prejudice limits understanding of the structure and genesis of prejudice towards particular out-groups. In order to conceptualize the specific nature of particular prejudices, we propose the differentiated threat approach. This framework postulates that different out-groups challenge diverse realistic and symbolic interests, and that these out-group specific threats affect various socio-economic strata and cultural groups differentially. The differentiated threat approach is applied to analyse majority-group Belgians’ attitudes towards immigrants, Muslims, Jews and homosexuals. The results show that a common denominator of prejudice can be distinguished, but that the prejudices towards the various out-groups contain substantively relevant unique components that are influenced by socio-demographic and attitudinal predictors in diverging ways. Gender traditionalism is found to reinforce homonegativity and temper Islamophobia at the same time. Feelings of relative deprivation are more strongly related to Islamophobia than to other forms of prejudice, and are unrelated to homonegativity. Religious involvement plays a more decisive role in the formation of antiSemitism and homonegativity than it does in the other forms of prejudice. Anti-immigration attitudes show a class gradient that is absent in attitudes towards other out-groups. Our results evidence that the concrete realization of attitudes towards a specific out-group cannot be understood without paying attention to structural and contextual factors, such as social positions, the nature of inter-group relations, power balances and elite discourses.

Police Warriors and Police Guardians: Race, Masculinity, and the Construction of Gun Violence

Abstract: This paper draws on 79 in-depth interviews with police chiefs in Arizona, California, and Michigan to advance sociological understandings of race, masculinity, and policing. While the bulk of scholarship on public law enforcement focuses on urban settings, this paper juxtaposes police’s perceptions of urban, suburban, and rural gun violence. It details how police chiefs construct criminal gun violence according to two overarching tropes: (1) gang- and drug-related gun violence involving black and brown perpetrators and victims in urban spaces and (2) active shooting-related gun violence involving white perpetrators and victims in suburban and rural spaces. The analysis shows that police understand their own guns in part through reference to these tropes, embracing two racially distinct styles of police masculinity: the “warrior” and the “guardian.” Whereas the “warrior” brand of police masculinity emphasizes aggressive enforcement against (black and brown) perpetrators, the “guardian” brand of police masculinity emphasizes assertive protection on behalf of (white) victims. Detailing masculinity as a bifurcated axis along which racialized policing is enacted and amplified, this study broadens scholarly understandings of public law enforcement as a race-making institution and suggests the limitations of police reforms that fail to address whiteness as shaping public law enforcement.

The Paradox of Legibility: Domestic Violence and Institutional Survivorhood

Abstract: Existing literature has demonstrated that victims of domestic violence and rape undergo processes of discipline when they interact with legal structures, transforming themselves into “worthy victims.” Intervening in this literature, I show how the medicalization of institutions surrounding domestic violence creates conditions under which women must prove their survivorhood, performing psychological recovery to achieve institutional legibility. Legal and therapeutic institutions create a matrix of demands on women’s lives, shaping their practices of survival and performances of self. Through interviews with domestic violence survivors, I show that women engage three strategies of transformation to make themselves credible survivors: (1) extracting domestic violence from their life stories; (2) explaining abuse through “self-esteem;” (3) performing survivorhood through “respectable” motherhood and sexuality. Through these processes, women craft a domestic violence narrative and an institutional performance of survivorhood, both of which allow them to navigate institutional pressures. These therapeutic narratives and performances, however, also rewrite the structural elements of violence into (feminized) accounts of psychological failure and overcoming. Thus, women navigate a paradox when they become survivors: they must tell stories of psychological recovery, even as those stories obfuscate the very infrastructure of violence. It is this disjuncture between individualized narratives of harm and the structural work of survival that I examine in this work. I develop the concept of the “paradox of legibility” to generalize this disjuncture, and to highlight women’s labor of making themselves credible amidst structural and institutional constraints.

Unmasking Racism: Students of Color and Expressions of Racism in Online Spaces

Abstract: Expressions of racism in the post-Civil Rights Era are expected to be more covert than overt and more unconscious than conscious. But some internet-based communication takes place in technological contexts that are not bound by the same norms as face-to-face interactions, and can structure more explicit presentations of racist ideologies. I explore the changing expressions of racism in online spaces and their effects on students of color using in-depth interviews with 27 undergraduate students of color and their reactions to and interpretations of an online, anonymous student forum. I argue that covert racism is unmasked in online environments, and that exposure to unmasked racial ideologies can challenge students’ racial worldviews, adaptive coping responses to racism, relationships to White students and institutions, and dominant racial narratives.

Grassroots Activism in the Belly of the Beast: A Relational Account of the Campaign Against Urban Fracking in Texas

Abstract: This article offers a relational account of the emergence, development, and impact of a social movement against urban fracking in Denton, Texas. It highlights the role played by the interactions between grassroots activism, local officials, and other stakeholders in the political construction of shared understandings of environmental risk. Drawing upon scholarship on risk perceptions and on social movement outcomes, the article argues that as a result of relationships of conflict and cooperation between activists, officials, residents, and oil and gas industry representatives, a field of opinion about the potential (negative) 0611-0658-AUYERO ET AL.indd 612 14/10/2019 05:09:47 p.m. AuyEro, HErNáNdEz y stitt: EN El ViENtrE dE lA bEstiA... 613 impacts of fracking emerged. It shows that grassroots, face-to-face, joint action played a key role in the campaign to ban fracking. Localized collective action should be at the front and center of social scientific examinations of shared understandings of environmental danger.

Racial, religious, and civic dimensions of anti-muslim sentiment in america

Abstract: This paper examines anti-Muslim sentiment in America. Existing research has documented rising hostility to Muslims in Western countries, but has been much less clear about what drives such sentiments or exactly what sort of “other” Muslims are understood to be. Our interest is in the cultural construction of Muslims as a problematic or incompatible “other.” We explore the extent, content, and correlates of such views. Building from recent work in critical race theory and the study of cultural boundaries in national belonging, we argue that Muslims are distinct in being culturally excluded on religious, racial, and civic grounds at the same time. Using nationally representative survey data with specially designed measures on views of Muslims and other groups, we show that nearly half of Americans embrace some form of anti-Muslim sentiment, and that such views are systematically correlated with social location and with understandings of the nature of American belonging.

Pathways to the Glass Cliff: A Risk Tax for Women and Minority Leaders?

Abstract: Do women and racial/ethnic minority leaders pay a risk tax on their way to the top? Theories of the glass cliff have focused on the penalties imposed upon women and minority leaders due to bias and discrimination at the time of appointment to top leadership positions. Much less attention has focused on the strategic agency these leaders exercise in response to bias across the career. This paper advances theory and research on the glass cliff by analyzing the choices, decisions, and priorities of white women and people of color that, across the career, result in their appointment to glass cliff positions. Our analysis relies on in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 33 senior leaders across a range of industries. Our findings suggest that rather than isolated instances of high-risk promotions, glass cliff appointments represent the culmination of a long-term career strategy centered on risk and risk-taking. We find evidence that these leaders pay a significant risk tax in order to achieve upward mobility in their organizations.

Laughter in stories of crime and tragedy : The importance of humor for marginalized populations

Abstract: Humor is essential to social life, but it is often overlooked in the study of crime and other social problems. We introduce and make use of humor theory, emphasizing the theories of superiority and relief. Based on interviews with incarcerated men, we demonstrate how humor is used to criticize authorities, for self-aggrandizement, and to alleviate the pain of tragic experiences. Funny remarks and stories are often ambiguous and evade simple categorization, which may explain why humor is neglected in the study of social problems. We argue that researchers should pay more attention to humor to achieve a fuller understanding of marginalized individuals and their social worlds.

The Ambivalent U.S. Context of Reception and the Dichotomous Legal Consciousness of Unaccompanied Minors

Abstract: Author(s): Galli, Chiara | Abstract: This paper examines the effects of immigration laws on unaccompanied minors from Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala who migrate to the United States and encounter a context of reception that is ambivalent towards them: they are considered deserving of protection as unaccompanied minors, yet also subjected to exclusion and state legal violence as undocumented immigrants. Apprehended at the US-Mexico border, they are categorized as “Unaccompanied Alien Children” (UACs), and they interact intensively with multiple immigration agencies. Interactions in these institutional spaces teach youths about US laws and behavioral norms expected of young humanitarian claimants deemed deserving of protection, which are construed in opposition to discourses that stigmatize their co-ethnics as “bogus minors/refugees,” “bad” immigrants, and deviant Latino teenagers. I highlight how these institutional encounters shape youths’ sense of belonging and their commonsense understandings of the law or legal consciousness. I argue that the legal consciousness of unaccompanied minors is dichotomous and characterized by the following elements: (1) a combination of trust and fear in the state; (2) concurrent feelings of deservingness/rights and stigma/subordination; (3) information and misinformation about US laws. This dichotomous legal consciousness shapes how UACs claim belonging and rights, both in everyday social interactions and during their applications for legal status in humanitarian adjudication bureaucracies. They do so by leveraging knowledge about their rights and normative notions about desirable teen and migrant behavior, and by perpetuating stigmas about co-ethics as they distance themselves from these to signal their own societal belonging and deservingness of discretionary humanitarian relief.

A Tale of Two States: How State Immigration Climate Affects Belonging to State and Country among Latinos

Abstract: This study assesses the impact of different immigrant policy climates on how Latinos feel about themselves, their place in their state and country, and how they think they are viewed by others. Using survey data from Arizona and New Mexico, we find that Latinos in Arizona exhibit lower levels of belonging than Latinos in New Mexico, but their alienation is confined to the state level. We also find that the U.S. born are most sensitive to the state climate. We conclude that policies that delineate outsiders from insiders by immigration status have wide ranging effects that fall prominently on the U.S. born. K E Y W O R D S : Latinos; immigration; Arizona; New Mexico; identity; belonging. In Arizona, police are allowed to check the immigration status of anyone they stop if they have reason to think the person is an undocumented immigrant. State residents who are undocumented immigrants cannot receive in-state college tuition rates or financial aid. Public schools cannot offer bilingual education to limited-English proficient students for more than one year, and the state constitution requires that all official actions be conducted in English. The state is also home to former Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the self-described “toughest sheriff in America,” whom a federal judge deemed guilty of racial profiling and violating the constitutional rights of Latinos in the state (President Trump later pardoned him) (Berry and Billeaud 2016; Varsanyi and Provine 2016). Next door, undocumented immigrants in New Mexico can get both financial aid and in-state tuition for college. The state has an “English Plus” law that highlights the value of multiculturalism and multilingualism, and the state’s law enforcement agencies have had relatively few formal cooperative agreements with federal immigration officers (New Mexico Legislative Council Service 2011; Varsanyi and Provine 2016). The authors with to thank Anna Boch, Marlene Orozco, and Zachary Shufro for their research assistance and Monica Varsanyi and David Fitzgerald for their feedback. They also wish to thank the United Parcel Service Endowment Fund at Stanford University and the Russell Sage Foundation. Direct correspondence to: Deborah J. Schildkraut, Professor of Political Science, Tufts University, Medford, MA 02155. Email: deborah.schildkraut@tufts.edu. 1 Throughout this study, we use “Latino” and “Hispanic” interchangeably, and “white” refers to whites who are not of Hispanic or Latin origin. We also use “undocumented” immigrant and “unauthorized” immigrant interchangeably. VC The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com 332 Social Problems, 2019, 66, 332–355 doi: 10.1093/socpro/spy008 Advance Access Publication Date: 23 May 2018 Article D ow naded rom http/academ ic.p.com /socpro/articlact/66/3/332/5001918 by H uter C olege Lrary user on 15 N ovem er 2019 These two states, which are similar in many respects but that have taken vastly different paths regarding immigrant incorporation and immigrant policy, reflect trends in a “new federalism” of immigration policy playing out across the United States (Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan 2015; Varsanyi 2010; Varsanyi et al. 2012). Indeed, both unwelcoming and welcoming responses to immigration have proliferated at the local and state levels in recent years, while attempts at national comprehensive immigration reform have stalled in Congress (NCSL 2016). There is evidence for the political origins of diverging state and local policies and for the contextual factors that shape implementation of these policies (Chavez and Provine 2009; Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan 2015; Hopkins 2010; Ramakrishnan and Wong 2010; Walker and Leitner 2011; Williamson 2018). Whatever the origins of such policies, understanding their effects on their target populations is paramount. Policies clearly can have a material effect on immigrants, determining their socioeconomic attainment and degree of inclusion in the polity (Bean, Brown, and Bachmeier 2015; Massey, Durand, and Malone 2002). But policies also have symbolic importance, signaling to those governed a sense of worth and belonging (Campbell 2012). Here we seek to understand the nature and extent of that symbolic influence on the largest U.S. immigrant population: Latinos. What impact do these different immigrant policy climates have on how Latinos feel about themselves; about their place in their state and country; and about how they think they are viewed by their state and country compatriots? We focus on attitudes about identity and belonging among Latinos because such concerns are a driving force behind the development of intergroup attitudes, positions on national and local policies, and civic engagement (Citrin and Sears 2014; Schildkraut 2005, 2011; Verkuyten 2004). We draw upon original survey data collected in 2016 in Arizona and New Mexico. We examine several measures related to identity and belonging, such as how much respondents feel that they belong in their state and the nation, how much they feel that others in their state and in the United States welcome them, how much pride they feel in their state and in the United States, and how much importance they place on their ethnic, national, and state identities. Our study is not about the reasons why different state governments adopt different types of immigrant policies, which has predominated research on subnational immigration policy (Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan 2015). Instead, we are interested in how these policies affect the attitudes of individuals who reside within the affected states. The main hypothesis under investigation is that Latinos living in Arizona will exhibit a depressed sense of belonging to both their state and the nation relative to Latinos living in New Mexico. It is important to note that the Latino populations in New Mexico and Arizona may also differ in important ways because of the histories of their respective states. The Latino population in New Mexico may be distinctive, not only relative to the Latino population in Arizona, but also in other parts of the United States. Many New Mexico Latinos represent the long-standing Hispano population that traces its roots in New Mexico to the time of Spanish rule, more than 400 years ago. Throughout history, New Mexico’s Hispanos have had much better social and political standing relative to Latinos in other parts of the Southwest, including Arizona (G omez-Qui~nones 1994; Noel 2014). Thus, there may be an unusually strong sense of New Mexico pride, and therefore belonging, among the Latino population there. As a consequence, we focus not simply on overall differences in belonging in their state of residence between the Latino populations in Arizona and New Mexico, but also in their sense of belonging in the United States, as well as differences between U.S.-born and foreign-born Latinos in these states. We find that Latinos in Arizona are indeed less likely to express feelings of belonging than Latinos in New Mexico. The different political histories of the two states likely account for some of disparities in feelings of belonging. But these histories may have also influenced the formation of the very different policy approaches that appear today. On this point, we bolster our findings with a discussion of an experiment that indicates that Latinos in both states say they would feel less at home and would consider moving should their state adopt new unwelcoming policies. The more welcoming history in New Mexico does not appear to shield Latinos from new antiimmigrant discourse. A Tale of Two States 333 D ow naded rom http/academ ic.p.com /socpro/articlact/66/3/332/5001918 by H uter C olege Lrary user on 15 N ovem er 2019 Additionally, we find that living in Arizona increases alienation for the U.S. born more than for the foreign born in either state. This finding suggests that the continuous Latin American immigration—immigrant “replenishment” (Jim enez 2010)—and the corresponding policy reaction, has the strongest effect on a U.S.-born Latino population that, in spite of high levels of integration, continues to navigate contexts in which politics and policies frame Latino ethnicity as “illegal” and foreign (Ch avez 2008). Our findings suggest that the U.S. born seem to feel less welcomed when their state adopts a hostile stance toward immigrants and when the enactment of unwelcoming policies implicates the native born as well as the foreign born through tactics such as racial profiling. And yet there is little difference between Latinos in the two states, regardless of nativity, in how they view their place in the United States more generally. Well aware of the varying policy responses across the United States, Latinos appear to individuate their state’s policy response to immigration, seeing the entire nation as generally welcoming of immigrants and Latinos (Schildkraut 2011, 2013a). In our conclusion, we discuss this finding in the context of the Trump administration, which has taken a decidedly more unwelcoming stance than was the case when our survey was conducted. Our study contributes to the growing literature on the increasing prevalence of subnational immigration policy formation. To date, much of this literature focuses on when, where, and why such policies get enacted (Chavez and Provine 2009; Gulasekaram and Ramakrishnan 2015; Hopkins 2010; Ramakrishnan and Wong 2010; Varsanyi et al. 2012; Walker and Leitner 2011; Williamson 2018). We build upon these studies by turning our attention to the effects of state-level immigration policies (also see Leerkes, Leach, and Bachmeier 2012). Across the social sciences, studies show that perception of a common, shared identity is an important ingredient for stability, cooperation, obligation, and trust (Gaertner and Dovidio 2000; Huo 2003; Putnam 2007; Schildkraut 2011; T

News Media Trends in the Framing of Immigration and Crime, 1990–2013

Abstract: Few social problems engender as much public and political debate as the alleged link between immigration and crime. Contrary to the findings of much empirical literature, the majority of the public believe that immigration increases crime and that the foreign born are especially prone to offending. Among many factors, the way prominent news media describe the immigration-crime link may help explain the disconnectedness of scholarship and public opinion over the past several decades. Using a unique database of over 2,200 news stories drawn from among the highest circulation national papers for 1990 through 2013, the current study employs time-series trend analyses to examine the prevalence of different media frames used to explain the immigration-crime link and whether those frames have changed systematically over time. Our results reveal that most immigration-crime news stories describe immigrants as especially crime-prone or as increasing aggregate crime rates. Moreover, this framing has increased in prevalence over time, as have narratives inaccurately describing undocumented immigration as a crime itself, while framing immigrants as victims of crime has declined significantly over the 1990–2013 period. These changes occurred systematically in only some newspapers. We discuss implications for research, policy, and the public engagement of scientific evidence.

Race to the Bottom (of the Well): Groundwater in an Agricultural Production Treadmill

Abstract: Groundwater from the Ogallala-High Plains Aquifer supports one of the most productive agriculture regions in the world. Yet, despite nearly 40 years of policies designed to conserve and sustain this vital resource, the Aquifer continues to be depleted at an unsustainable rate. We integrate propositions from treadmill of production theory and ecological modernization theory to develop a structural model, focusing especially on the role of technological modernization as a key mechanism motivating depletion. A time-sequenced path analysis of all counties in the Ogallala Aquifer region reveals that groundwater depletion has a strong internal momentum characteristic of an agricultural production treadmill. Technological modernization promotes depletion through Jevon’s Paradox. Increases in water efficiency—more crop per drop—are associated with less groundwater consumption, but more extensive deployments of irrigation infrastructures overwhelm the beneficial effects of increased water efficiency. An income-subsidy mechanism supports the treadmill dynamic. Agricultural production and increased water efficiency do not influence incomes. Instead, incomes are influenced mainly by expansions of irrigation technologies, which generates subsidies, and this dynamic puts further “spin” on the treadmill. The implications of the findings for theory and policy are discussed.

Different and Not Equal:The Uneven Association of Race, Poverty, and Abortion Laws on Abortion Timing

Abstract: The number of regulations surrounding abortion has increased drastically in recent years. It is important to assess how these laws relate to abortion timing, since the cost, safety, and accessibility of abortion varies by how many weeks pregnant a woman is when the procedure occurs. Research examining how state laws relate to abortion timing generally use rates or data from vital statistics; while informative, such methods do not allow researchers to examine how these laws may be disproportionately associated with abortion timing among select groups of women, including poor and nonwhite women. To fill this research gap, I analyze data from the nationally representative 2008 Abortion Patient Survey, with appended information on state laws regarding abortion in 2008. I find that laws requiring second trimester abortions be performed in a hospital and both in-person counselling and waiting periods have different associations with abortion timing based on race and income-to-poverty status. Predicted abortion timing for black and Hispanic women differs based on state laws and their income-to-poverty status, while for white women, models show that the association between state laws and abortion timing is not dependent on their income-to-poverty status. Overall, this research illustrates the relevance of state-level abortion laws for shaping abortion timing among women, highlighting how these relationships differ across racial and socioeconomic groups in the United States.

Iron Cage or Paper Cage? The Interplay of Worker Characteristics and Organizational Policy in Shaping Unequal Responses to a Standardized Decision-Making Tool

Abstract: Studies are largely optimistic about the ability of standardized procedures to constrain decision-makers’ biases and produce more equitable results across fields. However, work that embraces standardization as an equalizing force stands in contrast to research on standardization and street-level bureaucrats, which asserts that standardized procedures are not self-actuating and cannot be understood apart from the environments in which they are used. I examine how frontline workers vary in their approach to an actuarial-based tool intended to standardize judgments. In a highly controlled decision-making environment, child welfare workers whose racial and sex characteristics afford them higher status report subverting the tool; conversely, workers in the same position whose ascriptive characteristics yield them lower status in terms of race and sex describe following the rules. In an environment where the same tool is adopted only ceremonially, all workers experience decision-making as unconstrained, regardless of their ascriptive characteristics. This work fills gaps in knowledge about how social status and organizational context intersect to affect rule abidance. Examining these dynamic relationships advances understanding of how organizations reproduce inequality and the limits and potential for standardization to transform social hierarchies.

Categorical Exclusions: How Racialized Gender Regulation Reproduces Reentry Hardship

Abstract: Since gender organizes key reentry services such as housing, formerly incarcerated people seeking resources must successfully inhabit a gender category. Drawing on seven months of ethnography and 79 interviews with service providers and formerly incarcerated transgender people, I show that these organizational practices of gender categorization are racialized and impact resource access. Most gender-segregated housing programs rely on biology-based definitions of gender. These gender rules create workable options for trans men to stay with women, but bar trans women from women’s spaces. Once in gendered housing programs, clients need to navigate gender assessment in interactions. Trans men employed several strategies to establish gendered selves who were easily categorized as either male or female, which allowed them to access stable housing. Gender sanctioning posed a major problem for black trans women. Black trans women were highly scrutinized in women’s programs, characterized as illegitimate based on biological definitions of gender, and harassed for any perceived deviation from gender norms. When harassment escalated into conflict, they were expelled from programs. Regulation of black trans women’s womanhood led to systematic material deprivation. By understanding the connections between categorical exclusions and exclusion from resources we can better understand the reproduction of reentry hardship and inequality more broadly.

Are Racial and Educational Inequities in Mass Incarceration Perceived to be a Social Problem? Results from an Experiment

Abstract: The disproportionate incarceration of certain groups, racial minorities, and the less educated constitutes a social problem from the perspective of both policy makers and researchers. One aspect that is poorly understood is whether the public is similarly concerned about inequities in mass incarceration. Using a list experiment embedded in a framing experiment, we test for differences in attitudes towards mass incarceration by exploring three frames: race, education, and the United States in global context. We test whether social desirability bias causes people to over-state their concern about mass incarceration when directly queried. We find that mass incarceration is seen as a problem in the United States, whether the issue is framed by race, education, or as a global outlier. The list experiment reveals that public concern about mass incarceration is not quite as great as overtly-expressed opinion would suggest, and the framing experiment indicates that race-neutral frames evoke greater concern about mass incarceration than an emphasis on racial disparities.

Within-Neighborhood Dynamics: Disadvantage, Collective Efficacy, and Homicide Rates in Chicago

Abstract: Research on neighborhood structural conditions like concentrated disadvantage and crime largely focuses on between-neighborhood differences; for example, places with more disadvantage are expected to experience higher homicide rates. However, empirical research often does not consider within-neighborhood dynamics of structural stability and change. Furthermore, several recent studies have found cross-sectional associations between structural variables and crime outcomes can vary significantly across units, violating a key assumption of global modeling strategies. The current work explores if and how historical changes in disadvantage influence neighborhood collective efficacy and homicide rates, net of the level of disadvantage at a given time point. Collective efficacy theoretically mediates the relationship between conditions and crime, and is hypothesized to be the mechanism through which structural change influences homicide rates. It is also hypothesized that spatial variation in cross-sectional associations between disadvantage and social outcomes can be explained by accounting for within-neighborhood changes in disadvantage. Using a sample of Chicago neighborhoods and ordinary least squares and geographically weighted regression models, I find that within-neighborhood changes in disadvantage significantly predict neighborhood collective efficacy, though the effects of this change on homicide rates are not completely mediated by collective efficacy. Within-neighborhood change completely accounts for spatial variation in cross-sectional associations, offering one explanation of prior research findings. Within-neighborhood structural changes appear to disrupt collective efficacy and contribute to higher homicide rates than predicted by the level of disadvantage alone.

Homemade Matters: Logics of Opposition in a Failed Food Swap

Abstract: A rich literature on commensuration and standards of evaluation has yielded important findings on how items are valued. Over the course of a two-year ethnography, we witnessed one effort to create a new economic practice—a monthly swap of “homemade food”—start promisingly but ultimately fail as participants were unable to reach consensus on valuations. They rejected each other’s offerings on numerous grounds, including proximity to industrial food, packaging, and excess “artisanal-ness” and alterity, forcing participants to “thread the needle” in search of acceptable qualities. Multiple or competing logics can be reconciled with clear institutional definitions, by using money, or via relational work. In our site, none of these mechanisms were operative. Instead, a multivalent alternative identity biased toward oppositional criteria impeded valuations and robust exchange. We believe this problem is common to a larger class of organizations that define themselves in opposition to the dominant market. K E Y W O R D S : money; inequality; evaluation; circuits of commerce; sharing economy. On a Sunday afternoon, in a neighborhood of a large Northeastern city filled with revitalized wharfs and warehouses, a group of approximately 20 people gather in a rented room. The action begins with participants walking around and sampling foods, followed by a silent auction as people make offers for exchanges. After all the bids are entered, trades begin. No money will change hands, but soon food will circulate throughout the group. This is a typical scene at the Northeastern Food Swap, an informal “sharing economy” initiative that has operated since 2011. Food swaps began in Brooklyn in 2010 and quickly spread. In 2013, 123 swaps were reported across the United States and Canada (Winterman 2013). Food swapping is a type of activity that economic sociologists have called a “circuit of commerce,” a concept developed by Viviana Zelizer (2004, 2010) to describe economic exchanges and social relations that are neither traditional firms nor markets. Over the course of a two-year ethnography, we observed our research site devolve into a failed attempt at what we have called a “circuit in construction” (Dubois, Schor, and Carfagna 2014), an attempt to create, de novo, ongoing socially meaningful exchange relationships among a group of largely unrelated people. After beginning with enthusiasm and excitement, For helpful critiques and suggestions at various stages of this project, thanks are due to Kimberly Hoang, Ashley Mears, Jonathan Wynn, Viviana Zelizer, Ezra Zuckerman, and members of the MacArthur Team on Connected Consumption and the Connected Economy. The authors also wish to thank the three anonymous reviewers whose insightful comments greatly improved the manuscript. Direct Correspondence to: Connor Fitzmaurice, Boston University, Department of Sociology, 96-100 Cummington St., Boston, MA 02215. Email: fitzmauc@bu.edu. VC The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Society for the Study of Social Problems. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com 1 Social Problems, 2018, 0, 1–18 doi: 10.1093/socpro/spx046 Article Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socpro/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/socpro/spx046/4795357 by guest on 09 January 2018 this swap struggled to establish itself as a viable site of either economic exchange or social connection. By the end of the second year, it was barely functioning. As barter economies, food swaps represent an attempt to remove some food provisioning from the cash market, with swappers adhering to a relatively fixed one-to-one exchange ratio: a jar of jelly yields a jar of pickles. The lack of cash makes this an unusual case as relational economic sociologists have primarily analyzed situations where cash enters areas of social life. These studies reveal contextspecific, relationally determined meanings of exchange, and challenge classical views of money as a universal leveling agent (Zelizer 1989). By examining a site where individuals have removed money from exchange, and where social negotiations failed to produce consistent standards of exchange, we aim to complicate these interpretations. The food swap is a place to trade homemade foods. Despite the ostensibly straightforward meaning of “homemade,” criteria for evaluating offerings were diverse and often obscure. Participants’ competing understandings of the purpose and practices of this emergent circuit thwarted the development of common systems of evaluation and accounting. Rather than finding easy avenues for trading foods brought to the swap, participants found exchanges failed to materialize. Members rejected foods for many reasons; prominent among them were that offerings were taboo or profane, quotidian, or excessively “alternative.” The proliferation of competing standards of evaluation contributed to unclear boundaries of circuit membership—particularly without money to equilibrate offerings. In our case, the result was uncertainty about what type of food—and what type of person—was welcome at the swap. We believe this case contributes to the growing literature on evaluation and commensurability in economic life. In previous research, sociologists have found that multiple or competing logics can be reconciled in at least three ways: with clear institutional definitions and boundaries, by using money, or via relational work. In our case, the first two were unavailable. The food swap is a barter economy. As a new organization, the swap could not rely upon past institutional work to create common standards. Relational work would have been the obvious route for reconciling multiple logics to negotiate common evaluative criteria, but the kinds of relations required did not develop—even among a relatively homogeneous group of participants. What accounts for this failure, especially in light of intentions to create new relationships and practices? We argue an important part of the answer lies in the larger context of our case, namely the emergence of “new economy” institutions, such as the sharing economy, cooperatives, and gift economies, animated by a rejection of dominant market structures. The food swap is situated within one of the most successful of these challenges—alternative food movements challenging the agro-industrial food regime. To a significant extent, the swap was founded with an oppositional identity, defining itself against both the normative food system and culturally valorized artisanal alternatives. For that reason, members found it easier to articulate negative criteria, i.e., categories of foods that should not be offered rather than robust standards for valued items. Faced with multiple exclusionary criteria, successful swappers needed to “thread the needle” to avoid numerous undesirable qualities in their offerings. Ultimately, a failure to articulate what qualities and characteristics were consistently acceptable contributed to the swap’s demise. We believe that this bias toward broadly “oppositional criteria” characterizes a larger class of organizations in the new economy sector, many of which also define themselves in opposition to the dominant market (Schor and Fitzmaurice 2015; Schor et al. 2016), and suggest this may be a factor in their limited success. T H E C A S E : F O O D S W A P S I N T H E N E W S H A R I N G E C O N O M Y Food swaps are a part of what has been termed the “sharing economy”: a constellation of digitally mediated platforms and face-to-face initiatives providing novel modes of provisioning. While the sharing economy has common features, such as digital technology and peer-to-peer structure, it is also 2 Fitzmaurice and Schor Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/socpro/advance-article-abstract/doi/10.1093/socpro/spx046/4795357 by guest on 09 January 2018 diverse (Schor and Fitzmaurice 2015). It has also generated considerable controversy (Schor 2014) with critical accounts contending that the for-profit platforms are extensions of the neoliberal economic project (Dawkins 2011). For smaller peer-to-peer/nonprofit platforms, questions include their ability to retain members, expand, and facilitate robust, networks of exchange (Bellotti et al. 2014; Schor et al. 2016). While sharing economy platforms are attracting significant venture capitalist funding and attention, numerous alternative nonprofit, peer-to-peer initiatives facilitating non-monetized sharing have also been emerging on this new frontier of consumer culture. The expansion of some of these initiatives, such as Freecycle—an organization that facilitates gift exchanges of unwanted goods—would suggest success. Freecycling claims eight million users across 85 countries (Arsel and Dobscha 2011). However, the limited literature on these alternative initiatives suggests many are struggling. Time banking initiatives have suffered when needed services are unavailable (or valuable services are withheld). Often, participants frame their involvement in these initiatives as “volunteering,” leading to transaction imbalances that undermine exchange and long-term trading relations (Bellotti et al 2014; Dubois et al. 2014; Seyfang 2004). Even the relative success of Freecycling has been fraught with “[mismatches] between the institutionally imposed norms and community participation” (Arsel and Dobscha 2011). Furthermore, this landscape is littered with numerous failed attempts: Landshare, which paired landowners and gardeners has closed down. Yerdle, a sophisticated gift economy, has shuttered its site. So too have a number of the neighborhood goods exchange and loaning platforms. Food swaps are peer-to-peer/nonprofits. They are in-person events where participants exchange foods that they have made, grown, or foraged. A common form is a weekly or monthly gathering— generally of 50 or fewer participants. Exchanges follow a silent auction format with written b