Drew Humphries

Serious Crime, News Coverage, and Ideology A Content Analysis of Crime Coverage in a Metropolitan Paper

This exploratory study of the coverage of serious crime by the New York Post is based on routine crime stories (n = 126) taken from newspapers published in 1951 and 1968. There was an increase in stories about lethal violence. In both years reporters frequently described offenders in terms of age, gender, racial membership, and employment status, and used these descriptions to situate individuals within the social world. Often, the mode of explanation used implied that male youths, nonwhites, and under- or unemployed persons were members of illegitimate social categories. These descriptions, however, included no information that would place violence and serious offenders in the structural or historical context of the postwar period. The article concludes with a discussion of the implications of these findings for an understanding of the ideological con tent of crime news.

The Cooptation of Fixed Sentencing Reform

Criticism of indeterminate sentencing was initially advanced as part of a larger radical program to transform American society. Yet recent sentencing reform legislation legitimated by this criticism has taken on a con servative character. This development is documented here, and explained in terms of political and social change over the past decade.

Capitalist Accumulation and Urban Crime, 1950-1971

Capitalism is a system of accumulation that organizes production and social reproduction to extract surplus value. As it does so, accumulation generates those behaviors registered as crime by the state. This exploratory paper traces the impact of accumulation processes on urban variations in U.S. crime rates following the Second World War. The analysis focuses on the transition from industrial to corporate capitalism, core-periphery aspects of domestic investment shifts, and the effects of these trends on police and victim estimates of crime. Contributing to an empirically grounded theory of crime in advanced capitalism, findings show that selected personal and property crime rates vary with accumulation trends.

Social class and legal change: the birth control controversy.

Changes in birth control legislation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries are analyzed from the perspective of 2 contrasting theoretical models: the corporate liberal model and the class conflict model. The former approach emphasizes domination and the repressive consequences of reform wheras the latter model focuses on the complex relationships among classes and the state. The corporate liberal model posits that women of the corporate class and philanthropists such as the Rockefeller family saw birth control reform as a means to extend class rule. These forces were concerned with improving the quality of the population in the face of widespread immigration and balancing population growth against limited resources. The impact of philanthropic interests on the birth control movement was to establish a body of experts-- the birth control intelligentsia--who defined the rationales for public use of contraception and the circumstances under which it was to be made available. The class conflict model rejects this emphasis on domination viewing the consequences of legal reform as variable and dependent on the balance of class forces revealed in the process of change. Its application involves connecting the distinctive experiences of each of several classes and class factions to the forces advancing reform and showing how the relationships among classes and the state determine the outcome of the reform process. Anthony Comstocks crusade against birth control is viewed as an attempt to regulate the sexual activity of the corporate class and to improve its declining biological position in relation to working class immigrants. He was able to secure the support of corporate liberals because his movement was aimed against radicalism and was consistent with that sectors antiunion strategy. However Emma Goldman and Margaret Sanger organized working class resistance to Comstockery. The decline of the feminist movement and the repression of the Socialist Party ruptured the ties between the birth control movement and mass support leaving the movement open to cooptation by the birth control intelligentsia. It is concluded that the class conflict model with its emphasis on the role of both dominant and subordinant classes and class factions facilitates a clearer analysis of historical material.

Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder*Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility: Fetal Alcohol Syndrome and the Diagnosis of Moral Disorder, by ArmstrongElizabeth M.. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003. 277 pp.

What makes Elizabeth Armstrong’s Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility essential reading for scholars in the areas of medical sociology, policy, gender, and drugs is its penetrating and persuasive analysis of fetal alcohol syndrome (FAS), the set of birth defects attributed to prenatal exposure to alcohol. The “risk” concerns the uncertain outcomes of pregnancy as constructed by medical writers and physicians interested in the role of alcohol. “Responsibility” refers to reproductive outcomes like FAS, for which women are held uniquely accountable, although potential readers should be alerted to a rewarding discussion on the nineteenth century shift from shared parental responsibility to maternal blame for birth defects. Overall, the book compares nineteenth and twentieth century visions of the effects of alcohol on pregnancy and children, which lends support to the social control argument that FAS, as a medical diagnosis, was and is a troubling response to disorder, that is, the increasing independence of women. In advancing the argument, Armstrong avoids the pitfall of social constructionist approaches to social problems. She does not deny the reality of FAS; indeed, she faces up to evidence that alcohol is a teratogen, that is, an agent that has the potential for deforming infants when ingested by pregnant women. Thus, one purpose of Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility is to expose the degree of uncertainty associated with FAS, a worthy purpose given the public’s belief that FAS is an inevitable result of alcohol consumption. If the connection were inevitable, then FAS ought to be more widespread than it is, given consumption of alcohol over time and by women, argues Armstrong. There are plenty of questions, including those about the relationship between alcohol and birth outcomes, about the distribution of FAS in the population, and about which groups are at risk. In answering these questions, Armstrong demonstrates the power of medical knowledge to typify problems like maternal alcohol use, controlling women’s drunkenness by apportioning blame individually and generally (hence the blanket warning to avoid alcohol) and in a manner that disregards remedies that might address the impersonal and complex circumstances that foster drinking among pockets of the population. In the nineteenth century, ideas about alcohol and heredity held mothers and fathers responsible for the birth of future drunks. Later theories about germ poison and race poison shifted the blame to women and held them responsible for viability of the race or quality of national stock. The author is at her best when addressing the science underpinning these notions. Controlled studies contested presumptions about the detrimental effects of alcohol, but results tended to be disregarded and held to be of lesser value than clinical observations of knowledgeable physicians, according to Armstrong. A century later, FAS emerged, the product of claimsmakers who relied on equivocal case studies, a shifting amalgam of symptoms, and science biases favoring studies that confirmed adverse outcomes like FAS. Clinicians were far from certain about FAS. Although Armstrong reports a range of clinical observations, it is safe to say that questions arose among the doctors that she sampled about the amount of alcohol, the limits of single causes, and the role of environmental as well as individual vulnerabilities. One of the most powerful arguments in Conceiving Risk, Bearing Responsibility is