Employment And Divorce

A new study to be released in the American Journal of Sociology by Liana Sayer of The Ohio State University looking at 3,600 couples surveyed in 1987-1988, 1992-1994, and 2001-2002 shows "how employment status influences both men's and women's decisions to end a marriage.

[A] woman's employment status has no effect on the likelihood that her husband will opt to leave the marriage. An employed woman is more likely to initiate a divorce than a woman who is not employed, but only when she reports being highly unsatisfied with the marriage. . . .

For a man, not being employed not only increases the chances that his wife will initiate divorce, but also that he will be the one who opts to leave. Even men who are relatively happy in their marriages are more likely to leave if they are not employed[.]

The finding seems to reflect data that I've cited in the past on the subject that appear to show that economics is still probably the strongest tie that holds marriages together and the biggest influence on recent trends in divorce rates, but that the dynamic is complex. In a nutshell, the key economic factor seems to be the economic dependence of women on men in a marriage. When it is present, divorce is rare. When it is absent, marriages tends to survive in good times, but not in bad ones.

I've hypothesized in previous posts that the driving factor behind the divide in divorce rates between college educated and non-college educated couples is that college educated women relative to non-college educated women (1) have more to gain economically from their husbands (who have better incomes and often benefits like favorably priced health insurance and defined benefit pension plans), (2) sacrifice more of their earning potential by being married and having kids (first, because they actually stay at home as a result, and second, because experience matters much more in professional careers than in blue collar jobs), and (3) have lower expectations that they will be able to secure a match or new job that puts them in at least as good a position as they are in when married (because they have more room to do worse and less room to improve, and because the better men tend to stay married while the less desirable ones do not, on average).

Thus, even though college educated women (at least when they have children and are married to college educated men) generally have more earning capacity than non-college educated women (at least when they have children and are married to non-college educated men), also tend to have a greater economic dependency upon their husbands.

Other data have tended to show in multiple countries that an important factor in divorce rates of couples relative to each other within countries is the ratio of a husband's income to a wife's income. Marriages in which wives have more earning power relative to their husbands are more likely to end in divorce.

A Father's Day column by Vincent Carrol in the Denver Post questioned this economic interpretation for a rise in divorce rates, noting that job prospects for men aren't that much worse than they were in the 1960s and that in absolute terms couples are strong married in hard economic times because they can pool income and reduce expenses than they are when they are not together. But, his analysis paints with too broad a brush.

The men who are most likely to get divorced, those who lack college educations, have faced four straight decades of near total economic stagnation, sharing in almost none of the economic growth of that overall prosperous era, while better educated professional men have shared in that economic growth. Meanwhile, the economic prospects of women have improved dramatically in those four decades in all social classes.

But, while much better than they were in the early 1960s (when women made up single digit percentages of most professions and often remained unmarried and childless if they chose to do so at all), the economic gains for higher level women professionals who marry and have kids have consistently shown the greatest lag behind men in the same professions. The "mommy track" career pattern, of choosing to take time off from work to raise young children and to take positions within a profession that provide a better work-family balance to a greater degree than men, as much as more blatant discrimination in compensation between men and women, accounts for a very large share of the enter gender gap in compensation today. Women who don't marry and have kids and have college educations have incomes very similar to men with college educations (even if they have married and/or had kids).

The "mommy track" gap is very top heavy. Low skilled jobs of women with no college education tend not to have very seniority and experienced based pay scales. The seniority and experience factor for women who are lawyers, and doctors and business chiefs, in contrast, as illustrated with data like the University of Michigan Law School alumni survey, can be intense.

Considering policy responses to this situation is beyond the scope of this post. Obviously, nobody is seriously proposing that we should return to the 1950s regime when women were all but barred from almost all professions by school teaching, nursing and secretarial work (and professional such as laundry work and child care that constituted outsourced forms of homemaking). Neither do we want to return to the Baby Boom era barefoot and pregnant model in which economic dependence that strengthened marriages flowed from having children early and often. 

It may be that marriages that are too strong aren't even desirable.  The stronger a marriage is, as a result of economic dependence, the more an economically dependent wife will tend to tolerate mistreatment in that marriage, up to and including domestic violence, a husband that engaged in incest with her children, affairs, and so on.

But, it is also the case that we either have to learn to find ways to make a reality with less stable marriages work better, or rethink the economic incentives within marriage and the way that women choose to be involved in the workforce, if we wish to improve the status quo.

Addressing issues that aren't driving the problems won't produce solutions.  Even changing the standards under which marriages are entered into, or divorce is available wouldn't necessarily work.  In the era well before no fault divorce, when economic trends weakened marriages arose, divorces and de facto divorces became more common and changes in the law regarding the availability of divorce, followed rather than preceded this trend.  Likewise, parallel to the trend of high divorce rates in recent decades (although they have started to fall again) is the increasingly widespread trend of couples never getting married in the first place.

READ MORE - Employment And Divorce

Columbus, Ohio Builds Perv Friendly Courthouse

Somebody forgot that in engineering, function should always trump form, particularly functional aspects that matter to your key constituents. The snafu in a $105 million court house in Columbus, Ohio was clear when it opened on Monday.

The central stairs of the new Franklin County Common Pleas Courthouse seem almost to float up from the ground floor, suspended in a foyer of light and glass.

However, the aesthetic appeal of the stairway has an unfortunate side-effect in a building where judges sentence sex offenders: People can see up a woman's skirt from the busy walkway under the stairs.

"If you wear dresses, you're on notice that you might want to take the elevator, as I will be doing," said Judge Julie M. Lynch, who wears dresses exclusively to work.

Although it's probably best not to advertise the issue for fear of abuse, people partial to skirts, dresses and kilts have a right to know about the risk, Lynch said.

From here (the Court of Common Pleas in Franklin County is the court of general jurisdiction handling felonies and large claim civil cases in Columbus, Ohio).

The problem is particularly unimpressive because the issue is a familiar one in new public building projects. I'd be willing to guess that there weren't any women or acrophobics on this engineering design team.

The county is aware of the issue and has discussed whether anything needs to be done, said Jim Goodenow, director of public facilities management.

For now, security guards have been told to keep an eye out for people craning their necks. If the design becomes a problem, the county can adjust the glass to make it less transparent, but officials are hoping not to disrupt the artistic integrity of the building. . . .

When glass stairs and walkways first came out, [one of the engineering executives who builds them for Apple computer properties] Zorn said, he remembers looking up at an elevated walkway at an airport and wondering how the designers had missed the fact that skirts were going to be a problem. Most engineers know enough to use some well-placed opaque glass and careful design to avoid the problem, he said.

A similar design for a recent renovation at nearby Ohio State University's main library was nixed at the design stage for this reason and because of "the fear some people have of standing on clear glass."

READ MORE - Columbus, Ohio Builds Perv Friendly Courthouse

Uganda Lets Anti-Gay Bill Die

Uganda is a country in East Africa at between mass violence torn Rwanda, Burundi, Congo, and Sudan that has itself experienced mass political violence (the best known being massacres by Ida Admin in the 1970s) in its recent history. Its purchased ties to Gaddafi have made it a pivotal in efforts to find a resolution of the situation in Libya, and it has plaed in active and mixed role in addressing regional conflicts.

Uganda is also remarkable for being a nation in Africa where the dominant political forces, sometimes violent, are the local brands of evangelical Christianity. This political wave has manifested itself in major social issue overhauls of its statutes, after long periods of legislative stagnation under less than democratic rule.

One recent wave of legislative change that received widespread praise was one of the most dramatic legislative reforms to establish women's equality and give women's rights that force of law in all of history in a given country as the direction of its constitutional court on April 4, 2007.

Another, which secured widespread international condemnation and massive popular support locally, was a virtulently anti-gay bill that has been considered by its parliament for the last eighteen months:

The Anti-Homosexuality Bill sought to impose the death penalty for a number of reasons, including being a “serial offender” of the “offense of homosexuality.” The bill also called for Ugandans to alert the government to known cases of homosexual behavior within 24 hours.

Religious leaders said they had obtained more than two million signatures in support of the measure[.] . . .

Since the bill was introduced, gay-rights advocates have gone into hiding in Uganda; a vitriolic newspaper published the names and addresses of gay men and lesbians and told readers to kill them; and one prominent activist for gay rights, David Kato, was bludgeoned to death with a hammer in his neighborhood outside Kampala.

The bill expired with Uganda's current legislative session on Friday, in a major victory for gay rights defenders and the international community. The far away legislative debate has made its way to American shores because missions of prominent American evangelical churches have been financial backers of the churches and political organizations that have been pivotal in backing the anti-gay legislation in Uganda. Pressure from gay rights activists on these churches, which often aren't known for their anti-gay stances in their U.S. activities, may be one important behind the scenes reason that the legislation has faltered in Uganda.

READ MORE - Uganda Lets Anti-Gay Bill Die

The New American Work Force

[I]n 1954, about 96 percent of American men between the ages of 25 and 54 worked. Today that number is around 80 percent. One-fifth of all men in their prime working ages are not getting up and going to work. According to figures from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the United States has a smaller share of prime age men in the work force than any other G-7 nation. The number of Americans on the permanent disability rolls, meanwhile, has steadily increased. Ten years ago, 5 million Americans collected a federal disability benefit. Now 8.2 million do.…There are probably more idle men now than at any time since the Great Depression, and this time the problem is mostly structural, not cyclical.

From Tyler Cohen at the Marginal Revolution citing David Brooks at the New York Times.

In parallel with the shift Cohen notes, the percentage of adult women in the work force has almost doubled from about 32% to about 65%.  About one in five American women will never have children, and the vast majority of those who do have children will also work for many years while they have children, sometimes even when the children are infants.  Also, both men and women are entering the work force later because they are more likely to finish high school and attend college, and a much larger number of working age adults are incarcerated now than were in 1954.

Finally, of course, unemployment rates are just under the double digits as we creep out of the recession caused by the financial crisis, and men have taken more of a hit in the current recession than women.  In contrast, 1954 was a point of relatively low unemployment, driven by a manufacturing economy that was serving a world market whose own capacity had not yet recovered from the capital destruction of World War II and the millions of men permanently removed from the work force by that war.

I'm not ready to jump to the "loser men" interpretation  that Cohen, citing David Brooks, does.  An increased number of permanent disability claims is to be expected as a generation of blue collar baby boomers ages.  Total labor force participation relative to the working aged population as a whole is at all time highs, unrivaled anywhere else in the world, and Americans work longer hours that workers in any other country.

The working aged men who are withdrawing from the labor force, in addition to growing ranks of graduate students and inmates and disabled blue collar workers, are mostly early retirees who have played by the rules, worked hard, saved money, raised children, sent them to college and are retiring early because they are prosperous, not because they are lazy.  Many young retirees use their years of early retirement to give back to the community and their families, contributions that were often slighted during the hectic years when they built up their nest eggs.  Early retirement is the American answer to the fact that we have so much less work-life balance, longer work weeks, and less vacation time than our developed world counterparts.  For my druthers, I'd prefer an economy where the average American works fewer hours per year, unemployment is lower, early retirement is rare because most people love their jobs, and men and women balance work and family in more similar ways to each other than we do today.  But, until we reach that day, I am not going to grudge the time that working age men who toiled intensely for a few decades and accrued a nest eggs take to retire early and smell the roses.

My father was anything but an early retiree, but what he spends his time doing in retirement is typical of retirees in reasonably good health of all ages.  He visits grandchildren and stepgrandchildren.  He helps an urban Cincinnati church reimagine itself and develop a plan for raising funds and turning itself around.  He directs a youth choir, commissioned the composition of one hymn and wrote another hymn himself.  He is civically active, writing letters to the editor and op-ed columns relevant to his professional experience.  He participates in a gourmet group and a community choir.  He keeps his home in good repair.  He keeps a watchful eye on the good health and well being of his neighbors and the neighborhood's esprit de corps.  He takes steps to move forward efforts to convert smelly feedlot manure into a renewable energy source.  He set up a volunteer training program for people in his small town and established a lecture series in his old department.  He stays connected to the people he has spent a lifetime building ties to across the nation and the world.  Of necessity, he spends a lot more time than he once did tending to his own good health, and as a consequence of his age, spends more time reading obituaries and attending funerals than he once did.  He spends more time on vacation travel than he once did, but no more than a typical French or German bureaucrat in the prime of his career does.  Just as we strive to find meaningful work in our lives working for pay, and some of us achieve that, we strive to find meaningful leisure in our lives when we are not working for pay and some of us achieve that as well.

What my father does in his retirement is not the same as work, admittedly.  He no longer has to fight pitched bureaucratic battles with the university facilities department over furniture acquisitions for his department.  He longer spends hours grading papers from students in his classes.  He no longer bears primary responsibility for finding internship opportunities for three dozen graduate students a year.  He doesn't have to deal with office politics or admissions decisions.  His days of pouring over long technical reports and attending endless meetings while serving as an advisor to a federal nuclear waste disposal project have come to an end.  But, like most retirees, early and late, he is not an "idle man."  The kind of person who works hard enough to retire early, even more so than the usual retiree, usually is constitutionally incapable of being idle even if they tried.  Early retirement may leave our nation with more really good golfers than we really need, but if one takes it as a given that economic production is a means to an end, rather than an end in and of itself, something economists sometimes forget, this shouldn't be terribly troubling.

One can argue that an economic system that compensates some of our most skilled physicians, executives, lawyers and engineers so well that a large fraction of them withdraw their valuable skills from the monetary economy early is out of kilter.  Surely, my inlaws, who are both medical doctors and both retired early, would have probably done so a little bit later if medical doctors were paid less than they are in our economy and they needs to work longer to be economically self-sufficient.  In that world, they would have spend a few more years treating patients and a little less time playing golf in their golden years.

But, I can hardly fault them. They were cogs in the machine and did what made sense at the time.  The way that the profession was designed when they were actively participating in it, medical doctors had to work exceedingly long hours and carry pagers whereever they went missing children's birthday parties and family time after school, foregoing extended vacations, and generally giving extremely intensely of themselves to serve large numbers of people in medical need with cutting edge skills and technology that provided great benefit to those patients.  They didn't have the option of living more balanced lives while they were working, and that system had built into it the incentive of an early retirement as a reward for that very intense work using skills so scarce that the United States established an immigration visa to secure people with these skills that it was unable to produce in sufficient numbers at home.  If the hope of early retirement hadn't been available in the long run, lots of doctors in their generation would probably have decided that their toil simply wasn't worth it and would have deprived the health care system of their skills far sooner.

The economy at large is experiencing basically the opposite of what most of academia is experiencing.  While old academics are lingering in their tenure track positions long past the traditional retirement age, leaving little room for the ranks of new professors seeking to fill their shoes, in hot parts of the private sector, the millionaire entrepreneurs and executives and physicians of the last long economic boom are making way for their ambitious, young, tech savvy successors.

Indeed, one of the many reasons that upper middle class managerial and professional workers experience low rates of structural unemployment than less skilled workers is that upper middle class workers can afford to retire early and free up jobs for younger workers.  In contrast, many blue collar workers often can't hope to save enough too retire early and continue to fill jobs that reduce the opportunities available for their younger successors.  Still, many middle class, as opposed to upper middle class retirees are workers who have been laid off from long, physically demanding careers as soldiers, as cops, as firemen, and factory workers whose unions, aware that large numbers of them would experience permanent disabilities anyway if they didn't retire early, worked with management to desire jobs that allow for early retirement.

Getting up and going to a paying job is something that people do because they need to support themselves and their families, and because the economy needs certain jobs to get done.  There is no shame in working and no one wants to be unable to support themselves.  But, it is a mistake to assume that getting up and going to a paying job has intrinsic moral value.  There is nothing morally wrong with an early retiree in his early 50s lingering over the newspaper while having breakfast, and spending the rest of his day doing what he thinks is the most valuable use of his time when money is not an object.

Economists tend to think that rational actors want nothing more than more money.  But, most people simply want to have enough money to allow them to be secure in their ability to meet their comfortable but modest economic needs.  Once that goal is accomplished, increasingly sooner for much of the nation's upper middle class in this more prosperous age, earning more money becomes a much lower priority goal.  Sometimes these activities will produce money anyway, but money is no longer the point.

I'm sure that a reporter with a little gumption could find men who don't fit the narrative that I've outlined and fall into the stereotype that David Brooks is trying to conjure. 

I know of several men with good educations and/or professional experience in Denver who spent time as homemaker husbands and/or returned to school for more education, when their own careers hit bumps during bad job markets and their wives had jobs.  Yet, isn't this something that the feminist revolution has been bracing us for, and encourging us to welcome, over the last several decades?  And, at any rate, this remains a statistically minor blip that only accentuates a larger trend of more people seeking graduate educations, blue collar boomers wearing their bodies out, more people spending long years in prison, more people retiring early, and a bad economy driving up unemployment rates.

I'm sure that a not insignificant number of working aged men, particularly men with criminal records or substance abuse problems have simply given up after long, fruitless job hunts, are dependent upon family or friends or lovers, and do little but drink too much and watch television.  In earlier days, when our economy needed lots of unskilled labor for mindless jobs because we hadn't yet mastered automation, people like that would have worked at abundant assembly lines all work and gotten drunk and wasted time after hours and on the weekends.  Now, a lot of that work has been offshored or automated.  There are still unskilled mindless jobs in our economy, but there aren't nearly as many as their used to be, while there are almost as many people chasing after them.

But, for the most part, America's meager safety net doesn't afford men who are not financially secure early retirees the option of leaving the labor force whether they want to or not.  More so than any other developed nation in the world, Americans must work or starve and die.  Leaving the work force is a very expensive luxury purchase for most Americans not to be made lightly, and men and women alike do so in our economy at their peril.

Like any other nation, we have "loser men."  We also have "loser women," "loser children" and "loser seniors."  But, for the most part, those loser men are the men who have no choice but to continue working at unfulfilling, dead end, low paying jobs because they have no other choice and didn't manage to save anything for their futures, not the early retirees who have left the work force entirely.

READ MORE - The New American Work Force

Policy Beliefs Can Change

When you get immersed in the toil of electoral politics, it is easy to get into the rut of assuming that politics is all about getting people who agree with you to the polls at a higher rate that the people who don't agree with you, and that people's opinions, to the extent that they are based on more than trivial amounts of information, almost never change.

But, in the longer run, that isn't true. While an individual, and even a whole geographic community's place on the political spectrum is very stable over time, in the case of communities, even over more than a century, the location of specific policy stances on that political spectrum can shift dramatically in a couple of a decades or less.

A poll from CNN this week is the latest to show a majority of Americans in favor of same-sex marriage, with 51 percent saying that marriages between gay and lesbian couples “should be recognized by the law as valid” and 47 percent opposed.

This is the fourth credible poll in the past eight months to show an outright majority of Americans in favor of gay marriage. . . Prior to last year, there had been just one survey — a Washington Post poll conducted in April 2009 — to show support for gay marriage as the plurality position, and none had shown it with a majority. . . . opponents of gay marriage almost certainly no longer constitute a majority; just one of the last nine polls has shown opposition to gay marriage above 50 percent.

From here.

In New York State, likely voters polled earlier this year supported gay marriage by a 56-37 margin. In New York City suburbs support for legalizing gay marriage is 61-33. Roman Catholics are more likely to support gay marriage than members of the population at large, notwithstanding church doctrine to the contrary.

If you told me when I started high school in small town Ohio in the mid-1980s that a majority of Americans would support gay marriage two and a half decades later, I would have thought that you were crazy. When I graduated from high school, only about 11% of those polled thought gay marriage should be legal, while about 72% oppose it. Frankly, I'm surprised that support for gay marriage back then was that high, I would have guessed that it was in the single digits, and maybe in small town Ohio it was. It is also possibly that the single pre-1994 poll's number was high and was made public at all only because it was a statistical outlier on the high end.

The AIDS epidemic had started to make most people aware that there were actually people who had intimate relationships with members of the same sex voluntarily, but even the notion that someone could actually identify as "gay" or "lesbian" in real life, as opposed to merely as an insulting and inaccurate description of someone, wasn't real clear to me at the time. I had never met anyone who had come out. I hadn't even seen or heard of anyone who had come out on TV, in a movie, on the radio, or in anything that I'd read in print. There were no organizations for gays, lesbians, transgender individuals that I was aware of in my town, and the only one that I was aware of nationally was ACT-UP. I was aware of a couple of same sex adult couples who lived together as a household, one of which involved an extended family member, but it had never occurred to me that a household like that would be anything other than platonic, and nobody in those households ever said a thing that suggested that more legal rights were necessary for them.

Since then, the trendline has been more or less steady and shows no sign of reversing. Nate Silver notes in the linked article that "If support for gay marriage were to continue accelerating as fast as it has in the past two years, supporters would outnumber opponents roughly 56-40 in the general population by November 2012." Even if the growth in support reverts to the overall trend line, there will be a pretty safe majority that favors legalizing gay marriage by then, and some states will be ahead of that trend while others will be behind it.

Popular understanding of sexual orientation and gender identification has expanded dramatically in a quarter of a century. By the time I finished high school, I learned that there were at least a few people in my community who self-identified as gay or lesbian (I would not meet anyone who had a transgender identity until after I finished college). Oberlin, where I went to college, was a mecca for gay and lesbian students, who were often active in campus politics, were deeply involved in running one of the major social events of the year on campus (the drag ball), and made it a point to be out of the closet in daily life in class and around campus. A large share of our student body came from New York City and some students personally knew people who had participated in the Stonewall Riots.

But, while college changed my views, this took much longer for the rest of the nation. More than one book has recounted what happened in the years that followed, but my point is not to illustrate how this happened. My point is to note that it did.

Even a decade ago, even among liberal minded people and many people in the gay and lesbian community, some form of civil unions seemed possible and desirable, but gay marriage seemed like a remote possibility that might never happen anywhere in anything but the distant future (where author Kate Elliott, who I whose science fiction Jaran novels I was reading in the late 1990s had put a society that had gay marriage). It was a little hard to determine at that point what gay marriage would even mean at a practical level, because not a lot of attention had been given to the question by people in a position to know the answers.

Now, there are thousands of same sex legally marriage couples in the United States and more in Europe. Colorado doesn't legally recognize same sex marriage and doesn't even have a civil unions law (one was narrowly defeated in this year's session of the Colorado General Assembly). But, it does have a lot of same sex couples who view each other as spouses, who hold themselves out to the public as spouses, who live as a household and who raise children together. They are parents of children who go to school with my children. They are teachers. They are nurses. Their families are my neighbors. Those couples are my clients in large numbers.

It has become obvious to a large share of the population through countless examples that someone can be gay or lesbian as a matter of personal identity, and that a person's sexual orientation is a stable part of who someone is as a person that someone is generally aware of to some extent, even if they may not fully understand their feelings in some social contexts or may be confused at times, for most, if not all, of their lives. (And, who doesn't, at some point in life, find their potential romantic relationships to be confusing?)

It has become clear as well that gay marriage doesn't have negative externalities. It doesn't weaken the institution of marriage for opposite sex couples. It helps many children and harms none. It imparts dignity without taking it away from anyone.

There are still plenty of people in the world who still insist that same sex loves are sinful based on epistles written by John the Gospel writer a couple of thousand years ago, and stories and laws written by Jewish priests centuries before then. But, those scripturally motivated views don't last long in the face of encounters with real life friends, neighbors and colleagues. They don't have much credibility with young people, even those who are evangelical Christians who have grown up in a world that has allowed them to see gays and lesbians and transgender individuals living ordinary (and extraordinary) lives like anyone else.

Decisions from courts and politicians, like the recent Congressional repeal of the Don't Ask, Don't Tell policy in the military and the President's decision not to defend in court the part of the Defense of Marriage Act applicable to the federal government have provided the leadership that has changed the views of the majority, and willingness to hire a gay man as the White House social secretary. Once you abandon the sin theory of sexual orientation the rest flows pretty naturally, and the leadership that our nation's leaders have shown has pretty well discredited that understanding of sexual orientation.

The sin theory of sexual orientation is rapidly going the way of the equally scripturally supported and equally empirically inaccurate demon possession theory of mental illness. Despite the fact that the words in the Bible haven't changed, very few people walking the streets believe in an internalized way that mental illness is caused by demon possession, and likewise, the Biblically based defenses for the institutions of slavery are also now heart felt for only a tiny minority of American Christians.

Lots of people believe that faith healing (which the Gospels devote a great deal of time to) is possible, or at least once was possible, but very few people resort to a clergyman laying on hands as their sole means or even primary means for dealing with poor physical health.

The Pope's official position, reduced to writing ever since 1968 in "Humanae Vitae," is that using contraceptives is a sin. But:

A survey just one year later . . . found that 44% of Catholic women (who were regular churchgoers) were currently using artificial contraception. In 1974, 83% of Catholics said they disagreed with the Pope’s stance on birth control. By 1999, nearly 80 percent of Catholics believed that a person could be a good Catholic without obeying the church hierarchy’s teaching on birth control. A 2005 nationwide poll by Harris Interactive showed that 90% of Catholics supported the use of birth control. The Center of Disease Control and Prevention 2002 National Survey of Family Growth revealed that 97% of American Catholic women over age 18 have used a banned form of contraception, which is the same percentage as the general population.

The sea change in public opinion on gay rights isn't the only recent example.

While he was living, Martin Luther King, Jr., our nation's pre-eminent hero was the civil rights movement, was wary of pressing to strike down miscegenation laws and emphasized civil rights in the public sphere of work and commerce instead. Yet, in the wake of Loving v. Virginia, even prominent segregationist politicians like Strom Thurmond eventually came around to the view (and I genuinely believe that at least that far it was sincere) that miscegenation laws were wrong and that there was nothing wrong with interracial marriage. Large percentages of white, usual Republican primary voters in Mississippi still haven't come around, and we are not a nation of color blind people. But, Jim Crow era laws to enforce segregation and discriminate on the basis of race have been utterly morally discredited for the vast majority of Americans today.

We haven't reached a comfortable answer that tells us how to balance work and family in a world where both men and women are part of almost all parts of the workforce. But, almost nobody wants to return to the status quo that was in place when I was born when the percentage of women in law school student bodies was in the single digits, and there were only a handful of jobs that were open to women, especially to married women. Likewise, almost nobody advocates a return to a legal regime in which women cannot own property, bring lawsuits or enter into contracts in their own name, as was the case when the Founders wrote the United States Constitution.

Similarly, nobody is advocating that the franchise be limited to white male property owners over the age of twenty-one as it was when the Founders wrote the United States constitution. Indeed, while non-whites can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on race, women can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on gender, and eighteen to twenty year olds can no longer constitutionally be denied the right to vote based on age, laws restricting the franchise to property owners would quite possibly not violate the federal constitution, although such laws would be politically impossible to pass at the moment.

Abortion remains controversial, but popular opinion today would never support the laws struck down by the U.S. Supreme Court in Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965 that made it illegal to use "any drug, medicinal article or instrument for the purpose of preventing conception."

Support for legalizing marijuana is at about the same point that support for legalizing gay marriage was two years ago. The year that I graduated from high school, about 74% opposed that and 24% supported it. Now, about 50% oppose legalizing it, while 46% support legalizing it, and support for legalization has grown more or less steadily for the last fifteen years. According to the executive director of NORML:

Thirteen states have decriminalized marijuana, and that covers 130 million Americans. We now have fifteen states and the District of Columbia that have legal protections for qualified medical-marijuana patients, and that covers 90 to 95 million Americans.

The President has taken the position of not using federal law to punish people who use marijuana in compliance with state medical marijuana laws, and has paid essentially no price (and perhaps gains support) for taking this position.

In aspects of life where people have real experience and are affected in their daily lives, religious texts and doctrines and even community traditions are all but irrelevant to people's opinions. The previous generation's unthinkable possibilities can become the current generation's moral norms.

READ MORE - Policy Beliefs Can Change

Women Still Get Victimized In Colorado

The victim in a Washington state sex assault that is now linked to a 32-year-old Lakewood man was charged with false reporting and paid a $500 fine in 2008 because police didn't believe her story.

Authorities in Lynnwood, Wash., reopened their case and reimbursed the woman after Colorado detectives found pictures of the victim on a camera belonging to Marc O'Leary, an Army veteran charged in two similar cases in Golden and Westminster, Lynnwood police Cmdr. Steve Rider said.

From here.

Women are still raped in public view in places like Denver International Airport.

Drunk young women still disappear into the night after clubbing in LoDo, and go missing for weeks without explanation.

Coaches, and pastors still abuse positions of trust.

Little girls are still shot dead.

And, that is just in Colorado so far this month.

READ MORE - Women Still Get Victimized In Colorado

The Case Against The Label "Borderline Personality Disorder"

There is an established mental health disorder with the name "Borderline Personality Disorder."  This label has its critics.  See also here.

First, the category itself is questionable, because it is so often co-morbid with other conditions, doesn't have a fixed core of symptoms found in every person given that diagnosis, and is often confused with conditions like bipolar disorder, which can present similarly.  It is a muddy diagnosis that may not have a common cause or a common suitable treatment that fudges inadequacies in the diagnostic system.

Arguably, this is a feature and not a flaw.  Nobody in the clinical community is claiming seriously that people who are diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder by qualified psychiatrists who are doing their job properly do not have a mental health condition.   Once one is diagnosed with "something," the specific treatment plan may be rather ad hoc in any case, tailored to what works and the individualized presentation in the patient.  Ambiguous muddy diagnoses prevent someone who clearly has something wrong from falling through the cracks because they don't fit in a specific box.

But, the lack of coherence in the category does illustrate that the modern psychiatric medical establishment isn't really sure what is wrong and doesn't really know what to do about it.

Second, the label has pejorative connotations, seems to be applied to women when men with the same symptoms would be given another diagnosis (often "psychopathy" or in DSM-IV language, a particular subtype of "anti-social personality disorder"), may capture clinician bias about a particular patient rather than objective symptoms, and  it isn't really clear what metaphor is being invoked when the "borderline" label is used - borderline between what and what?  Critics argue that the label essentially consists of being both crazy and difficult, rather than merely crazy, or merely difficult.

Now one can argue that any classification that carries as diagnostic criteria more of the folk definitions of "evil" than all but one or two other diagnoses is inevitably going to develop prejorative connotations, just as labels for people with low IQ have to be re-invented every decade or two because they inevitably develop those connotations and cease to have exclusively clinical meaning.

READ MORE - The Case Against The Label "Borderline Personality Disorder"

The Japanese Business Model For Teacher Pay

There are lots of differences between the prevailing American model and the Japanese model for K-12 education. One of those differences is that Japanese schools often have class sizes that many U.S. schools would consider unacceptably large, but use these larger class sizes to make it feasible to pay teachers higher salaries and generally, to build up the prestige of teaching as a profession. Also, many tasks that would be done by paid staff in American schools, like a significant share of the janitorial work and photocopying, is done by students in Japan, again, freeing up resources for higher teacher salaries. American law professors routinely teach classes of ninety students. Almost no high school teachers in the United States do that, although such large class sizes are unheard of in Japan.

Nicholas Kristoff argues, reasonably, that teachers are underpaid:

Until a few decades ago, employment discrimination perversely strengthened our teaching force. Brilliant women became elementary school teachers, because better jobs weren’t open to them. It was profoundly unfair, but the discrimination did benefit America’s children.

These days, brilliant women become surgeons and investment bankers — and 47 percent of America’s kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers come from the bottom one-third of their college classes (as measured by SAT scores). The figure is from a study by McKinsey & Company, “Closing the Talent Gap.”

Changes in relative pay have reinforced the problem. In 1970, in New York City, a newly minted teacher at a public school earned about $2,000 less in salary than a starting lawyer at a prominent law firm. These days the lawyer takes home, including bonus, $115,000 more than the teacher, the McKinsey study found.

He also cites some studies that argue that good teachers produce good student results, although the general trend is that instructional inputs are related only dimly as second or third order effects to student academic performance and life success.

But, part of the reason that demonstrated results from instructional inputs are so equivocal, is because almost everybody is using the same basic model: 180 days a year of school for days of less than eight hours, modest amounts of homework, teachers mostly drawn from conventional teacher certification programs in public schools with reasonably similar class sizes, and low career long pay prospects for someone with a college degree. Private religious schools don't pay teachers very well either. There are differences, but those differences are mostly modest.

A few elite secular private schools pay teachers very well, but given the elite character of the incoming student body which is overwhelmingly either upper middle class, rich, or extremely academically talented, it is hard to tell if good teachers or good students are driving the results. Also, these schools typically have not only highly paid teachers but very modest class sizes, which make their model unattainable without immensely larger K-12 budgets.

The public will simply does not exist to pay for a system of public schools where the average student-teacher ratio is 8:1 and the average teacher makes $90,000 a year. The more typical story is like this one from today:

The fifth-largest school district in Colorado this afternoon expects to announce $30 million in cuts — including jobs and student activities, as well as increased class sizes — to meet its 2011-12 budget.

Today at 3:30 p.m., Adams 12 Five Star Superintendent Chris Gdowski will announce the proposed cuts, including an anticipated 185 job cuts. Last year, the district cut 188 full-time positions. Over the past five years, the district has cut $38 million from its budget.

For the 2010-11 school year, the operating budget was $268.8 million, about 88 percent of which was devoted to employee salaries and benefits.

Even if we did, we wouldn't get the results you see at Groton in classes full of kids who are two grade levels behind by the third grade, may not get a square meal on the weekends, have an older sibling in a gang, live in a single parent home with a parent who dropped out of high school, and are intermittently homeless. Government stinginess towards children in the United States is not limited to education spending.

On the other hand, the Detroit model: dramatically increasing class sizes while paying their teachers 30% below the going rate for teachers in the state, despite the fact that they are teaching students with the greatest educational needs, and simultaneously increasing commuting time for students on their way to and from school, is pretty surely not a good way to improve educational quality either. To some extent, you get what you pay for.

Nobody has ever tried in recent history for a sustained period to set up a K-12 education system in which entry level teachers teaching ordinary average neighborhood kids are paid as much as entry large law firm lawyers in the same area, and can expect to receive that kind of compensation for their entire careers, but teach very large classes by American standards with very little staff assistance.

Of course, it isn't at all easy to break out the impacts of particular parts of the Japanese or American models. The Japanese spend more days in school. A larger share of American kids are college bound than in Japan. Cram school for college entrance exams to supplement ordinary high school education are the norm. Japanese educators are less reluctant to use drill and kill instruction methods, and more liberal in putting social pressure on kids to perform though public disclosure of academic performance. Extra-curricular activity participation is more of an expectation in Japan. Many American kids have more educational choices that comparable Japanese kids. American higher education, particularly at the graduate level, has a better reputation for rigor than Japanese higher education. American teachers have a much larger proportion of very low income students and far more students who are non-native speakers of the language of instruction. Japan starts foreign language instruction sooner and has very little sex education.

Also, somewhat surprisingly, given the tendency of K-12 education systems to pay teachers of older students more than teachers of younger students, the evidence on educational performance and education seems to indicate that the importance of educational quality is greatest when kids are youngest and lower when kids are older. Kids who need remedial work upon entering college were mostly behind already by the time they were in the 6th grade.

If we are to set compensation based on potential lifetime educational performance impact (and no school system in the world does this, to the best of my knowledge, although many do mandate smaller class sizes for younger students), we should be paying the highest salaries to pre-school and kindergarten teachers, the next highest salaries to elementary school teachers, the next highest salaries to middle school teachers, and the lowest salaries to high school teachers. Instead, the pay of teachers seems more closely related to the proportion of the teachers who are men, which is greatest for the older ages. As usual in the American labor market, the supply of similarly skilled labor is more important in setting compensation levels than the value of what workers produce.

But, moving in the direction of the Japanese business model for teacher pay, and paying early education teachers much more than we do, is certainly something worth considering.

READ MORE - The Japanese Business Model For Teacher Pay

Sexual Freedom v. Freedom From Exploitation

Anyone who reads this blog with any regularity knows that I have strong opinions on a great many issues. But, now and then, a case comes along that is so hard to evaluate, that it is very hard to see a right answer. The case of the 41 year old British man with an IQ of 48 who was in a same sex relationship and banned from having sex is one such case. It presents hard issues that are worth grappling with in a situation that is unfamiliar to most of us.

The Facts

The facts, insofar as we know them are as follows:

The 41 year-old [man] had been in a relationship with a man with whom he lived and told officials "it would make me feel happy" for it to continue.

But his local council, which provides his accommodation, decided his "vigorous sex drive" was inappropriate and that with an IQ of 48 and a "moderate" learning disability, he did not understand what he was doing. . . . the man known as Alan was described as being physically able but "seriously challenged in all aspects of his mental functionality". He lived in a home provided by the council, where he developed a sexual relationship with a man called Kieron by the court. Alan was also accused of making lewd gestures at children in a dentists' surgery and on a bus, although no police action was taken.

An IQ of 48 is a level of intellectual functioning lower than 99.8% of the general population, and is commonly described as "moderate mental retardation" per the DSM-IV. It is roughly equivalent to having the mental abilities of an eight year old child.

The Law

The law in Britain gives the state broad powers in such a case: "Under the Mental Capacity Act 2005, [judges on Britain's Court of Protection] have the power to make life-or-death decisions for people deemed to lack the intelligence to make them for themselves - such as ordering that they undergo surgery, have forced abortions, have life-support switched off or be forced to use contraception."

In Colorado, and most U.S. states, an individual in this situation would probably have a legal guardian appointed for him under the supervision of a general jurisdiction or probate court or some other court with comparable equity jurisdiction (a type of jurisdiction named after the British courts that once, but no longer, have jurisdiction over these kinds of cases). In Colorado, a guardian's authority can vary from case to case as set forth in a judge's order, although at common law a guardian of an adult had rights comparable to the rights of a natural parent's rights when that parent's child is in the parent's custody.

In other words, while the issue would present itself somewhat differently, a U.S. court could probably grant a guardian of an adult with an IQ of 48 the right to decisions similar to the ones made by the Court in this British case.

Procedural History

The town hall began court proceedings in 2009 to restrict contact with Kieron on the grounds that he lacked mental capacity, and an interim order was made. . . . A psychiatrist involved in the case tried to prevent the man being given sex education, on the grounds that it would leave him "confused".

Mr Justice Mostyn said the case was "legally, intellectually and morally" complex as sex is "one of the most basic human functions" and the court must "tread especially carefully" when the state tries to curtail it.

But he agreed that the man, known only as Alan, should not be allowed to have intercourse with anyone on the grounds that he did not have the mental capacity to understand the health risks associated with his actions.

Under the judge's order, the man is now subject to "close supervision" by the local authority to ensure he does not break the highly unusual order. The judge concluded: "Alan does not have the capacity to consent to and engage in sexual relations.

"In such circumstances it is agreed that the present regime for Alan's supervision and for the prevention of future sexual activity is in his best interests."

"Since then Alan has been subjected to close supervision to prevent any further sexual activity on his part," said the judge.

Analysis

There are good reasons to be skeptical of this kind of court order. The eugenics movement sponsored movement in the 20th century to sterilize the mentally retarded is generally seen as a class historical instance of government exploitation of vulnerable individuals. There is also a history of government abusing its authority to punish gays in the name of mental hygiene. Some high profile cases in Britain involving prominent intellectuals are particularly notorious.

On the other hand, the exploitation, sexual and otherwise, of people who don't have the capacity to consent intelligently to what people ask of them is also a long standing problem. A central theme of Steig Larsson's Millennium Series (which starts with "The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo") is that vulnerable people, such as wards with guardians appointed for them and illegal immigrant women are subject to a horrible injustice when they are sexually exploited. Sexual exploitation is sufficiently common in this situations that in the popular imagination, at least, at is seen as almost the unpleasant norm in prisons, foster care situations, and households where an impoverished single mother lives with a boyfriend unrelated to her children.

We have statutory rape laws that declare that children under a certain age are incapable of consenting to sex and that someone who does so has committed the crime of rape. While those laws can be controversial when applied to high schoolers who are past puberty and routine have sex with each other, there is a wide consensus that they are appropriate when applied to pre-pubescent children. Likewise, while there is intense controversy over the harsh sentences imposed for people who merely view child pornography, and over the near criminalization of innocent child nudity, there is widespread consensus that it is a serious crime to use pre-pubescent children to create pornography or to pimp out pre-pubescent child prostitutes, and that there is a genuine government interest in destroying the economic market that drives its creation.

Certainly, there would be a very wide consensus that is would be a serious crime for an adult to have sex with an eight year old, regardless of the sex of the parties involved.

But, there are many important ways that a 41 year old is different from an 8 year old, even if they have similar mental capacities. Adults routinely have sex for pleasure. Many adults men are gay or bisexual. Eight year olds have genuine opinions and feelings and are capable of engaging in surprisingly sophisticated relationship, of understanding differences between right and wrong to a considerable extent, and consenting to a variety of agreements. Most parents allow their eight year olds to make many choices about their clothes and room decor and food to eat when eating out, to largely choose their own friends at school, and to spend small amounts of money as they see fit. Eight year olds can play baseball and board games, can hug each other and family members in genuine expressions of love, and make many other decisions for themselves.

Even though statutory rape is often theorized as an incapacity to consent, there is really more to it. Pre-pubescent children aren't just intellectually incapable of consent, they are hormonally and physically not yet at a stage of development where their bodies are ready for sex.

Statutory rape laws for adolescents, which were almost universally adopted initially with the understanding that they would pertain to adolescent or adult men seeking to have sex with teenage girls, were also rooted in the concern that teenage girls due to their youth and adolescent impulsivity are especially vulnerable to making impulsive bad decisions that have the potential to carry with them the serious long term consequences of pregnancy, parenthood and quite possibly either a shotgun marriage for life or a lifetime in which one is unmarriagable and destitute as a result.

A different way to view statutory rape laws, that is gaining increasing credence, is to view statutory rape not as an incapacity to consent in the same class as a stranger drugging you and then having sex with you, but as a distinct subset of cases where someone in a position of trust (by virtue of being an adult in states where there is a Romeo and Juliet exception) abuses that position of trust. In this view, statutory rape is less like a date rape drug case and more like a sexual harassment of a subordinate employee case. The gravamen of the wrong is abuse of power within a relationship by someone whom we presume under the law should know better than to do so.

There is also a widespread view that sexual relationships carried on by someone who isn't ready for them or capable of "truly understanding" what sex involves (do any of us ever really reach that blissful state) will inflict intense psychological trauma that will destroy a person's entire well being, also making it far more serious than other kinds of things to which one might consent.

If a 41 year old man who is physically ready for sex, and perfectly well could be homosexual or bisexual, is voluntarily (to the extent that his eight year old intellectual capacity permits) having sex with another man and enjoying the experience, who is to say that it really is wrong?

This man doesn't appear to be suffering from psychological trauma. He doesn't have to worry about having children or being rendered unmarriagable or forced into a marriage that can't be legally terminated. His body, and no doubt his hormones, are ready for sex and have been for decades. Finding someone who is ready and willing to satisfy his sexual drive probably isn't very easy for a 41 year old with an IQ of 48 who lives on welfare in public housing. It is certainly plausible that Alan is gay or bisexual (indeed, by some definitions his acts and words are sufficient to say that this is true as a matter of definition), that the relationship between Alan and Kieron is as sincere, voluntary, loving and non-exploitative as the sexual relationship between any two single adults, and that the town's intervention is simply a case of an inability to genuinely come to terms with the idea that two men can have legitimate, loving sexual relationships. There are certainly strong hints in this case that this is what is happening in this situation.

On the other hand, it certainly wouldn't be implausible that Kieron is an evil hearted, exploitative manipulator who has managed to get Alan to say things that hide Alan's inner feelings of pain and being used and compelled into something that makes him uncomfortable that Alan isn't capable of articulating to legal system officials in that kind of atmosphere and that Alan has no sexual attraction to Kieron, but has trouble distinguishing between sexual attraction and the kind of platonic physical contact that is normal between eight year old boys.

While Kieron's motives aren't the center of the court's inquiry, which is really about what is best of Alan, it is certainly possible to see Alan as being in a position a bit like someone who is acting happy because he has been tricked into thinking that he has formed a relationship that was really just a scheme to make him the butt of a cruel joke and doesn't know it yet, but is sure to be furiously angry and miserably sad when he realizes it.

By analogy, contrary to common belief, a large share of bona fide childhood sexual abuse victims have trouble remembering the incidents because they weren't as aware of the special meaning that our culture attaches to sexual contacts at the time, and feel the bulk of the psychological trauma that they experience not when the sexual abuse actually takes place, but when they get old enough to gain an understanding of that special meaning and finally realize that an adult whom they trusted exploited them all those years ago. A reasonable person could fear that Alan is at grave risk of experiencing a similar kind of traumatic realization and suffering dearly at a psychological level when and if that happens.

If one thinks that absence of capacity to consent is really all that matters in a case like this one, Kieron's motives are irrelevant and people with the intellectual capacity of eight year olds are morally equivalent to actual eight year olds and shouldn't be subjected to sexual activity. But, if the important question is really abuse of a position of trust that Kieron holds as the intellectually normal close friend of mentally retarded Alan, then Kieron's motives and what is going on in the interactions between Kieron and Alan matter a great deal to the merits of whether a court should or should not prevent Alan from having sex with Kieron.

On balance, I'm skeptical of the British judge and town government's decisions in this case. It bears the stink of a lot of unreasonable prejudices. But, I also recognize that this decision is a highly fact specific inquiry for which ordinary social intuition provides few exact precedents, and that decision makers further removed from the facts are at a decided disadvantage. It is hard to say with any great degree of certainty from the little that we know that the judge's decision was clearly wrong in this unfamiliar territory.

READ MORE - Sexual Freedom v. Freedom From Exploitation

Bullying and Cyber Bullying

A few notable facts about bullying and cyber bullying:

1. "[A]s few as 10 percent of bullying victims are cyber-bullied. Meanwhile, a study of fifth, eighth and 11th graders in Colorado that same year found that they were more likely to be bullied verbally or physically than online." About a quarter of all kids are bullied in the old fashioned meatspace way.

2. Most bullies learn to be bullies from experience as victims themselves: "72 percent of children who were physically abused by their parents became a bully, a victim of a bully or both." Most bullies are both victims and perpetrators, as are many victims of bullying, although generally not both in the same relationship.

3. "[N]early 50 percent of American workers have experienced or witnessed bullying in the workplace, . . . 80 percent of workplace bullying is legal - and and 72 percent of bullies outrank their targets."

4. Bullying may trigger suicide, but generally this happens in cases where the victims were already at grave risk for suicide from other factors.

5. Active efforts to control bullying can significantly reduce it, but probably not eliminate it.

Has Feminism Narrowed Our Understanding Of Bullying?

The article cited doesn't discuss it, but one way to conceptualize both domestic violence and child abuse is as a cycle of bullying behavior that encompasses all of the domains of work, home and school.

Japanese culture is quite sensitive to the existence of bullying as a problem at both work and in school, and sometimes spanning over into the home. Whether that is because it is more common there, or because it is conceptualized that way is hard to tell.

American cultural responses to bullying type behavior through sexual harassment and domestic violence lenses, a gender specific way of thinking that may go all the way back intellectually to 19th century culture of honor concepts, while effective in the domains targeted, may be preventing Americans from seeing the issue in a holistic way, or from a mental health as well as a criminal justice and private litigation perspective.

Bullying Compared To Gang Violence

Another, overlapping but not identical area, where there is a large overlap between the class of likely perpetrators and the class of likely victims is gang violence, which is probably the most variable component of the violent crime rate in the United States, rising and falling much more than other kinds of violent crime (e.g. impulsive assaults by people with drinking problems or domestic violence).

The insularity of gang violence is one of the reasons it is not addressed more assertively by the criminal justice system. Sorting out honor among thieves isn't easy for law enforcement to do.

A very large share of all murders and firearm assaults, and even even larger share of all murders and firearm assaults during periods when murder rates are high (particularly the subset of unsolved murders) appear to involve violence related to gang membership perpetrated with other gangs or member's of one's own gang as targets (and other victims being mere bystanders caught in the crossfire). The motives for gang violence include vigilante justice, establishment of territory, opportunistic raiding for loot, suppressing criminal justice system involvement, and reputation building to prevent further challenges to gang authority.

Much of this violence can be conceptualized as social, rather than psychological in origin, like the violent acts carried out by soldiers in furtherance of a sovereign's direction, although it is also true that a disproportionate share of gang violence appears to be carried out by the minority subset of gang members with mental health factors, some hereditary, that particularly predispose them to it.

Indeed, one can see gang violence as an apolitical version of terrorism. Terrorism is socially organized and motivated violence committed by non-governmental groups with political ends. Gang violence is committed by semi-sovereign non-governmental groups that don't aspire to genuine sovereignty seeing the legitimate government as too daunting to overcome outside their narrow space of organized criminal activities carried out for profit and personal safety.

Conceiving of gang violence as a fundamentally social activity provides insight into what will and will not work in the criminal justice system to reduce violent crime associated with gang violence. On one hand, a "sociopath" (i.e. someone who engages in anti-social behavior because it is acceptable or even required within the norms of his social context) may be redeemable in a way that a "psychopath" (i.e. something who is congenitally without a conscience psychologically), may not be. Governor Ritter's pardon of Reverend Kelly in December was an example of that kind of redemption being accomplished in real life. On the other hand, incarceration that is draconian relative to personal culpability (e.g. in the case of felony murder sentences) may work because they disrupt the social entities (gangs) that drive members to act in sociopathic ways.

If one is looking at social context, rather than individual culpability, as being the key to suppressing gangs, the natural next step is to consider non-traditional sentencing options and penal management methods that can disrupt gangs and put convicted gang members into a new social context with mainstream norms, without expensive overkill use of incarceration. The dynamics involved (and their intractability) are explored, for example, in "The Good Girl's Guide To Getting Kidnapped" (2010) by Yxta Maya Murray (who is also a law professor), in which a young woman with deep ties of Los Angeles gang life struggles between success in that context and success in the contexts of the middle class establishment. It is a young adult book that pulls no punches and is assiduously committed to showing rather than telling, and leaving morals open ended rather than resolving the issues.

Addressing the motivations of gang violence in sentencing in a way conscious of its social context, through the criminal justice system, which usually defines crime in the context of isolated individuals without much thought to context, may also be the key to really making progress in addressing racism in the criminal justice system, as a large share of all disproportionate involvement of racial minorities in the criminal justice system in related to gang affiliated crime. Indeed, given the ubiquity of gang related crime in high poverty minority communities, one of the big crimological and sociological question may be not "why do high poverty minority communities have so much criminal gang activity?," but "why do high poverty Anglo communities seem to lack significant criminal gang activity?" Criminal gangs, of couse, used to be common in immigrant communities in the United States, particularly those involving Catholic immigrants in the 19th century, but that American mafia is almost gone now and while there are exceptions, this does seem to be the case.

READ MORE - Bullying and Cyber Bullying