Since the advent of the Internet, right-wing extremists and those who subscribe to extreme right views have exploited online platforms to build a collective identity among the like-minded. Research in this area has largely focused on extremists’ use of websites, forums, and mainstream social media sites, but overlooked in this research has been an exploration of the popular social news aggregation site Reddit. The current study explores the role of Reddit’s unique voting algorithm in facilitating “othering” discourse and, by extension, collective identity formation among members of a notoriously hateful subreddit community, r/The_Donald. The results of the thematic analysis indicate that those who post extreme-right content on r/The_Donald use Reddit’s voting algorithm as a tool to mobilize like-minded members by promoting extreme discourses against two prominent out-groups: Muslims and the Left. Overall, r/The_Donald’s “sense of community” facilitates identity work among its members by creating an environment wherein extreme right views are continuously validated.
Immigration and crime have received much popular and political attention in the past decade, and have been a focus of episodic social attention for much of the history of the U.S. Recent policy and legal discourse suggests that the stigmatic link between immigrants and crime has endured, even in the face of evidence to the contrary. This study addresses the relationship between immigration and crime in urban settings, focusing on areal units where immigrants tend to cluster spatially as well as socially. We ask whether immigration creates risks or benefits for neighborhoods in terms of lower crime rates. The question is animated in part by a durable claim in criminology that areas with large immigrant populations are burdened by elevated levels of social disorder and crime. In contrast, more recent theory and research suggests that "immigrant neighborhoods" may simply be differentially organized and function in a manner that reduces the incidence of crime. Accordingly, this research investigates whether immigrants are associated with differences in area crime rates. In addition, we ask whether there are differences in the effects of immigration on neighborhood crime rates by the racial and ethnic makeup of the foreign born populations. Finally, we examine the effects of immigration on patterns of enforcement.Acknowledgements: The authors wish to express their sincerest appreciation to Amanda Geller for her excellent assistance with data wrangling, and to Rob Sampson and John MacDonald for improving our paper with their comments and insights.
Current risk assessment tools are embedded in a variable-oriented perspective and based on the assumption that the risk of reoffending is linear, additive, and relatively stable over time. As a result, actuarial instruments tend to overestimate the risk of violent/sexual recidivism for some sex offenders while underestimating this risk for others. One of the main causes of such predictive inaccuracies is the inability of current actuarial tools to account for the dynamic aspects of offending trajectories over time. Using a person-oriented approach, the current study examined the presence of offending trajectories in sex offenders using measures of offending at multiple time points in adulthood to examine the risk of violent/sexual reoffending. The study was based on a sample of 246 adult males convicted of a sexual offense between 1994 and 1998. Group-based modeling was used to identify offending trajectories, while Cox proportional hazard was used to examine the links between the identified trajectories and recidivism. Findings suggest that a sex crime is more reflective of a transitory phase of the criminal career rather than evidence of a “sexual criminal career” in the making. The findings challenge underlying assumptions of current actuarial tools and calls for a more sophisticated approach to risk assessment that accounts for offending patterns.
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