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Sociology Lecture Review

Forms of Punishment

  • Deterrence

    • Purpose: To prevent individuals from committing crimes.

    • Examples: Fines, jail time.

  • Retribution

    • Purpose: To 'even the playing field' or 'get things back on equal grounds' after a wrong has been committed.

    • Forms: Often involves monetary compensation or giving back to the community.

  • Incapacitation

    • Purpose: To protect society by removing criminals from it.

    • Method: Primarily through imprisonment.

    • Prison Conditions (brief mention): Descriptions included nice beds and three balanced meals a day, sometimes compared favorably to dormitories.

  • Rehabilitation

    • Core Idea: Believes that criminals are 'salvageable' and can 'turn their lives around' to become better, safer individuals capable of re-entering society.

    • International Approach: Some countries with rehabilitation prisons will restore an individual's rights if they demonstrate good behavior for a sufficient period.

    • US Context:

      • Opportunities: Opportunities for rehabilitation are limited, particularly amidst mass incarceration.

      • State-run Prisons: Some state-run prisons offer educational programs such as AA degrees and associate's degrees.

      • Private Prisons: Do not typically offer rehabilitation programs.

      • Reason for Lack of Rehabilitation in Private Prisons: These institutions often utilize prisoners for business labor, aligning with commercial interests rather than rehabilitative ones.

      • Examples of Businesses Using Prison Labor: Victoria's Secret was cited, and the TV series "Orange is the New Black" was mentioned as being based on this practice.

  • Death Penalty (Capital Punishment)

    • Prevalence: Still exists in several US states, particularly in the South, including Texas.

    • Methods of Execution:

      • Lethal Injection: Considered the most humane and painless method, though this perception is questioned and stated as not entirely true.

      • Electric Chair: Still in use in some states, with Texas specifically mentioned.

      • Firing Squads: Utilized in other Southern states.

    • Legal Changes: An unnamed Louisiana governor, upon taking office, reportedly lowered the age at which individuals, specifically 16-year-olds, could be tried as adults.

Mass Incarceration and the Criminal Justice System

  • Global Context: The United States incarcerates more people than any other country in the world.

  • Louisiana's Situation:

    • Treats its prison system as a 'big business'.

    • Invests more state resources in prisons than in schools.

    • Has a 'true industry in locking people up'.

    • Possesses the highest per capita incarceration rate within the entire United States.

  • Disproportionate Incarceration:

    • Mass incarceration leads to disproportionate rates of people of color being incarcerated.

    • Historically, statistics have shown that black individuals constitute a significantly higher percentage of the prison population.

  • Michelle Alexander's "The New Jim Crow"

    • Argument: America's criminal justice system, particularly its impact on individuals, functions as a 'new Jim Crow' system.

    • Impact: This system disproportionately affects black men through their overrepresentation in the US prison population and through felon disenfranchisement, stifling their opportunities and progress.

    • Implied System: Alexander's work points to the existence of a caste system within the US based on criminal justice involvement.

Social Stratification and Inequality

  • Stratification

    • Definition: The hierarchical arrangement of individuals and groups in societies. Every society has some form, but the criteria for stratification differ (e.g., race, class, gender).

    • Mechanism: It results in 'folks operating in different spaces' within society.

  • Inequality

    • Definition: The unequal distribution of wealth, power, or prestige among members of a society.

    • Relationship to Stratification: Inequality arises from operating in different stratified spaces, leading to 'different levels of access' to resources (e.g., Native American communities often having less wealth).

  • Systems of Stratification

    • Slavery

      • Description: The most extreme form of social stratification, fundamentally based on the legal ownership of people.

      • Modern Practices/Parallels:

        • Au Pairs: Individuals, often from developing nations, are employed for childcare and household tasks in exchange for lodging and a weekly fee. Unfortunate practices involve employers withholding passports, effectively holding them captive.

        • Immigrant Labor Exploitation: Employers Blackmail or threaten undocumented immigrant workers by withholding their earned wages/checks. An example provided involved a friend intervening to threaten employers into releasing payments.

    • Caste Systems

      • Description: A form of social stratification where an individual's social status is ascribed at birth, often based on religious, political, economic lines, or physical characteristics like skin color.

      • India: Well-known historically for its caste system, where individuals are born into a predetermined social level.

      • South Africa (Apartheid):

        • Context: Influenced by the American model of racial segregation, which the Dutch adopted.

        • Categories: Stratified society into categories such as 'white', 'black', 'colored', and 'honorary white'.

        • 'Colored' Identity: Defined as individuals born to a white parent and a black parent (e.g., Trevor Noah).

        • Current State: Described as feeling akin to the '1960s' Jim Crow era in the US, indicating that while legally 'free', black people in South Africa still face significant stigma and lack the same level of societal advancement as in the US.

Intersectionality

  • Core Concept: The understanding that individuals are composed of a multitude of unique identifiers and characteristics, all of which intertwine and cannot be separated to understand their experiences.

  • Metaphor (Cake Analogy): Just as one cannot extract individual ingredients (eggs, butter, flour) from a baked cake, one cannot separate individual identifiers (e.g., being black, female, short, dark-skinned) from a person to analyze what causes interactions or engagement with them. All aspects of an individual's identity are integrated and simultaneously influence their experiences.