Pacific Standard. Smart Journalism. Real Solutions. |
- Mapping Knowledge
- Thousands of California Inmates on Hunger Strike Against Solitary Confinement
- The Tagalong Metals
- What Makes a Healthy Family
- The (Racial) Housing Crisis in America
- Where Bribes Bite Like Taxes
- How Do We Feel About Higher Education? Look to the Movies
- Do Gay Men Have More Sexual Interest in Children Than Straight Men Do?
- Lockdown Nation
- Atheists, Foxholes, and How Combat Impacts Religiosity
| Posted: 09 Jul 2013 06:34 PM PDT  Two parallel schools of inquiry into the same subject matter toil in ignorance. What’s the impact of geography on knowledge exchange? One school’s take:
Read the study for yourself. Ah yes, borders matter. Geography matters. Distance is not dead. Grab the pitchfork and head to Thomas Friedman’s house. The Internet revolution not only won’t be televised, it isn’t happening. The Mask of Anarchy is sad. Psst … the world is flat, at least for knowledge exchange. So sayeth the German pork butchers in Britain. People who toil in the same geographic areas wouldn’t know much of anything if it weren’t for migration. Density be damned. Welcome to the parallel universe. Knowledge, like migrants, doesn’t travel very far. Flat World is the exception:
Emphasis added. Funny, that. Joe Schmo from Idaho leaves cool, diverse, and dense New York to go back to Boise and continues to trade with his cosmopolitan “cube-mates” in Brooklyn. State borders don’t matter. Geography is dead. |
| Thousands of California Inmates on Hunger Strike Against Solitary Confinement Posted: 09 Jul 2013 03:34 PM PDT  Monday marked the start of a wave of prisoners' non-violent protests against what they see as inhumane conditions in prisons, and specifically against the increasingly common practice of long-term solitary confinement. Over 30,000 prisoners refused their meals beginning on Monday, according to the Los Angeles Times. Many also refused to go to scheduled work or classes. This is only the latest phase in a series of strikes, which began in the Pelican Bay State Prison Security Housing Unit (SHU) in northern California two years ago, according to the Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity blog. The organizing prisoners, who call themselves The Pelican Bay State Prison SHU Short Corridor Collective, had and still have five "core demands" of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR). Pete Brook summarized their demands on his Prison Photography blog as follows (the full text of the demands can also be downloaded here):
The Short Corridor Collective organizers formalized these demands to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation (CDCR) in April 2011, and when the prisoners did not feel that their concerns were being addressed, called the first strike on July 1, 2011. Dozens of prisoners in the SHU, and over 6,000 prisoners elsewhere refused to eat or work for almost four weeks; they stopped the strike when the CDCR agreed to negotiate. Then, when the changes promised during those negotiations were not made, a second phase resumed in September and October of 2011, and expanded to include over 12,000 prisoners across the state. This third phase, which began on Monday, has spread across California to prisons in Washington state as well, and inspired a protest march in Seattle on Monday. Some of the prisoners' groups also say that they are protesting in solidarity with hunger strikers at Guantanamo, where 106 detainees have refused food for several months. The number of California inmates held in extended solitary confinement varies widely by source. The Los Angeles Times says 4,527 inmates are "being held in 'segregation' cells at four state prisons, including 1,180 at Pelican Bay," citing CDCR figures. The Prisoner Hunger Strike Solidarity website says that the state currently has almost 12,000 people in "extreme isolation." According to Brook, estimates of the number of prisoners in solitary confinement across the U.S. range from 20,000 to 70,000. Regardless of the exact figure, it's a fact that California's rules for solitary confinement are harsher than most. If a prisoner is even suspected of being involved in a gang behind bars, he can be sent to solitary for an indefinite amount of time; some have been there for 20 years. And while they're inside, they are denied any incredibly basic sources of mental stimulation and sanity, such as mirrors or photographs. "Over the years, prison staff has outlawed everything from phone calls to colored pencils to wall calendars," reports the Bakersfield Californian. "Pelican Bay even banned books written in Swahili, Celtic and Na'huatl [a Mexican dialect] on the grounds that the languages were being used as secret codes by gangs." The CDCR does not typically acknowledge a hunger strike inside its prisons until inmates have missed nine consecutive meals, which will occur on late Wednesday if the strike continues. Meanwhile, the protest continues to gain traction, and the Pelican Bay strike leaders are meeting with their lawyers on Tuesday to discuss their suit against the CDCR in federal court. There are also plans in the works for a demonstration outside Corcoran State Prison on Saturday, July 13, and over 15,000 people have signed a petition to Governor Jerry Brown urging him to intervene. |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2013 02:28 PM PDT  In "The New Bronze Age," my new feature in the magazine, I write about the changing dynamics of the global mining industry, which gets perennially overshadowed by the oil and gas sector in big conversations about resource extraction. For reasons of space and simplicity, I focus on copper, the metal that carries the world's electrical current. Just as for oil, demand for copper is at an all time high, fueled by the rise of new economic superpowers like China and India. But copper, because of its elemental qualities, is essential even to the technologies that are meant to nix our dependence on hydrocarbons—wind turbines, hybrid and electric cars, solar panels. There's simply no way to replace it. And because the easy reserves of copper are pretty much tapped out, getting the metal out of the ground is becoming just as difficult, expensive, geopolitically consequential, and environmentally menacing as drilling the hardest-to-reach crude. We have entered what I call the era of "tough ore." But copper isn't the whole story. Owing to quirks of chemistry and geology, other metals tend to tag along when copper ore is formed. And in the incredibly capital-intensive realm of mining, these metals—all with their own essential industrial uses—have a huge effect on the tough ore equation. Molybdenum is the most common among these other metals. Moly, as it's usually called in the mining industry, is a hard, silvery metal. Is also quite dense, comparable to lead. But while lead liquefies at 620 degrees Fahrenheit—you can melt it on a kitchen stove—molybdenum stays solid to 4,753 degrees. A chunk of molybdenum heated in a glass bowl would still be a chunk long after the bowl became a puddle. A copper bowl would turn into copper steam before the molybdenum had a meltdown. Molybdenum is also highly resistant to many strong acids and other caustic substances. For these reasons, it is classified as a refractory metal—a withstander of the hellish heat and violent chemistry of the crucible. Big copper mines like Bingham Canyon have billion-pound-a-day copper-ore-snorting habits.When added to steel, even in low concentrations, molybdenum dramatically increases its strength and stability at high temperatures. This makes it critical to a class of alloys known as high-speed steels. The cutting edges of machine tools—lathes, drills, shears; machines that make other machines—are made of these alloys. The machine tools in turn make possible the production of all manner of precision metal equipment on which modern economies rely. When you hear, for example, that the Chinese or Indian steel industries have advanced, it means that they have gone from making simple cast or forged items, like I-beams and locomotive wheels, to making advanced machined components, like automatic transmissions and power-plant turbines. Molybdenum's uses go beyond steel, however. Moly-based catalysts remove sulfur from gasoline and diesel, producing the cleaner-burning fuels now mandated by law in many countries. Molybdenum disulfide, a soft graphite-like mineral, is a critical lubricant in oil drilling. Without it, the drill bits would bind in the rock and shatter. The tough job of getting oil out of the ground would get even tougher (costlier, riskier), with expensive repercussions all the way through the global economy. Not surprisingly, ongoing growth in oil consumption, combined with the rapid industrialization of China and India over the last decade, created a spike in demand for molybdenum. Its price rose accordingly, and in 2006 temporarily spiked so high that, measured by share of the mine's annual profit, Bingham Canyon was a moly operation. Ironically, in its hundredth year, the greatest copper mine on Earth wasn't primarily a copper mine at all. THE TURBINES OF JET engines are made out of so-called superalloys, and the key element in superalloys is an exceedingly rare metal called rhenium. To get one pound of rhenium out of the Earth's crust, you would have to sift through a billion pounds of other stuff. As a standalone business, this would be madness. Luckily, rhenium tags along with molybdenum, which of course tags along with copper, and big copper mines like Bingham Canyon have billion-pound-a-day copper-ore-snorting habits. Rio Tinto is currently building a cutting-edge molybdenum-processing facility at Bingham Canyon, at a cost of $340 million. One of side benefits will be the production of an extra few thousand pounds of rhenium per year. Rhenium is worth about $1,500 per pound. More than 35,000 new passenger jets will be constructed between now and 2031. The rhenium at Bingham Canyon may pay for the new plant on its own. Gold and silver also often ride along with copper. Bingham Canyon produces tons (literally) of both each year. So do many other copper mines. The Great Recession of 2007 inspired a rush on precious metals, driving the price of gold and silver sky-high. In the mining industry, even bad times can be good. Still other copper mines produce uranium as a secondary product. As it happens, nuclear power is currently enjoying a boom: More than 500 new plants are slated for construction around the globe. Many of them are in China. Throughout the 2000s, debate raged in Australia over a proposal to convert Olympic Dam, a significant but not spectacular underground copper-uranium mine, into by far the largest open-pit copper mine in the world. (The waste rock alone would form an 80-square-kilometer mountain range.) Many of the opponents focused on the uranium. Their fears were not so much local or environmental—the potential consequences of digging up radioactive material—as geopolitical: They believed that China might buy Olympic Dam uranium for an ostensibly peaceful purpose, power generation, but then enrich it for use in nuclear weapons. The supporters liked to point out that, these speculations notwithstanding, the value of Olympic Dam's ore exceeded Australia's annual GDP, and might even be worth the discomfort of having a more nuclearized neighbor to the north. Copper, the ur-metal of civilization, found itself at the center of a very modern controversy. The money argument won. The Olympic Dam expansion was approved—although BHP Billiton, the giant firm that owns the mine, has since shelved the project. Imagine for a moment, however, a world where copper is worthless. In that world, it is likely that none of these secondary metals would be mined from the huge copper deposits, because the costs of doing so would outweigh the profits. Supply of the secondary metals would in turn decline, and their prices would go up. From this perspective, one of the chief benefits of copper is the other stuff it makes available. It's a product with great byproducts. On the other hand, in the real world, the value of the copper in a deposit can be insufficient on its own to justify the cost of getting the copper out. It's often the presence of the secondary metals, even in small quantities, that makes the difference. Without them, some copper would go unmined, and in a mirror image of the hypothetical world above, its supply would decline and its price would go up. So a big copper mine is a sort of economic octopus, with tentacles that reach into numerous, disparate sectors of industry. But unlike an octopus, a big mine cannot survive—or thrive, anyway—with less than its full complement of arms. For all their brawn, the Bingham Canyons of the world are rather delicate creatures. |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2013 01:01 PM PDT  What’s the best family structure for raising kids? That question came up again recently because of the Supreme Court’s rulings on the Defense of Marriage Act, and California’s Proposition 8. A debate erupted on Meet The Press after conservative Christian activist Ralph Reed and GOP Representative Tim Huelskamp cited research showing that married, heterosexual couples raise kids the best. Host David Gregory responded to their claims as many have, pointing out that, "Children tend to prosper in homes where there is a loving marriage. There is really not evidence to suggest that if you are a same-sex couple or a heterosexual couple that it makes one difference one way or the other." But Gregory is underselling how wide a variety of unorthodox family structures can raise a well-adjusted kid, according to social science research. The number, gender, relationship status, and sexuality of parents are likely not as significant as the quality of the connections between children and the people raising them. As we wrote in our recent look at the history of scientific analysis of homosexuality, most major health professional associations now agree on gay couples' abilities to sustain happy, healthy families. But in one of the studies we cite, a 2012 survey of hundreds of studies by Cambridge professor of psychology Michael Lamb, "Mothers, Fathers, Families, and Circumstances: Factors Affecting Children’s Adjustment" (discussed in several amicus briefs for the Supreme Court's gay marriage cases), the author summarizes how decades of research debunks the idea that any one specific family arrangement is dramatically better than another when it comes to raising children. Most major health professional associations now agree on gay couples' abilities to sustain happy, healthy families.Lamb identifies three areas of parenting that appear to most strongly correlate with well-adjusted kids: The quality of the relationship between the child and the people or individual raising them; the quality of the relationship between the child's parents or single parent and their closest relations; and the economic and social resources available to the child. Evidence for the importance of the first factor, Lamb explains, "[is] amongst the most extensive and reliable in developmental psychology, and [is] consistent regardless of the ages of the children being studied." Only recently have researchers expanded on this idea to conclude that, perhaps secondary to the parent-child relationship, the relationships between adults raising a child has important implications for a child's wellbeing. So when David Gregory brought up the health of the "marriage," he may have emphasized the wrong point, and translated the research about the most effective family structure too narrowly by implying that marriage was the key ingredient. On the third factor, social and economic opportunities available to a child, Lamb echoes a major talking point for conservative legislators and voters (most recently stated by GOP rising star Rand Paul) when he highlights the financial stresses on many single-parent families that can have a negative impact on child development. According to a recent study from the City University of New York, 51 percent of single parents live on an annual income less than 50 percent of the national median—that's including welfare support from the government. The best evidence on the hard-to-quantify social ill of poverty among single-parent families indicates that single parenthood correlates with, but does not cause poverty—and the evidence that single parents cause maladjusted kids is even thinner. For their 2005 book, two researchers, Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas followed 162 low-income single mothers in Philadelphia, and found that having a child out of wedlock did not cause poverty as much as poverty made “married with kids” seem like an unattainable luxury. Other researchers have identified poverty as a more important factor than family structure in kids' education outcomes. Lamb explains that, despite their high rates of poverty, "the majority of children raised in single-parent or divorced families are well-adjusted," even if outcomes are slightly more negative overall than for kids raised in "traditional" families. It's an open question whether it's the money or the family structure itself holding back that minority of children of single parents that turn out maladjusted. And what about kids with more than two parent figures (no, not Big Love-style families), such as a foster-group setting where a child's wellbeing is overseen by a team of adults and peers? (Watch for an upcoming story on one such school, in the September/October issue of Pacific Standard.) Researchers have trouble parsing such a groups' effectiveness, because of the wide variety of group home models. But some early research indicates that certain types of group care might produce healthy outcomes for kids. Beyond family, a child's biology, his or her peers and teachers, the media a child consumes, and the communities in which he or she lives can all be influential in shaping that child's adjustment. But to the extent that research on childhood development has come to safe assumptions about what positive influence a parent-figure can have, one point stands out from Lamb's summary of existing research: A parent or parents projecting the right mix of warmth and compassion, combined with an appropriate balance of freedom for and control over a child, matters more than family structure. Even though David Gregory rebuts Representative Tim Huelskamp's broad mischaracterization of the research, he partially reinforces the faulty notion that marriage itself is the main ingredient to craft a healthy child. |
| The (Racial) Housing Crisis in America Posted: 09 Jul 2013 12:00 PM PDT  The results of a U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development national study on the persistence of housing discrimination are unlikely to shock: Racial and ethnic minorities continue to find themselves locked out of many housing opportunities. No, the more startling thing may be what HUD intends to do with its findings. HUD spent $9 million to contract with the Urban Institute to conduct 8,000 undercover tests in 28 metropolitan areas in order to expose illegal housing discrimination. Yet the federal agency has no plans to use these tests to actually enforce the law and punish the offenders. Once a decade for the last 40 years, HUD has produced a massive survey to reveal the pervasive discrimination that, year after year, exists in America’s housing marketplace. But as ProPublica reported late last year, HUD as a policy refuses to invest the same kinds of time, resources, and techniques in prosecuting those guilty of the very discrimination its expensive studies uncover. Instead, HUD outsources testing used to find and punish discriminatory landlords to dozens of small, poorly funded fair housing groups scattered across the country. Findings represent more than just numbers, and underscore, for instance, a family’s inability to move across town to a safer neighborhood with better schools.And Congress has shown little appetite for forcing HUD to do more meaningful enforcement. A bill that would create a national testing enforcement program at HUD is expected to soon die in committee for the third time. In an interview, Housing Secretary Shaun Donovan defended both the decision to conduct the survey and the Obama administration’s commitment to ending the kinds of discrimination it revealed. “The level of investment in fair housing enforcement has been significantly increased by this president,” Donovan said. Because housing discrimination these days is often more subtle—the survey released Tuesday said the kind of “door slamming” racism of years past had declined—testing is considered the best means of uncovering illegal behavior by homeowners, landlords, and real estate agents. According to HUD—the chief enforcement agency of the 1968 federal Fair Housing Act—running its own national testing program to pursue violators would compromise the agency’s neutrality. Critics, including the man who created the fair housing testing enforcement program at the U.S. Department of Justice, called that stance “absurd.” In the study, the Urban Institute sent paired testers, one white and one a member of a minority group, to contact housing providers who’d recently advertised homes and apartments. The pairs shared similar stories with the providers about their qualifications and then recorded their treatment. The good news is the testers—who all presented themselves as highly qualified—found little discrimination when trying to make an appointment to view a home or apartment. Black renters calling about an advertised unit are far less likely to be told it’s unavailable than a decade ago. But the study found significantly different treatment once testers met with agents. Black, Asian, and Latino testers were consistently shown or told about fewer units. For example, white homebuyers were shown nearly 20 percent more homes as equally qualified black and Asian homebuyers. In one test, a real estate agent refused to meet with the black tester until she was pre-qualified by a lender but made an appointment with the white tester without asking for pre-qualification. Donovan said the findings revealed a “sad” truth that the long struggle to end housing discriminations continues. “Although we’ve come a long way from the days of blatant in-your-face injustice, discrimination still persists. Any time freedom of choice is attacked it is a threat to the ideals we all value—equality and fairness,” he said. Donovan said these findings represent more than just numbers, and underscore, for instance, a family’s inability to move across town to a safer neighborhood with better schools. That the discrimination is “hidden doesn’t mean it is any less harmful,” he said. Margery Austin Turner of the Urban Institute said the discrimination uncovered in the study likely understates the problem because buyers presented themselves as highly qualified and did not necessarily represent the typical prospective minority home buyer. “The discrimination that persists today matters,” she said. “Not only is it fundamentally unfair that somebody doesn’t find out about available housing because of the color of their skin, but it also really raises the costs of housing searches for minorities. It restricts their housing choices.” Turner recommended increased testing, including at the national level, and strong enforcement. The agency’s unwillingness to fund an internal testing program to not just study but to enforce the 45-year-old Fair Housing Act enforcement has long been criticized as part of its overall failure to address wide-scale housing discrimination. This post originally appeared on ProPublica, a Pacific Standard partner site. |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2013 11:06 AM PDT  The annual survey of global corruption is out. Berlin-based Transparency International says it conducted 114,000 interviews in about half the world’s countries, 107, this year. The most commonly-cited institutions to suffer from corruption were political parties, the survey found. Police came in a close second in many places, but the answers differed greatly in each country, depending on which particular entity its citizens happened to find avaricious. Some findings: • Greeks, who face one of Europe’s highest unemployment rates and some of the crisis-hit continent’s lowest wages, paid nearly half a billion dollars in bribes to slippery members of their own government in 2012. • Mexicans on the lower end of that country’s economic ladder can pay as much as a third of their income to bribes in an average month. The kinder end of the average rate for the mordisco (“the nibble”) rounds out at 14 percent. The resulting graf looks a lot like a regressive tax plan. • Transfers of land are a particularly attractive transaction for corrupt officials. In Kenya, the average bit of sop for selling a plot was about $100. In Uganda, it was twice that. A particularly extreme claim in the report, which tends to be well-regarded, said that some hospital officials in Zimbabwe had charged women having babies $5 for each time they screamed during delivery. We can’t independently confirm that, and it seems pretty far outside any usual corruption narrative. The point seems to be, though, that a corrupt official does need an excuse, however implausible, to ask for the illicit money. It certainly wasn’t childbirth, but I recall a peculiar situation in a bus station, where a boy selling soft drinks asked me to take his picture. So I did. A soldier with a very big gun broke up the happy moment and demanded money for “a cold drink.” The soldier could have just said “give me two bucks, or I’ll arrest you.” But it had to be “a cold drink.” She would not actually let me buy her a drink from the boy who had demanded the photograph; she wanted the money, and would buy the “cold drink” from her preferred vendor, apparently. I gave her the two bucks and she let me go back to my bus, and the boy back to his rounds selling beverages. The report does not much go into the psychology of bribery on the part of the corrupt themselves. That, too, would be worth reading. Transparency’s work is, however, a good place to start. |
| How Do We Feel About Higher Education? Look to the Movies Posted: 09 Jul 2013 10:00 AM PDT  At a time when policymakers are debating the value of higher education, it’s interesting to look around and see just how the public perceives our college and university systems. And if recent films are any guide, higher education doesn’t necessarily have a great image. So, with apologies for some spoilers, I’d like to describe the depictions of higher education in several recent summer films: Monsters University, Man of Steel, and Star Trek: Into Darkness. (Yes, these are basically the only films I’ve seen in the theater this year.) Let’s start with Pixar’s Monsters. This is a pretty bleak view of the modern university; indeed, it doesn’t seem terribly modern. As Kieran Healy notes, the pedagogy there is pretty old school and uninspired:
Nor does the University seem interested in pursuing any sort of egalitarian vision. The dean of students blatantly ignores academic achievement and instead determines which students will succeed and which will be drubbed out of school based on their performance in Greek system sporting events. This would be an outright scandal at most universities; at MU it’s the MO. But beyond that, recall what happens at the end. (Here comes the spoiler.) Sully and Mike Wazowski are kicked out but still end up with their dream jobs as scarers at Monsters Inc. Yes, they have to work their way up from the mailroom, presumably over several years, but many of those years were years they would have spent in college anyway. So what was the point of the college education? If the university isn’t the gatekeeper to the elite jobs, why attend? Just to pay tuition and get humiliated by high status kids? OK, let’s jump over to Man of Steel. One of the film’s notable departures from the Superman canon in general, and from the 1978 Superman film specifically, is Clark Kent’s life after high school but before the Daily Planet. In the earlier film, he spent 12 years at the Fortress of Solitude being tutored by a hologram of his dead father, learning about physics, history, chemistry, etc. No, Clark never had a formal degree, and Superman was never really supposed to have been as educated as, say, Iron Man or Batman, but he still had some serious training, and he knew what to do and how to do it before donning the blue suit. In Man of Steel, however, Clark is basically a drifter, learning about the world by working as a commercial fisherman, a restaurant busboy, and other odd jobs. He starts trying to save the world literally hours after learning how to fly. This is Sarah Palin’s Superman, guided by his gut instincts and his decent midwestern upbringing rather than any sort of expert training. Superman’s foe, General Zod, mentions his own superior education, and of course he (spoiler coming) loses in the end. Finally, Star Trek. As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the earlier Star Trek reboot film from 2009 had a dim view toward higher education, in that the topic of Christopher Pike’s dissertation clearly didn’t matter. That is, he ended up with the exact same job in both timelines even though his dissertation subject necessarily changed. Meanwhile, Jim Kirk ends up captain of the Enterprise despite not even having finished at Starfleet and despite him being accused of cheating on a crucial exit exam. The new film, Into Darkness, has a somewhat more nuanced view of education. Pike is clearly concerned that Kirk has advanced too far too quickly, and in the early part of the film, he demotes Kirk from captain and sends him back to Starfleet to learn some humility. But Kirk ends up back in the captain’s chair within half an hour, running the ship with his usual bravado and recklessness. He does ultimately learn humility, in a deeply painful way, but again, he learns it outside of the academy. So maybe I’m watching the wrong films, but it seems to me that the message that is being conveyed from summer blockbusters is that college is capricious, outmoded, and unnecessary. If you want to know why your kids don’t seem that interested in applying a few years from now, remember the films that they saw in the summer of 2013. |
| Do Gay Men Have More Sexual Interest in Children Than Straight Men Do? Posted: 09 Jul 2013 08:00 AM PDT  I thought about holding off on this post until the next time somebody in the news declares that gay men are to blame for the sexual abuse of children. I'd probably only have to wait a couple of weeks at most. But I've decided to go ahead and put this research notice out there, so that hopefully the next time this issue comes up, the rational folks talking about it have the data they need to back up their hunches. So, at the outset, let me give away the answer to my headline question: Do gay men have more sexual interest in children than straight men do? No. And we have lab studies to prove it. In fact, the British Journal of Psychiatry published a major study backing up the "no" answer 40 years ago. The distinguished sex researcher Kurt Freund and his colleagues used a laboratory method (described below) that demonstrated that the sexual responses of gay men to boys were similar to the responses of straight men to girls. (Both responses are relatively low.) This past June in Canada, at the major international research conference on sexual orientation science, sex researcher Ray Blanchard (who was trained under Freund) presented substantial new data confirming and expanding on Freund's findings. Blanchard's work suggests that pedophilia and hebephilia look like sexual orientations—that, at least for men, sexual orientation is comprised not just of interest in a particular sex, but in a particular age range as well.Blanchard has published this work online, making it freely available to all comers. But, because this work is so important (the scientists assembled in Canada were stunned into near silence when they saw the impressive datasets and theoretical work Blanchard put before us), I asked Blanchard to explain the work somewhat more plainly for those who are not scientists. He's been kind enough to do so for us here. Blanchard explains first the laboratory method used: "This dataset included measures taken with the same laboratory method used by Freund et al., namely, phallometric testing. Phallometric testing (sometimes called penile plethysmography) is an objective technique for assessing erotic interests in men. In phallometric tests for gender and age orientation, the individual's penile blood volume is monitored while he is presented with a standardized sequence of laboratory stimuli depicting male and female children and adults. Increases in the patient's penile blood volume (i.e., degrees of penile erection) are used as the measure of his attraction to different classes of persons." In other words, sex researchers studying these men strap a device over the subjects' penises to measure how swollen or flaccid they become in response to various kinds of pictures and audiotapes. The idea is that, the more erect the penis, the more the man has been stimulated by the particular sexual material being presented to him. Blanchard further describes the subject population of his recent study: "The subjects were 2,278 male patients referred to a specialty clinic for phallometric assessment of their erotic preferences. All underwent the same test, which measured their penile responses to six classes of stimuli: prepubescent girls, pubescent girls, adult women, prepubescent boys, pubescent boys, and adult men. The stimuli were not, of course, live persons, but rather audiotaped narratives describing sexual interactions with prepubescent girls, pubescent girls, and so on. These narratives were accompanied by slides showing nude models who corresponded in age and gender to the topic of the narrative. The slides did not show the models doing anything sexual or even suggestive but rather resembled photographic illustrations of physical maturation in a medical textbook." Some laboratories doing phallometric tests use a "strain gauge," which is just what it sounds like—a sensitive wire strapped around a penis to measure how swollen a subject's penis gets in circumference in response to various stimuli presented to the subject. But Freund's and Blanchard's groups used a more precise type of measurement, a kind of bell jar that goes over the whole penis and allows the researchers to detect even small changes in penile volume. Blanchard explains: "Penile responses were recorded as cubic centimeters (cc) of increase in penile blood volume from the time a stimulus trial started to the time it ended. (A stimulus trial was one audiotaped narrative plus slides.) A full erection, as measured by the equipment used to collect these data, would typically correspond to an increase in penile blood volume of 20-30 cc. However, most subjects responded much less than that." So what the researchers were looking at was relative stimulation to different kinds of sexual materials, some suggesting sexual encounters with prepubescent girls or boys (usually about aged 10 and younger, and of sexual interest to pedophiles), some suggesting sexual encounters with pubescent girls or boys (generally aged 11-14, and of sexual interest to the group termed "hebephiles"), and some suggesting sexual encounters with sexually mature men and women (of interest to the people researchers call "teleiophiles," and what the rest of us tend to call "normal," i.e., "straight men and women," "gay men," or "lesbian women"). In Blanchard's work, the subjects were assigned to one of six groups according to their highest response on the phallometric test: (1) men who responded more to adult women than to any of the other five stimulus categories were classified as heterosexual teleiophiles; (2) men who responded more to adult men than to any other stimulus category were classified as homosexual teleiophiles; (3) men who responded more to pubescent girls than to any of the other categories were classified as heterosexual hebephiles; (4) men who responded most to pubescent boys, were classified as homosexual hebephiles; (5) men who responded most to prepubescent girls were classified as heterosexual pedophiles; (6) and men who responded most to prepubescent boys were classified as homosexual pedophiles. So what did the numbers in each category look like? First, keep in mind that this is not a random sample of the population walking around cities; this is a sample of men who were specifically referred for testing, typically because they were suspected of a crime or sought therapeutic help. Among that group, "the procedure of classifying subjects according to their highest penile response produced 1,066 heterosexual teleiophiles, 761 heterosexual hebephiles, 159 heterosexual pedophiles, 110 homosexual pedophiles, 86 homosexual hebephiles, and 96 homosexual teleiophiles." In order to repeat Freund's comparisons for this post, Blanchard graphed the relevant information from the dataset as shown in the accompanying figure. He notes, "This figure shows the mean (average) response of each group to each stimulus category. So that statistically inclined readers can make some comparisons besides those I will explicitly discuss, I have included the 95 percent confidence interval for each mean. These are represented by the vertical lines bracketing the top of each bar. Two means are significantly different if their confidence intervals do not overlap. The converse, however, is not true, and the significance of the difference between means with overlapping confidence intervals must be tested with methods other than visual inspection."
What does this pretty picture mean? Blanchard explains: "The key comparisons produced results similar to those of Freund et al. They show that gay men (homosexual teleiophiles) and straight men (heterosexual teleiophiles) have similar penile responses to depictions of children in the laboratory," that is to say, relatively low—but more important than their being relatively low, they're not really any different for gay and straight men. Furthermore, "The responses of heterosexual teleiophiles to prepubescent girls were similar to the responses of homosexual teleiophiles to prepubescent boys (gold bar in top left panel vs. green bar in top right panel). The difference between these means was not statistically significant. The responses of heterosexual teleiophiles to pubescent girls were actually slightly higher than the responses of homosexual teleiophiles to pubescent boys (orange bar in top left panel vs. blue bar in top right panel). This difference was statistically significant; however, it is most likely trivial, because the heterosexual teleiophiles were generally a little more responsive than the homosexual teleiophiles." So it doesn't look like gay men are any more likely than straight men to be attracted to pubescent children. Finally, "The middle panels and bottoms panels of the figure show that the stimuli depicting pubescent and prepubescent boys and girls worked as they should. The subjects who responded most to those stimulus categories responded as much or more, in absolute terms, as the subjects who responded most to adult men and women." In other words, we have reason to believe that this testing method is giving us real data when we use it to conclude that gay men are no more likely to be sexually interested in children than straight men are. One more thing Blanchard asks us to keep in mind: "Although the purpose of this analysis was to counter the notion that gay men present more of a risk to children than do straight men, it was not intended simultaneously to demonize all pedophiles and hebephiles. There are pedophiles and hebephiles who never act on their sexual attraction toward children. They cannot be blamed for what they feel, and they should be supported for the constant self-restraint they must exercise in order to behave ethically." Indeed, Blanchard's work suggests to me that pedophilia and hebephilia look like sexual orientations—that, at least for men, sexual orientation is comprised not just of interest in a particular sex, but in a particular age range as well. That doesn't mean, of course, that adult sexual interactions with prepubescent or pubescent children are morally permissible or should be legally permissible; Blanchard and I both feel that pedophiles and hebephiles have a duty not to act on their sexual urges, because children cannot meaningfully consent to sex with an adult. It is just to say that it makes no sense to persecute someone for an urge on which he does not act. |
| Posted: 09 Jul 2013 06:00 AM PDT  In 1775, American rebels in the Massachusetts towns of Lexington and Concord took up arms against British troops intent on searching American property for contraband weapons. The Revolutionary War had begun, motivated in part by frustration with military occupation. This April, in Boston, just 15 miles southeast of the site of the "shot heard 'round the world," citizens gathered to cheer police who, thanks to their uniforms and weapons, were all but indistinguishable from soldiers. For half a day, the city had been in "lockdown," a term that originated in California prisons in the 1970s but has since spread, most notably to schools, where lockdowns became commonplace after the 1999 shooting at Columbine High School. Now, for the first time, we have seen a citywide lockdown requested on American soil—and heard it greeted by applause from the affected population. In the fascinating and sometimes terrifying Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America's Police Forces, journalist Radley Balko traces the changes in American policing from colonial times to the present. His focus, though, is law enforcement's increased reliance on military hardware and strategy in the last 45 years, especially in the form of SWAT (special weapons and tactics) teams. As recently as 1969, the Los Angeles Police Department had one of the only SWAT teams in the country. Its first raid targeted a group of Black Panthers. Four police officers and four Panthers were shot and wounded. After hours of gunfire, the raid's leader, Daryl Gates, called the mayor, who received permission from the Department of Defense to use a grenade launcher. "My words seemed unreal," Gates would later remember. "Anytime you even talk about using military equipment in a civil action, it's very serious business. You're bridging an enormous gap." The Panthers were charged with conspiracy to murder police officers, but acquitted on self-defense grounds. "Practically, logistically, and tactically," Balko writes, "the raid was an utter disaster. But in terms of public relations, it was an enormous success." Paramilitary policing quickly spread across the country. Today there are more than 1,000 U.S. police forces with SWAT or SWAT-type units. In 1980, nationwide, they carried out an average of eight paramilitary raids a day; now there are well over 100. Balko attempts to explain why this happened, and why it matters.
One could say the militarization of U.S. police began in the 1850s, when individual officers started carrying guns. This was perhaps inevitable, given our long-running national love affair with guns and our predilection to use them. But a baton-twirling cop with a six-shooter is a far cry from a team of helmeted, balaclava-clad SWAT officers wielding battering rams and large-caliber semiautomatic rifles. The present-day prevalence of paramilitary policing is inseparable from the host of changes in U.S. law that began when Richard Nixon declared war on drugs. In 1970, with Republicans and Democrats competing to look tough on crime, the budget for the federal Law Enforcement Assistance Administration jumped from $75 million to $500 million. Balko interviews Don Santarelli, former head of the organization, who looks back despondently: "[Police] didn't value education or training. They valued hardware. … Anything the police chiefs could dream up to make themselves look more fearsome, they wanted." And once police had the equipment, they started using it. The first fatality of the drug war took place in 1972, when federal agents conducted a helicopter attack on what was supposed to be a million-dollar PCP lab in Humboldt County, California. According to a reporter who tagged along, the raid resembled "an assault on an enemy prison camp in Vietnam." An unarmed hippie named Dirk Dickenson was shot in the back and killed, but the agents found little but some baggies of marijuana and two tabs of LSD. When the local district attorney had the shooting officer indicted on murder charges, a specially deputized U.S. attorney moved the case to federal court, where a judge dismissed it. Militarization stalled during the Carter presidency, but surged again in the 1980s. Ronald Reagan signed the Military Cooperation With Law Enforcement Agencies Act, advocated the repeal of the exclusionary rule (which keeps illegally gathered evidence out of the courtroom), and expanded civil forfeiture laws, which allow the state to confiscate money and property related to criminal activity. In addition to shifting the burden of proof to defendants, these new laws created huge incentives for police departments to establish and use SWAT teams—and, perversely, to postpone raids until after drugs had already been sold. Confiscated drugs are simply destroyed, but confiscated money and property can help replenish department coffers. SWAT became a moneymaker. Paramilitary police tactics were designed, Balko writes, "to stop snipers and rioters—people already committing violent crimes." Today, however, SWAT teams are used mostly "to serve warrants on people suspected of nonviolent crimes." Paramilitary raids on American homes, which just four decades ago seemed extraordinary, have become common, as has legal forgiveness for any "collateral damage." The Supreme Court has by and large acquiesced, creating a string of drug-related exceptions to the Fourth Amendment. The lax oversight of SWAT raids, and the speed at which they unfold, make errors almost unavoidable. Information is gathered from unreliable informants; the wrong doors get broken down; the wrong people end up being home. It's impossible to say what percentage of all SWAT actions are botched, as police departments are disinclined to keep such statistics. But Balko stitches together enough reports to shock the conscience. His descriptions of raids, bungled or otherwise, constitute one of the book's greatest strengths. It's one thing to bemoan sloppy policing in the abstract, and quite another to read visceral descriptions of citizens awakened and cuffed at gunpoint, then questioned for hours while their homes are violently turned inside out. In one particularly nightmarish case, a SWAT team raided the house of Cheye Calvo—the mayor of Berwyn Heights, Maryland—on the same day police themselves had delivered a large package of marijuana to his door (he had brought it inside with no knowledge of its contents). During the raid, Calvo's two Labrador retrievers were shot and killed (whenever a SWAT team kills a dog, Balko notices). The mayor and his mother-in-law were handcuffed and interrogated for hours and left with a broken door, a house turned upside down, and pools of their dead dogs' blood. In 2010, nine minority-owned barbershops in Florida's Orange County were raided by SWAT in a "licensure inspection." "Administrative searches" of this type require neither probable cause nor warrants, and turn regulatory law into a set of loopholes for SWAT deployment. Barbers and customers were cuffed at gunpoint, and 37 arrests were made, but 34 for nothing worse than the misdemeanor of "barbering without a license." That same year, the big guns were sent to a nightclub near Yale University for an inspection that uncovered—shockingly— a crowded venue full of students drinking. Even if departments kept figures on botched raids, these wouldn't count. This is just the way it's done. BALKO IS A FORMER editor for Reason, a libertarian monthly; Overkill (PDF), his definitive 2006 white paper on SWAT raids, was published by the libertarian Cato Institute, where he worked as a policy analyst. (Thanks to Balko, the institute maintains an interactive map of mishandled raids on its website.) So it is not particularly surprising to see him float the idea that the police themselves—their very existence—might be unconstitutional. The argument, as I understand it, has three ingredients: The Third Amendment (remember that one?) prohibits the peacetime quartering of soldiers in citizens' homes without consent; police that look like the military, walk like the military, and act like the military are functionally similar to soldiers; and the Third Amendment is best understood as a "placeholder for the broader aversion to an internal standing army." This selectively originalist analysis is too clever by half. The authors of the Bill of Rights would indeed be surprised—probably alarmed—by the immense power of contemporary police. But they would also be shocked to see black citizens with the right to vote, to say nothing of a black president. Constitutionality is determined by the court decisions we have, not the court decisions we want. Balko seems to know his Third Amendment argument won't convince anyone, and that new checks on militarization and its excesses are unlikely to emerge in the immediate future: "So long as partisans are only willing to speak out against aggressive, militarized police tactics when they're used against their own … it seems unlikely that the country will achieve enough of a political consensus to begin to slow down the trend." Liberals weren't outraged by paramilitary violence in the sieges at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, and Waco, Texas; conservatives don't bridle when SWAT teams round up undocumented immigrants or raid medical-marijuana clinics. The recent shuttering of Boston while police roamed the streets from house to house attracted little mainstream criticism. Balko carefully prefaces his argument by noting that it isn't, at its core, "anti-cop." I suspect this is because he hopes to convince as many people as possible. As a former police officer, I have my doubts. Balko asserts that most police officers regularly commit felonious perjury. Lying, he writes, is "routine," "expected," and "part of the job." He supplies little evidence for this claim—an absence that is particularly notable because the rest of his book is so meticulously researched and thoroughly footnoted. "Bad cops are the product of bad policy," he warns us. But this is too glib. Bad policy creates bad policing. Bad police, however many there may be, are a separate problem. It's similarly telling that Balko doesn't mention the frequency with which police kill people. Since 1975, the number of police-involved killings has averaged about 400 per year. If anything, data indicate that overall, police—despite their militarization—are becoming less trigger-happy. Reasonable people can debate whether 400 police-involved homicides a year is an acceptable number—and a SWAT raid doesn't have to be fatal to be wrong—but it's hard to resist thinking that Balko leaves out these statistics because they take the edge off his argument. EVEN IF SWAT RAIDS don’t pose an existential threat to American liberty—and Balko makes a strong case that they do—Rise of the Warrior Cop persuasively demonstrates that they're simply unnecessary. The problem has little to do with the Constitution, and solving it doesn't require some radical innovation in police practice. Most warrants are served just fine the old-fashioned way: by knocking on someone's front door. In tactically tricky situations, police can wait for their suspect to walk to the corner store. The relevant question is political: Having given our police broad access to military weapons and tactics, will we ever choose to take them away? Thanks to paramilitary policing's self-perpetuating logic, it's a question that won't go away or get easier anytime soon. In 2010, two years after the raid on Mayor Sheye Calvo's house, the sheriff responsible was unrepentant: "We've apologized for the incident, but we will never apologize for taking drugs off our streets," he said. "Quite frankly, we'd do it again. Tonight." |
| Atheists, Foxholes, and How Combat Impacts Religiosity Posted: 09 Jul 2013 04:00 AM PDT  Ernie Pyle's maxim "There are no atheists in foxholes" raises a couple of serious questions. Does being thrown into life-threatening combat really make one more religious? And if so, does that predisposition stick throughout one's lifetime? A new study of veterans of World War II—the conflict Pyle chronicled—suggests that, for those who were badly shaken by the experience, the answer to both is yes. "The more a combat veteran disliked the war, the more religious they were 50 years later," Brian Wansink of Cornell University and Craig Wansink of Virginia Wesleyan College report in the Journal of Religion and Health. Their findings suggest that "the level of combat intensity—or perhaps the level of fear—one experiences may be related to subsequent religious activity, such as church membership and attendance." Those who associated their combat experience with valor and victory had a below-average lifetime interest in religion.Wansink and Wansink began by analyzing archival data on the attitudes of infantrymen serving in one Pacific Division during 1944. The men were asked about whether they found motivation in, among other things, prayer. "As combat became more frightening," they report, "the percentage of soldiers who reported praying rose from 42 to 72 percent. These results suggest that near the time of combat, the more fear infantrymen felt, the more they were likely to rely on prayer as a motivation to continue to fight." OK, but that was in the (terrifying) moment. Did this propensity to pray have a long-term impact on their religious outlook? To find out, the researchers analyzed a random national survey of 1,123 WWII veterans conducted in the year 2000. "In general, religious behavior was high among all veterans," they report. "In this generation, approximately 69.1 percent were church members, attending church 3.1 times per month. What is interesting, however, are the variations from these high base-rate numbers. "Among those veterans who claimed their military experience was positive, the heavier the combat they experienced, the less frequently they attended church. Those who saw no combat attended services an average of 3.1 times per month, while this dropped to 2.7 times per month for those experiencing light combat, and to 2.3 times for month for those experiencing heavy combat. "In contrast, the pattern for those who claimed their military experience was negative exhibited nearly the opposite pattern. As their involvement in combat increased, so did the number of times they attended church each month, trending up from no combat (2.3 times per month), to light combat (2.4 times per month) to heavy combat (2.8 times per month)." The same pattern was found when they were asked whether they belonged to a religious congregation. "When compared with veterans who did not experience combat, heavy combat was associated with a 10 percent increase in church membership for those who claimed their experience was negative, but an 8 percent decrease for those who claimed it was positive," the researchers write. This all suggests that "the combat-religion relationship may dramatically vary based on how a person retrospectively views their wartime experience," they conclude. Those who associated their combat experience with valor and victory apparently had a below-average lifetime interest in religion, while those who associated it with misery and fear seem to be more attracted to religion than the average vet. Wansink and Wansink note that church attendance was a much stronger cultural norm for the World War II generation than for their kids and grandkids. Given societal pressure to retain religious affiliation even for those who had lost their faith, it's possible this survey under-reported the actual number of non-believers. While they are eager to "conduct a similar study with contemporary soldiers" to see if the same patterns hold true today, they conclude that "Religious participation, such as joining or attending a church, may help combat veterans who have had a negative military experience better deal with the aftermath of combat." Their study suggests the intense, conflicting emotions of battle—putting your life on the line, fighting for a cause greater than yourself, watching helplessly as your buddies die—can lead one person toward faith, and another to lose his faith. It largely depends on whether you came home feeling triumphant or traumatized. |
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