No Real Release
The role prisons play in the spread of infectious disease among prisoners is well appreciated. But the health problems of prisoners extend far beyond prison walls. As former inmates return home to...
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Explaining and Eliminating Racial Profiling
The emancipation of slaves is a century-and-a-half in America’s past. Many would consider it ancient history. Even the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act, which challenged the de...
View ArticleSafe At Home
We’re more likely to hear about crime than experience it firsthand. Social scientists are coming to appreciate how profoundly this fact is impacting beliefs about crime and shaping the way we live in...
View ArticleA Game You Can’t Win
Criminologists and socio-legal scholars describe contemporary prisons as places where inmates face boredom, loneliness, and a loss of autonomy, while administrators strive to keep prisoners separate...
View ArticleLearning From The Inside Out
Editor’s Note: our “What I Learned” column is authored by undergraduates or students new to sociology. We encourage instructors to nominate first-person essays like this by sending their students’ work...
View ArticleEssays From Inside: Benjamin Hall
A New Perspective As hopeless as this sounds, at one point in my life I believed I would always lose and be destined to fail. As a teenager I really did believe I would end up in prison. It is where I...
View ArticleEssays From Inside: James Anderson
Prison is a cold and unforgiving place at times. It’s a 365 day per year punishment where the lack of meaningful programming to stimulate positive self change can ruin the hope in rehabilitatable men...
View ArticleEssays From Inside: Doug Sanders
I have been fortunate enough to be part of the “Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program” for two classes. I was in the very first class offered in the State of Oregon D.O.C. Essays From Inside Other essays:...
View ArticleEssays From Inside: David Spencer
Sociology is about people. This is by far the most important discovery I made during my time in Inside-Out. Essays From Inside Other essays: James Anderson Benjamin Hall Doug Sanders Return to the main...
View ArticleCSI: The Scenes Behind The Look
TV shows have piqued public interest in forensic work and how crime is done. But the attention hasn’t necessarily been good for those who work with corpses in real life. Medical examiners’ daily work...
View ArticleCarceral Nation
The dramatic expansion of prisons in the United States receives serious sociological investigation in two books that reflect on the decivilizing force of mass incarceration: Prison Profiteers: Who...
View ArticleTo Snitch Or Not To Snitch
Photographers document Philadelphia’s “stop-snitching” code, a response to the realities of impoverished Philadelphia neighborhoods that includes the necessity of the drug economy.
View ArticleThey Tried To Make Her Go To Rehab
Contradictory views of addiction as both sickness and moral failing have resulted in a broken system in which famous substance users (like their everyday counterparts) are bounced between overcrowded...
View ArticleCounting Sexual Violence in Congo
An interview with Tia Palermo, a professor of preventive medicine at Stony Brook University Medical Center. Palermo used population-based data to better understand the occurrence of sexual violence in...
View ArticleStealing a Bag of Potato Chips and Other Crimes of Resistance
Sociologist Victor M. Rios shows in his study how some young men make trouble as means of gaining respect. This is an adaptation from his book Punished: Policing the Lives of Black and Latino Boys.
View ArticleKilladelphia
Violent death is so commonplace in Philadelphia that it infuses the visual culture of the city with haunting imagery. Sociologist James Dickinson shows how memorial portraits, roadside shrines,...
View ArticleDangerous Shame
In recent years there have been 17 incidents of school killings in the United States, resulting in 189 deaths, 280 injuries, and 11 suicides. The murder of school children is a growing social problem,...
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Debating Trafficking
Photo by Sarah DudaWhile activists against human trafficking—the illegal trade of human beings mainly for the purposes of commercial sexual exploitation or forced labor—claim that it is one the most...
View ArticleQueasy Questions About Media Effects
Increasingly violent media shows no signs of driving away audiences. Cynthia Chris explores the possibility of redemptive arcs as ripped-from-the-headlines stories play out on TV, but with happy...
View ArticleDinner With Bruce
One of the first things I heard about Bruce was his way with cheesecake. Rumor has it that it was celebrated in all the prisons in upstate New York. The cook at the Harlem halfway house calls Bruce...
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