Clayton Mosher

Outrages Against Personal Dignity: Rationalizing Abuse and Torture in the War on Terror

The outrage over revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib prison has faded from public discourse, but a number of questions remain unanswered. This paper criticizes official rationalizations offered for the abuse. We make the case that these abuses are systemic, resulting from dehumanization of the enemy and the long reliance on and refinement of torture by the United States national security agencies. We also consider the spread of torture in the current war on terror, and we call on sociologists to become involved in the study of torture and prisoner abuse.

Search and Seizure, Racial Profiling, and Traffic Stops: A Disparate Impact Framework

In response to nationwide attention to the issue of racial profiling, numerous law enforcement agencies have reexamined their policies and collected data on the racial demographics of motorists stopped and searched by police. This article advocates a “disparate impact” framework for understanding the relationship between race and searches and seizures. Using data on the Washington State Patrol, analysis indicates that disparities in the proportions of racial minorities searched by the Patrol are likely not the result of intentional or purposeful discrimination. Additionally, factors such as age, sex, time of day, and the number of violations that motivated the stop affect the likelihood of a search.

Prisons, jobs and privatization: The impact of prisons on employment growth in rural US counties, 1997-2004.

In this study of prison privatization we draw on the insights of a recent body of literature that challenges a widespread belief that prisons help to spur employment growth in local communities. We look to these studies to provide an empirically and theoretically grounded approach to addressing our research question: what are the benefits, if any, to employment growth in states that have privatized some of their prisons, compared to states with only public prisons? Our research makes use of a large, national, and comprehensive dataset. By examining the employment contributions of prisons, as recent research has done, we were able to corroborate the general findings of this research. To study prison privatization we distinguish between states in which privatization has grown rapidly and those states in which privatization has grown slowly (or not at all). Our findings lend support to recent research that finds prisons do not improve job prospects for those communities that host them. We contribute to this literature by demonstrating that new prisons in states in which privatization is surging impede employment growth in the host community. To explain this we highlight the significant reduction in prison staffing - in both private and public prisons - where privatization is growing quickly.

Race, Crime and Criminal Justice in Canada

Certain racial/ethnic minority groups are greatly over-represented in Canada’s criminal justice system. While scholars examining this over-representation have pointed to issues of bias in the system, historically there has been a decided tendency on the part of several criminal justice system officials, legislators, some academics and media commentators to deny that such bias exists. Unfortunately, it is difficult to disentangle the causes of this over-representation, due to an informal ban on the release of race-based crime statistics in Canada. As Hagan (1998: xii) comments with respect to this issue, nThe reluctance to enumerate crime in racial terms is an unexpected product of an odd coalition of forces that, for a variety of dubious reasons, bans the necessary data collection. An unfortunate and little-recognized result of this ostrich-like behavior is complacent support for a posture of denial that pervades our justice system.