While big cities across the U.S. make progress toward reducing the number of people entering local jails, smaller cities and rural counties are experiencing an alarming rise in incarcerations.

Understanding the factors behind this shift and helping rural Washington communities overcome their justice system challenges is the goal of new, grant-funded research by sociologists at Washington State University.

The Vera Institute of Justice awarded sociology professor Jennifer Schwartz and associate professor Jennifer Sherman, both at WSU Pullman, and professor Clayton Mosher at WSU Vancouver, a $200,000 grant to examine how state-level reforms, driven by the more urbanized western side of the state, interact with local dynamics in the more rural eastern side.

The researchers will pay particular attention to the region’s distinct populations, including agricultural and ranching communities, college-town communities, Native Americans and migrant farmworkers.

“Rising incarceration in rural county jails is an often-overlooked problem—it must be understood and addressed both nationally and locally,” Sherman said. “We’re thrilled to work with Vera at the forefront of this reform and look forward to continuing this much-needed work.”

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WSU Insider

Inlander

Across America, working-class people are dying of despair. And we’re still blaming the wrong people.

We Americans are locked in political combat and focused on President Trump, but there is a cancer gnawing at the nation that predates Trump and is larger than him. Suicides are at their highest rate since World War II; one child in seven is living with a parent suffering from substance abuse; a baby is born every 15 minutes after prenatal exposure to opioids; America is slipping as a great power.

We have deep structural problems that have been a half century in the making, under both political parties, and that are often transmitted from generation to generation. Only in America has life expectancy now fallen three years in a row, for the first time in a century, because of “deaths of despair.”

In the 1970s and ’80s, problems in African-American communities were often blamed on a lack of “personal responsibility.” William Julius Wilson, a Harvard sociologist who earned his doctoral degree in sociology at WSU, countered that the true underlying problem was lost jobs, and he turned out to be right. When good jobs left white towns like Yamhill, Oregon, a couple of decades later because of globalization and automation, the same pathologies unfolded there.

Men in particular felt the loss not only of income but also of dignity that accompanied a good job. Lonely and troubled, they self-medicated with alcohol or drugs, and they accumulated criminal records that left them less employable and less marriageable. Family structure collapsed.

It would be easy but too simplistic to blame just automation and lost jobs: The problems are also rooted in disastrous policy choices over 50 years. The United States wrested power from labor and gave it to business, and it suppressed wages and cut taxes rather than invest in human capital, as our peer countries did. As other countries embraced universal health care, we did not; several counties in the United States have life expectancies shorter than those in Cambodia or Bangladesh.

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The New York Times

A longtime Florida A&M professor will be inducted into Florida Civil Rights Hall of Fame on Thursday night.

Dr. Charles Ullman Smith was a a civil rights leader and a long-time faculty member at FAMU.

In 1948, Smith completed his Ph.D. in sociology at Washington State University where he was the second African American to earn a Ph.D. at the University.

After graduation, Dr. Smith served as chair of the Department of Sociology and dean of graduate studies at FAMU.

He was active in the civil rights movement including the Tallahassee Bus Boycott of 1956 and the lunch counter sit-ins of 1960.

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WTXL

Nationally, doorbell cameras’ effectiveness in deterring crime is not yet apparent. Additionally, there have been several ethical dilemmas raised by minority groups and police watchdogs as the cameras become more popular.

Clayton Mosher, a professor of sociology at Washington State University Vancouver who focuses on criminology, said a key issue surrounding the devices is the involvement of big corporations such as Amazon in marketing them. The companies may be using “questionable ‘research’ to overstate their effectiveness and increase their profits,” he said.

“It is possible that the installation of doorbell cameras [or related technologies] may have a short-term impact on burglaries, but there are also displacement issues. People will still commit burglaries, and perhaps just go to different areas,” Mosher said.

Technology is ahead of the government’s attempts to regulate it, Mosher said. He is also concerned, he said, about who will have access to data from doorbell cameras and whether it will be linked to other data, especially law enforcement data, potentially violating people’s rights.

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Government Technology