Browsing by Subject "Crime"

Now showing 1 - 17 of 17
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    Condemned to be free: the cultural life of capital punishment in the United States, 1945-present.
    (2011-01) LaChance, Daniel
    This dissertation examines the waning of capital punishment in the immediate post-World War II period and its resurgence in the 1980s and 1990s. Some scholars understand the revival of the death penalty in the United States as part of a socially conservative backlash in a society undergoing immense social change. Qualifying and building upon these accounts, I argue that the migration of Americans' sense of political community away from the public sphere and a concomitant resurgence of individualism in the post-World War II period played an under-examined role in the growth of the American demand for capital punishment. State killing, I show, was compatible with a cultural consensus that social problems could be solved only by individual acts of will and not by large-scale social engineering. The revival of the death penalty reflected Americans' discomfort with the way that modern, utilitarian approaches to punishment, which peaked in the years after World War II, failed to take individuals seriously, prioritizing social goals over individual autonomy. In this context, capital punishment legitimized, rather than simply masked, the state's withdrawal of its claim to being the central provider of social, economic, and personal security. And it denied, rather than endorsed, the state's role as a dispenser of traditional morality. Contradictory understandings of the role of the killing state as normatively and descriptively strong and weak worked, moreover, to sustain the practice of capital punishment in the United States.
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    Conditions and courses of genocide
    (2014-06) Brehm, Hollie Nyseth
    After the Nazi Holocaust, the international community vowed to prevent genocide from occurring in the future. Yet, genocide has continued to occur. Accordingly, this study seeks to better understand why and how genocide takes place. I ask two key questions: 1) What are the causes of genocide at societal, state, and international levels? and 2) What accounts for temporal and regional variation in violence within genocides? To assess what leads to genocide, I conduct an event history analysis of the preconditions of genocide in all countries over the last 50 years. This quantitative analysis examines factors associated with the onset of genocide at the societal level (such as ethnolinguistic diversity), state level (such as type of government), and the international level (such as trade), finding that factors at each level must be considered in order to understand why genocides take place and that civil wars are the strongest predictors of genocide. While the event history analysis treats genocide as a single event, viewing genocide as an undifferentiated event misses opportunities to better understand the violence. Thus, the second part of this dissertation draws upon three case studies to analyze regional and temporal variation in genocidal violence in Rwanda, Bosnia-Herzegovina, and Sudan. I rely upon quantitative models to test how numerous factors drawn from genocide studies, the study of political and ethnic violence, and criminology--such as ethnic diversity, resource scarcity, unemployment levels, education levels, or the presence of certain armies--influence the onset and magnitude of certain forms of violence at meso levels. I also conducted fieldwork and 113 interviews with survivors, scholars, and other witnesses. Overall, I find that the factors associated with regional and temporal differences in violence vary based on who the perpetrators are and how they are organized. In Rwanda, members of the community who were not part of previously organized formal groups participated in the violence. As such, criminology's social disorganization theory--which argues that community cohesion influences crime rates--helps explain variation in this violence. In Bosnia-Herzegovina and Darfur, however, previously organized armies and militias generally committed the violence. Accordingly, strategic concerns dictated patterns.
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    Does the right hand know what the left hand is doing? General Assistance welfare crime, and punishment in the United States
    (2013-07) Shannon, Sarah
    Both the welfare state and the criminal justice system have undergone tremendous changes in the past 50 years. While the "right hand" carceral state has swelled through increased populations and spending, the "left hand" welfare state has simultaneously shifted caseloads and spending toward programs that support and reward the working poor and away from cash programs for those in deep poverty. This dissertation examines the theoretical and empirical connections between the changes in these two "hands" of the state using the particular case of General Assistance (GA) welfare programs from 1960 to 2010. In three sets of analysis, this study examines what factors account for major changes in GA policy since the late 1950s, as well as how GA welfare provision has affected state incarceration rates and crime rates at the state and county level over time and space. Results from these analyses highlight two important points: 1) the outlook for low-income men (and others not eligible for federal welfare programs) has become more dire over the last several decades as states have ended income supports for this population in conjunction with higher rates of incarceration; and 2) the loss of such income supports impacts public safety since greater provision of GA is associated with reductions in several types of crime.
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    Harrison Glenwood Avenue Planning.
    (2002) Minneapolis Neighborhood Information System
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    Harrison Neighborhood Crime and Safety Data.
    (2002) Minneapolis Neighborhood Information System
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    A Model to Estimate the Cost of Crime in Minnesota: Summarizing Potential Costs of Crime/Examining the Possible Correlations between Character and Crime
    (Hubert H. Humphrey School of Public Affairs, 2012-08-17) Aagesen-Huebner, Heather; Koll, Jon; Massel, Sandy; Moore, Tracy
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    The Political Psychology Of Immigration Attitudes: A Compound Threat Sensitivity Framework
    (2020-05) Weiner, Elliot
    Immigration attitudes are shaped by complex interactions between contextual factors and individual differences. Whereas prior work has generally considered these interactions in isolation, I contend that we can gain a more nuanced understanding of the dynamics of immigration attitudes by assessing individual differences in sensitivity to simultaneous contextual changes. I develop a compound threat sensitivity framework, which proposes that the influence of population change on immigration attitudes is dependent on concurrent changes in economic wellbeing and crime, as well as individual differences associated with preferences for security/order over social freedom (e.g., authoritarianism; see Altemeyer, 1981; Stenner, 2005), and those associated with preferences for power/dominance over egalitarianism (e.g., social dominance orientation; see Pratto, Sidanius, Stallworth, & Malle, 1994). Correspondingly, the influence of economic conditions and crime on immigration attitudes depends on concurrent changes in the rate of immigration, as well as these individual differences. I tested these ideas in two studies. Study 1 assessed the contingent influence of objective country-level contextual factors, using data from the European Social Survey. Study 2 tested these ideas experimentally by manipulating information about concurrent changes in society. The results provide support for a compound threat sensitivity framework. These findings expand upon and qualify both the Dual Process Model of Prejudice (DPM; Duckitt & Sibley, 2009) and research on the influence of demographic change on political attitudes (e.g., Craig & Richeson, 2014). In addition to enhancing our theoretical understanding of “person X context” interactions in the domain of immigration, this work also has practical implications regarding messages that are likely to influence support for immigration.
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    The Prosecution of Misdemeanor Offenses
    (2003) Nelson, Stephanie Moser
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    ReMix Project: Juxtaposition Arts
    (2007) Bell, Joyce
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    Temperature, Heat Waves, Crime, and Injuries in Hanoi, Vietnam
    (2022-12) Le, Vu Thuy Huong
    Manuscript 1: The effects of temperature on behavior change and mental health have previously been explored, but the association between temperature and crime is less well understood, especially in developing countries. Single-city-level data were used to evaluate the association between the short-term effects of temperature on crime events in urban Hanoi, Vietnam. We used quasi-Poisson regression models to investigate the linear effects and distributed lag non-linear models to investigate the non-linear association between daily temperature and daily crime events from 2013 to 2019. There were 3884 crime events, including 1083 violent crimes and 2801 non-violent crimes, during the 7-year study period. For both linear and non-linear effects, there were positive associations between an increase in daily temperature and crime, and the greatest effects were observed on the first day of exposure (lag 0). For linear effects, we estimated that each 5 °C increase in daily mean temperature was associated with a 9.9% (95%CI: 0.2; 20.5), 6.8% (95%CI: 0.6; 13.5), and 7.5% (95%CI: 2.3; 13.2) increase in the risk of violent, non-violent, and total crime, respectively. For non-linear effects, however, the crime risk plateaued at 30 °C and decreased at higher exposures, which presented an inverted U-shape response with large statistical uncertainty. Manuscript 2: Heatwaves are a pervasive natural hazard that can have significant public health impacts on society. The effects of heatwaves on health, including mental health disorders, are well documented, but the effects on criminal behavior are unclear, particularly in understudied tropical regions. This study evaluates the heatwave-crime associations in urban Hanoi, Vietnam, for seven years (2013- 2019). The time-stratified case-crossover study design with a quasi-Poisson regression model was applied for three heatwave definitions of increasing severity. We found that heatwaves were weakly protective factors against crime risk in urban Hanoi under all three heatwave definitions. For non-violent crime, 4-day heatwaves of 34.5 °C showed the most protective effect (RR=0.28, 95%CI = 0.08, 0.94), and for violent crime, 2-days heatwave of 32 °C showed the most protective effect (RR= 0.65; 95%CI = 0.45; 0.93). In addition, longer heatwave durations under all heatwave scenarios decreased violent and non-violent crime risks. However, we used data in only urban Hanoi, so further research is warranted, including the addition of future years and more cities in Vietnam to investigate the comprehensive effects of heat on crime in this southeast Asian study area. Manuscript 3: Injuries take the lives of 4.4 million people worldwide each year and constitute nearly 8% of all deaths. Vietnam, considered a low-and-middle-income country (LMIC), has suffered a heavy toll on the burden of injury. This is the first study to investigate temperature-injury associations in Vietnam. This study used emergency visit data from 733 hospitals and clinics in Hanoi to examine the linear and non-linear effects of temperature on the injury for three years (2017-2019). We found that the proportion of males visiting the emergency department (ED) due to injury is higher than females, and similar trends are observed across different age groups, except for people aged 60 and older. The temperature-injury associations differ by gender and age. For linear effects, the lowest risk was in people aged 60 and older, followed by people aged under 15, people aged 15 to 44, and people aged 45- 59. People exposed to a higher temperature, especially in the highest quintile, show higher injury risk than those exposed to below 21.30 °C. For non-linear effects, we observed an increase in the risk of injury at high temperatures but a decrease in the risk of injury at low temperatures compared to the threshold temperature of 15 °C. Males have a higher injury risk than females when temperature increases. On average, males and people under 60 were identified to be at higher risk of temperature-related injury than other females and people 60 and older. Future research is warranted to investigate temperature injury among different groups of people and the causes of injury.
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    Terrorizing the Masses: Identity, Mass Shootings, and the Media Construction of "Terror"�
    (2015-06) DeFoster, Ruth
    This dissertation examines the history, policy definitions and context of both terrorism and mass shootings in the United States. Using three high-profile mass shootings on American military bases as case studies, this project considers the role of news media in constructing the events (and the shooters) in markedly different ways. Specifically, this project examines the ways in which both events and shooters are framed in mainstream American broadcast media, analyzing media coverage through the lens of two pivotal shifts in public understanding of tragedies that took place around the turn of the 21st century-the 1999 Columbine shooting (which almost singlehandedly coined the phrase "mass shooting"� and produced enduring tropes in media coverage), and the September 11, 2001 attacks, which permanently and drastically refigured the image of "terror"� in the American imagination.
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    There Goes the Neighborhood? The Impact of Subsidized Multi-Family Housing on Urban Neighborhoods.
    (Center for Urban and Regional Affairs, University of Minnesota., 1996) Goetz, Edward G; Lam, Hin Kin; Heitlinger, Anne
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