A self-report questionnaire about past criminal behavior is presented here as a useful pedagogical tool to demonstrate the invalidity of crime rates, challenge stereotypes about criminals, exemplify policy problems, and personalize the ways in which race, gender, and class operate to disadvantage and advantage people in the administration of justice. Philip Reichel’s 1975 criminal activities checklist exercise, first published in Teaching Sociology, is updated pursuant to the Georgia 2016 criminal code. Additions include new laws around technology use (i.e., sexting, privacy, and piracy laws), substance use (pharmaceuticals and minor alcohol possession), criminalized driving offenses (aggressive driving and DUIs), and sex offenses. I found that most students in my classroom have violated a law. These findings, the findings of others who have administered similar checklists, and growing research suggest that crime commission is more the norm rather than the exception, and this gives instructors great opportunities to challenge student assumptions.
To examine access to needed resources among low-income methamphetamine-using females, we conducted interviews with 30 women living in poor suburban communities of a large southeastern metropolis. As an invisible population in the suburbs, underserved by social services, the women remain geographically and socially anchored to their poor suburban enclaves as transit, treatment and education remain out of reach. The longitudinal study included three interviews over a two-year period. Resources needed by the women were identified in the first interview and a list of available services was provided to them. In subsequent interviews we asked how they accessed the services or barriers encountered and discussed these further in focus groups. Using a social capital framework in our qualitative analysis, we identified three processes for accessing needed resources: formal, informal and mediated. Implications for policymakers and social service providers are suggested, and models for future development proposed.
While states are implementing policies to legalize cannabis for medical or recreational purposes, it remains a Schedule 1 controlled substance with no medical uses according to U.S. federal law. The perception of cannabis depends on social and cultural norms that impact political institutions involved in implementing policy. Because of negative social constructions, such as the “gateway hypothesis,” legalization of cannabis has been slow and contentious. Recent studies suggest that cannabis can help combat the opioid epidemic. This article fills a gap in our understanding of how cannabis is viewed by people who are actively misusing opioids and not in treatment. Using ethnographic methods to recruit participants living in a state that legalized cannabis and a state where cannabis was illegal, survey and interview data were analyzed informed by a social constructionist lens. Findings from their “insider perspective” suggest that for some people struggling with problematic opioid use, cannabis can be beneficial.
As evidence of a failing war on drugs mounts and a deadly opioid crisis continues, U.S. drug policy is slowly changing to less punitive responses to drug use. Collaborations between treatment programs and law enforcement gained praise from politicians, but concerns regarding the impact of increased surveillance and the rising culture of control call for greater focus on these governing relationships. Framed within an abolitionist perspective, and incorporating insights from successful models of decriminalization in Portugal and deinstitutionalization in Italy, our analysis of in-depth interviews with 117 people who are actively using opioids seeks to understand their perspectives on treatment drawing on lived experiences. Findings reveal a need for a paradigm shift in drug policy as well as treatment practices and increased access to targeted social resources in the community. An application of penal abolition policy requires decriminalizing (or legalizing) drug use and creating commissions composed of community members, peers, and professionals disconnected from the criminal justice system.
Several established and emerging critical perspectives on and responses to female offending exist. This entry succinctly reviews these perspectives and briefly comments on their criminological relevance. These critical perspectives include socialist, Black, queer, and postmodern feminisms. The new school of convict criminology is also discussed in its capacity to affect institutional and structural change consistent with correctional policy and justice reform that would improve the lives of adolescent girls and women.
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