The Open Access Publisher and Free Library
10-social sciences.jpg

SOCIAL SCIENCES

SOCIAL SCIENCES-SUICIDE-HATE-DIVERSITY-EXTREMISM-SOCIOLOGY-PSYCHOLOGY

Aristocratic Vice: The Attack on Duelling, Suicide, Adultery, And Gambling In Eighteenth-century England

By Donna T. Andrew

Aristocratic Vice examines the outrage against—and attempts to end—the four vices associated with the aristocracy in eighteenth-century England: duelling, suicide, adultery, and gambling. Each of the four, it was commonly believed, owed its origin to pride. Many felt the law did not go far enough to punish those perpetrators who were members of the elite. In this exciting new book, Andrew explores each vice’s treatment by the press at the time and shows how a century of public attacks on aristocratic vices promoted a sense of “class superiority” among the soon-to-emerge British middle class.

New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2013. 328p.

Cutting The Wire: Gaming Prohibition and The Internet

By David G. Schwartz

The story of the Wire Act and how Robert Kennedy’s crusade against the Mob is creating a new generation of Internet gaming outlaws. Gambling has been part of American life since long before the existence of the nation, but Americans have always been ambivalent about it, what David Schwartz calls the "pell-mell history of legal gaming in the United States" is a testament to our paradoxical desire both to gamble and to control gambling. It is in this context that Schwartz examines the history of the Wire Act, passed in 1961 as part of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy’s crusade against organized crime and given new life in recent efforts to control Internet gambling. Cutting the Wire presents the story of how this law first developed, how it helped fight a war against organized crime, and how it is being used today. The Wire Act achieved new significance with the development of the Internet in the early 1990s and the growing popularity of online wagering through offshore facilities. The United States government has invoked the Wire Act in a vain effort to control gambling within its borders, at a time when online sports betting is soaring in popularity. By placing the Wire Act into the larger context of Americans’ continuing ambivalence about gambling, Schwartz has produced a provocative, deeply informed analysis of a national habit and the vexing predicaments that derive from it. In America today, 48 of 50 states currently permit some kind of legal gambling. Schwartz’s historical unraveling of the Wire Act exposes the illogic of an outdated law intended to stifle organized crime being used to set national policy on Internet gaming. Cutting the Wire carefully dissects two centuries of American attempts to balance public interest with the technology of gambling.

Reno, NV: University of Nevada Press, 2005. 296p.

Online Gambling and Crime: Causes, Controls And Controversies

By James Banks

Offering the first empirically driven assessment of the development, marketisation, regulation and use of online gambling organisations and their products, this book explores the relationship between online gambling and crime. It draws upon quantitative and qualitative data, including textual and visual analyses of e-gambling advertising and the records of player-protection and standards organisations, together with a virtual ethnography of online gambling subcultures, to examine the ways in which gambling and crime have been approached in practice by gamers, regulatory agencies and online gambling organisations. Building upon contemporary criminological theory, it develops an understanding of online gambling as an arena in which risks and rewards are carefully constructed and through which players navigate, employing their own agency to engage with the very real possibility of victimisation. With attention to the manner in which online gambling can be a source of criminal activity, not only on the part of players, but also criminal entrepreneurs and legitimate gambling businesses, Online Gambling and Crime discusses developments in criminal law and regulatory frameworks, evaluating past and present policy on online gambling. A rich examination of the prevalence, incidence and experience of a range of criminal activities linked to gambling on the Internet, this book will appeal to scholars and policy makers in the fields of sociology and criminology, law, the study of culture and subculture, risk, health studies and social policy.

Farnham, UK: Ashgate Publishing, 2014. 182p

Crime, Addiction and The Regulation of Gambling

Edited by Toine Spapens , Alan Littler and Cyrille Fijnaut

This is the third book to be produced by members of the Gambling Research Group - associated with Tilburg University's Faculty of Law concerning issues closely connected with the debate on the gambling policies that the European Union and its Member States are pursuing. The first book - Alan Littler and Cyrille Fijnaut (eds), "The Regulation of Gambling: European and National Perspectives" (Leiden, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2007) - mainly considers the legal aspects of gambling regulation, at both European Union and Member State level. The second book - Tom Coryn, Cyrille Fijnaut and Alan Littler (eds), "Economic Aspects of Gambling Regulation: EU and US Perspectives" (Leiden, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 2008) - looks at research conducted in the United States and the European Union into the costs and benefits involved in the regulation of gambling.The contributions to this third book turn the spotlight on two social problems: crime and addiction, both of which play a significant part in the institutional debate in the European Union concerning whether gambling should be treated as a service that - like other services - should be subject to the laws universally applicable to the internal market. This volume is primarily devoted to the research that has been conducted in several Member States into the problems of gambling-related crime and addiction. It also examines developments at EU level: what policy is the European Commission currently pursuing and what stance does the European Court of Justice take these days. Crime and addiction problems that can arise in the context of online gambling and at possible ways of keeping them under control are also examined.

Leiden; Boston: Martinus Nijhoff, 2008. 269p.

Public Enemies, Public Heroes: Screening The Gangster from Little Caesar to Touch of Evil

By Jonathan Munby

In this study of Hollywood gangster films, Jonathan Munby examines their controversial content and how it was subjected to continual moral and political censure.

Beginning in the early 1930s, these films told compelling stories about ethnic urban lower-class desires to "make it" in an America dominated by Anglo-Saxon Protestant ideals and devastated by the Great Depression. By the late 1940s, however, their focus shifted to the problems of a culture maladjusting to a new peacetime sociopolitical order governed by corporate capitalism. The gangster no longer challenged the establishment; the issue was not "making it," but simply "making do."

Combining film analysis with archival material from the Production Code Administration (Hollywood's self-censoring authority), Munby shows how the industry circumvented censure, and how its altered gangsters (influenced by European filmmakers) fueled the infamous inquisitions of Hollywood in the postwar '40s and '50s by the House Committee on Un-American Activities. Ultimately, this provocative study suggests that we rethink our ideas about crime and violence in depictions of Americans fighting against the status quo.

Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 1999. 277p.

Al Capone and the 1933 World’s Fair: The End of the Gangster Era in Chicago

By William Elliott Hazelgrove

Al Capone and the 1933 World's Fair: The End of the Gangster Era in Chicago is a historical look at Chicago during the darkest days of the Great Depression. The story of Chicago fighting the hold that organized crime had on the city to be able to put on The 1933 World's Fair. William Hazelgrove provides the exciting and sprawling history behind the 1933 World's Fair, the last of the golden age. He reveals the story of the six millionaire businessmen, dubbed The Secret Six, who beat Al Capone at his own game, ending the gangster era as prohibition was repealed. The story of an intriguing woman, Sally Rand, who embodied the World's Fair with her own rags to riches story and brought sex into the open. The story of Rufus and Charles Dawes who gave the fair a theme and then found financing in the worst economic times the country had ever experienced. The story of the most corrupt mayor of Chicago, William Thompson, who owed his election to Al Capone; and the mayor who followed him, Anton Cermak, who was murdered months before the fair opened by an assassin many said was hired by Al Capone. But most of all it's the story about a city fighting for survival in the darkest of times; and a shining light of hope called A Century of Progress.

Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2017. 280p.

Ice: A Memoir Of Gangster Life And Redemption-from South Central To Hollywood

By Ice-T , Douglas Century

My life’s been a great story / In the ultimate war / Should I ill or do right? / Make peace or go raw?—Ice-T, “Exodus” He’s a hip-hop icon credited with single-handedly creating gangsta rap in the 1980s. Television viewers know him as Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola on the top-rated TV drama Law & Order: SVU. But where the hype and the headlines end, the real story of Ice-T—the one few of his millions of fans have ever heard—truly begins.Ice is Ice-T in his own words—raw, uncensored, and unafraid to speak his mind. About his orphan upbringing on the gang-infested streets of South Central Los Angeles. About his four-year stint in the U.S. Army’s famed “Tropic Lightning” outfit. About his successful career as a hustler and thief, the car crash that nearly killed him, and the fateful decision to turn away from a life of crime and forge his own path to international entertainment stardom.Ice by Ice-T is both a tell-it-like-it-is tale of redemption and a star-studded tour of the pop culture firmament. The acclaimed rapper and actor shares never-before-told stories about friends like Tupac, Dick Wolf, Chris Rock, and an antler-clad Flavor Flav, among others. Readers will ride along as Ice-T’s incendiary rock band Body Count narrowly escapes from a riotous mob of angry concertgoers in Milan, and listen in as the music legend battles the self-appointed censors over his controversial “Cop Killer” single. Most of all, Ice is the place where one of the game’s most opinionated players breaks down his own secret plan for living, offering up candid observations on marriage and monogamy, the current state of hip-hop, and his latest passion: doing one-on-one gang interventions and mentoring at-risk youths around the country. With insights into the cutthroat world of the street—and the cutthroat world of Hollywood—Ice is the inspirational story of a true American original.

New York: One World Books, 2011. 283p.

Ice: A Memoir Of Gangster Life And Redemption-from South Central To Hollywood

By Fred Gardaphe

The gangster, in the hands of the Italian American artist, becomes a telling figure in the tale of American race, gender, and ethnicity - a figure that reflects the autobiography of an immigrant group just as it reflects the fantasy of a native population. From Wiseguys to Wise Men studies the figure of the gangster and explores its social function in the construction and projection of masculinity in the United States. By looking at the cultural icon of the gangster through the lens of gender, this book presents new insights into material that has been part of American culture for close to 100 years.

London; New York: Routledge, 2006. 266p.

From Wiseguys to Wise Men: The Gangster and Italian American Masculinities

By Fred Gardaphe

The gangster, in the hands of the Italian American artist, becomes a telling figure in the tale of American race, gender, and ethnicity - a figure that reflects the autobiography of an immigrant group just as it reflects the fantasy of a native population. From Wiseguys to Wise Men studies the figure of the gangster and explores its social function in the construction and projection of masculinity in the United States. By looking at the cultural icon of the gangster through the lens of gender, this book presents new insights into material that has been part of American culture for close to 100 years.

London; New York: Routledge, 2006. 266p.

Colombia: Democratic but Violent?

By Leopoldo Fergusson and Juan Fernando Vargas

Colombia is a Latin American outlier in that it has traditionally been a very violent country, yet at the same time remarkably democratic. This chapter explores Colombia's puzzle from a political economy perspective, shedding light on the broader relationship between democracy and violence. The chapter studies some of the most important democratization reforms since Colombia's independence 200 years ago. It argues that the reforms often failed to curb violence and sometimes even actively, though perhaps unintendedly, exacerbated violent political strife. Democratic reforms were unable to set the ground for genuine power-sharing. They were often implemented amidst a weak institutional environment that allowed powerful elites, the reforms' ex-ante political losers, to capture the State and offset the benefits of the reforms for the broader society. We conclude by highlighting the implications of the argument for other countries facing democratic reforms, as well as for Colombia's current peace-building efforts.

Bogotá, Colombia: Universidad del Rosario, Facultad de Economía, 2022. 21p.

Security Sector Reform and Citizen Security: Experiences from Urban Latin America in Global Perspective

By Robert Muggah and John de Boer

While widely considered a core pillar of the peace and security architecture, Security Sector Reform (SSR) is coming under fire. SSR theory and practice are criticized for being overly focused on traditional conflict and post-conflict settings and for being unable to adjust to unconventional settings marked by chronic crime and terrorism. SSR tends to be disproportionately focused on national institutions and less amenable to engaging at the subnational scale. Drawing on the experiences of so-called ‘citizen security’ measures in cities across Latin America and the Caribbean, this paper offers some opportunities for renewing and revitalizing SSR. The emphasis of citizen security interventions on multiple forms of insecurity, data-driven and evidence-informed prevention, the promotion of social cohesion and efficacy and designing crime prevention into the social and built environment are all insights that can positively reinforce comprehensive SSR measures in the 21st century.

London: Ubiquity Press, 2019. 58p.

'My Name is Not Natasha': How Albanian Women in France Use Trafficking to Overcome Social Exclusion (1998-2001)

By John Davies

This book challenges every common presumption that exists about the trafficking of women for the sex trade. It is a detailed account of an entire population of trafficked Albanian women whose varied experiences, including selling sex on the streets of France, clearly demonstrate how much the present discourse about trafficked women is misplaced and inadequate. The heterogeneity of the women involved and their relationships with various men is clearly presented as is the way women actively created a panoptical surveillance of themselves as a means of self-policing. There is no artificial divide between women who were deceived and abused and those who "choose" sex work; in fact the book clearly shows how peripheral involvement in sex work was to the real agenda of the women involved. Most of the women described in this book were not making economic decisions to escape desperate poverty nor were they the uneducated naïve entrapped into sexual slavery. The women's success in transiting trafficking to achieve their own goals without the assistance of any outside agency is a testimony to their resilience and resolve.

Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 325p.

The Aryan Circle: Crime in the Name of Hate

By Mark Pitcavage

The Aryan Circle is a large, growing and dangerous white supremacist gang based primarily in Texas. Active in prisons and on the streets, it has a long track record of murder, including the deaths of two police officers in Bastrop, Louisiana, in 2007. • The Aryan Circle originated in the Texas prison system in the mid-1980s and is now the second largest white supremacist gang in Texas. • The Aryan Circle has four segments: its Texas prison population, its federal prison population, its out-of-state prison population, and its non-incarcerated population. Total membership is probably over 1,400, making it one of the largest white supremacist groups in the United States. The most disturbing trend is the growth in its free-world membership. • The Aryan Circle is headed by an elected president and run by senior members. Billy “Thumper” Haynes was elected the Circle’s new president in 2008, but many Circle members fought the choice. In mid-2009, he was replaced by Greg “Droopy” Freeman. • The Aryan Circle recruits in prisons and on the streets. Members tend to come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds; many members work in the oil industry. The Aryan Circle is unusual in that women can become members. Some women have achieved positions of considerable responsibility, but sexism makes it difficult for them to rise to the highest ranks. • The original “homegrown” white supremacy of the Aryan Circle has become more sophisticated. However, many Circle members still have only a crude understanding of white supremacist ideology. The Circle uses white supremacy to increase group solidarity. • The Aryan Circle has few relationships with “traditional” white supremacist groups. Its relations with other prison gangs are often violent; the Aryan Circle has been involved in a number of prison gang wars. • The Aryan Circle not only deals drugs; many members abuse drugs, especially methamphetamine. Efforts by Circle leaders to combat drug use by members have failed. A new effort started in 2008 faces serious hurdles. • Much of the Aryan Circle’s criminal activities are profit-driven. Inside prisons, the smuggling of contraband (particularly drugs and tobacco) is the most important endeavor. Outside prison walls, Circle members engage in drug trafficking and a variety of theft and robbery rings. • Organized violence is also a feature of Aryan Circle activity, including killing suspected informants and engaging in violence against rival gangs. Aryan Circle members have also committed hate crimes, in and out of prisons.

New York: Anti-Defamation League, 2009. 37p.

New Hate and Old: The Changing Face of American White Supremacy

By The Anti-Defamation League, Center on Extremism

A report from the ADL Center on Extremism explores how white supremacists in the United States have experienced a resurgence in the past three years, driven in large part by the rise of the alt right. The alt right is the newest segment of the white supremacist movement, bringing new energy and activism to the movement’s racism and anti-Semitism.

The ADL Center on Extremism (COE) is one of the world’s foremost authorities on extremism, terrorism, anti-Semitism and all forms of hate. For decades, COE’s staff of seasoned investigators analysts and researchers have tracked extremist activity and hate in the U.S. and abroad -- online and on the ground.

New York: ADL, 2018. 72p.

Surveying the Landscape of the American Far Right

By Mark Pitcavage

What is the extreme right in the United States? To many, terms such as “extreme right” and “far right” are simply synonymous with white supremacy. References by the media, political leaders and pundits may reinforce such views, painting a simplistic picture. The reality is the United States is a large, complicated country with ideological fringes equally complex. The American far right is not a monolith but a convoluted landscape encompassing an array of movements and causes. White supremacy is an important feature of that landscape, but hardly the only one. Indeed, when one examines rightwing terrorism in the United States, white supremacist attacks and plots make up only a plurality (43%) of such incidents

Washington, DC: George Washington University, Program on Extremism, 2019. 17p.

Preventing Bullying Through Science, Policy, and Practice

By National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine

Bullying has long been tolerated as a rite of passage among children and adolescents. There is an implication that individuals who are bullied must have "asked for" this type of treatment, or deserved it. Sometimes, even the child who is bullied begins to internalize this idea. For many years, there has been a general acceptance and collective shrug when it comes to a child or adolescent with greater social capital or power pushing around a child perceived as subordinate. But bullying is not developmentally appropriate; it should not be considered a normal part of the typical social grouping that occurs throughout a child's life.

Although bullying behavior endures through generations, the milieu is changing. Historically, bulling has occurred at school, the physical setting in which most of childhood is centered and the primary source for peer group formation. In recent years, however, the physical setting is not the only place bullying is occurring. Technology allows for an entirely new type of digital electronic aggression, cyberbullying, which takes place through chat rooms, instant messaging, social media, and other forms of digital electronic communication.

Composition of peer groups, shifting demographics, changing societal norms, and modern technology are contextual factors that must be considered to understand and effectively react to bullying in the United States. Youth are embedded in multiple contexts and each of these contexts interacts with individual characteristics of youth in ways that either exacerbate or attenuate the association between these individual characteristics and bullying perpetration or victimization. Recognizing that bullying behavior is a major public health problem that demands the concerted and coordinated time and attention of parents, educators and school administrators, health care providers, policy makers, families, and others concerned with the care of children, this report evaluates the state of the science on biological and psychosocial consequences of peer victimization and the risk and protective factors that either increase or decrease peer victimization behavior and consequences.

Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. 2016. 361p.

Between Coca and Cocaine: A Century or More of U.S.-Peruvian Drug Paradoxes, 1860-1980

By Paul Gootenberg, with Commentary by Julio Cotler

Cocaine has a long and mostly forgotten history, which more often than not over the past century has revolved around relationships between the United States and the Andean Republic of Peru.2 This essay examines that U.S.-Peruvian axis, through three long historical arcs or processes that proceeded–and in some sense inform–the hemispheric “drug wars” of the past twenty years. For each stage, I will focus on the changing U.S. influences, signals or designs around Andean coca and cocaine, the global contexts and competing cocaine circuits which mediated those transnational forces and flows, and the notably dynamic Peruvian responses to North-American drug challenges. Each period left its legacies, and paradoxes, for cocaine’s progressive definition as a global, illicit and menacing drug.

Washington, DC: The Wilson Center, 2003. 62p.

The Historical Foundations of the Narcotic Drug Control Regime

By Julia Buxton

This paper outlines the institutional history of the international narcotic drug control regime. It details the evolution of the control system, from its foundations at the beginning of the twentieth century - a period of mass, unregulated narcotic drug use - to the current period. The paper argues that the contemporary control model is ill-positioned to address the dynamic and rapidly changing nature of the global narcotics trade. The persistence of anachronistic guiding first principles, specifically the utopian idea of prohibition, is identified as the key impediment to the adoption of a more humane and effective policy approach. But while there is growing pressure for a revision of founding ideas, this is not supported by a host of powerful actors that includes the United States.

Washington, DC: The World Bank, 2008. 32p.

Economic Analysis of E-waste Market Under Imperfect Information

By Prudence Dato

Despite international regulations that prohibit the trans-boundary movement of electronic and electric waste (e-waste), non-reusable e-waste is often illegally mixed with reusable e-waste and results in being sent to developing countries. As developing countries are not well prepared to properly manage e-waste, this illegal trade has important negative externalities, and creates ‘environmental injustice’. The two main information problems on the e-waste market are imperfect monitoring and imperfect information on the so-called ‘degree of purity’ of the e-waste. In this paper, we use a simple bilateral North-South trade model and show that there exists an alternative e-waste market that is better than the standard e-waste market for developing countries. This alternative e-waste market is a joint trade in reusable and non-reusable e-waste. In both cases, we consider demand and supply sides, plus the equilibrium of the e-waste market to show that the alternative market that we propose is better for developing countries.

IREGE - Institut de Recherche en Gestion et en Economie, 2015. 31p.

Threat Assessment in Schools: A Guide to Managing Threatening Situations and to Creating Safe School Climates

By Robert A. Fein; Bryan Vossekuil; William S. Pollack; Randy Borum; William Modzeleski; Marisa Reddy

This document, Threat Assessment in Schools: A Guide to Managing Threatening Situations and to Creating Safe School Climates, takes these findings one step further by setting forth a process for identifying, assessing, and managing students who may pose a threat of targeted violence in schools. This process–known as threat assessment–was first pioneered by the U.S. Secret Service as a mechanism for investigating threats against the president of the United States and other protected officials. The Secret Service threat assessment approach was developed based upon findings from an earlier Secret Service study on assassinations and attacks of public officials and public figures.

Washington, DC: United States Secret Service and United States Department of Education, 2004. 98p.