Robert J. Kelly

Success in School: A Research Agenda on Student Attrition and Retention in the SEEK Program

Success in higher education for minorities and disadvantaged students may be more closely linked with their sociopsychological adjustments to an institution than was previously thought. At the same time, the culture of institutions of higher learning may facilitate the assimilation of minority students through an apparatus of services that assists them academically and socially. This article examines the institutional interaction processes in the Search for Education, Elevation, and Knowledge Program (SEEK) among students, staff, and faculty at Brooklyn College of the City University of New York (CUNY), and explores how assimilation into the institutional subculture may be enhanced. The research paradigm raises questions about how the school setting affects success or failure and how institutions offer their students resources that enable them to overcome the legacies of poverty and attitudes inimical to the culture of learning.

Lucky money for little brother: The prevalence and seriousness of Chinese gang extortion

Although many Chinese residents acknowledge victimization and extortion of businesses by Asian youth gangs, there is little evidence with which to estimate the seriousness and prevalence of the problem, the number or types of businesses affected, the extent of monetary loss, or the prevalence of violence that business owners may endure. This study presents estimates of the rates of extortion and other forms of victimization based on interviews with 603 owners of Chinese businesses in three Chinatown neighborhoods in New York City. Over 70 percent of the businesses in New York Chinatown neighborhoods were approached by Chinese gang members for some type of extortion, usually demands for money. Over half (55 percent) have made payments. Although gang members frequently harass or threaten business owners, actual victimization occurs fewer than four times each year. Payments vary by type of extortion and type of business. The average payment of less than

Mapping the Domains of Crime: The Contributions of Literary Works to Criminology

1,000 per business per year is a small fraction of the business volume. There is little evidence of vulnerability to victimization based on characteristics of owners or their businesses. Despite threats of violence, actual violent victimization is rare, with verbal threats being the most common form of coercion. Business owners also resisted extortion attempts in unique ways, and in some cases negotiated with gang members the payments to be made. Extortion is deeply ingrained in the social and economic dynamics of Chinese business and is regulated informally by cultural norms. Adaptation and accommodation are the customary responses by business owners to extortion demands, with little incentive or willingness to’ invoke formal legal or social controls.

Psycho-social impacts of terrorism and organized crime: The counterfinality of the practico-inert

This article attempts to discover what benefits criminologists might derive from a study of literature. In its accounts and depictions of every day life, literary art has had a profound effect on our ways of thinking and feeling about crime and criminals. Why? What is it about the literary form, its structure, and its themes, that makes it appealing, and expands our horizons of knowledge? Tentative suggestions are offered in this article.

Collateral damage on the home front: The gulf in America

In the aftermath of the bombings of the World Trade Center (WTC) in New York City and the federal building in Oklahoma City, newspapers published maps showing the radius of potential destruction from such blasts. The ballistic results were frightening as were other scenarios concocted about attacks on the vulnerable infrastructure of bridges, subways, buildings, and tunnels. 5 Three decades ago, it would have been inconceivable that several persistent, unresolved ethnic-nationalist conflicts in the Middle East and southwestern Asia and a deeply alienated individual could act in such an unprecedented manner to produce a level of violence resulting in the death and wounding of hundreds of civilians. All of this would have been thought preposterous, but it happened (Simon, 1994). With terrorism endemic in several countries and regions --Northern Ireland, Bosnia, Lebanon, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Peru, India, Somalia, and Liberia the young have become child warriors. In too many cases, violence

Review essay/dirty dollars: Organized crime and its illicit partnership in the waste industry

Combat casualties in the Persian Gulf War among Coalition troops were by all estimates miraculously low. However, the fallout of the war for many groups on the home front may have been more pernicious in the long term than expected or estimated. This paper sketches some of the consequences of the Persian Gulf War for racial and ethnic minorities in the military, the less tangible and visible affects on the young, and the exacerbation of tensions in terms of social distress between the government and the media in the coverage of the campaign in Kuwait.

Responsibility and Crime in Literature

Alan A. Block & Frank R. Scarpitti, Poisoning For Profit: The Mafia and Toxic Waste in America New York: William Morrow & Co., Inc., 1985, 361 pp.

Field research among deviants: A consideration of some methodological recommendations

Accountability for ones actions has been a major theme that literary artists have grappled with over the centuries. Among the works in which it plays a significant role, and which are here analyzed, are the Oedipus trilogy, Hamlet, The Brothers Karamazov, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Trial, The Stranger, and three twentieth-century American novels: An American Tragedy, Light in August, and Native Son. Insights into the dark recesses of the human mind, which can complement the insights of legal philosophers and social scientists, are revealed in these and other works. They point to an argument that prophesy is not immutable destiny and that social causation is not social determinism. The human being achieves freedom by acceptance of responsibility, each man for his own acts, each woman for hers.

The Role of Movies and Mental Health

Apart from the ethical, moral, and legal problems that beset the study of individuals in their natural settings, investigations of various kinds of criminal conduct engender special difficulties and snares that set limits on the scope of the research effort and the reliability of findings.

The Aliens in Us and the Aliens Out There: Science Fiction in the Movies

This chapter primarily deals with the problem of mental illness as well as psychiatrists and psychologists and demonstrates how they have been exhibited in the motion pictures from 1919 to the present. This theme is important because it plays a fundamental role in helping us understand how Americans may form their impressions of mental illness and those who treat it. One of many reasons for the interest of Hollywood using themes of mental illness may be the unique ability of the camera to capture and represent fantasy dreams and unconscious processes of the past and present. The film provides us with an unusual opportunity to communicate to the world of imagination. A review of the current and past literature will be presented in order for us to understand how this process took place. The chapter concludes by summarizing the importance of the content of the most important films that reflect our argument.