No description available.

Feminist activism in the digital age leverages technology to raise awareness of, and to mobilize support for, important issues and causes. Human trafficking is one such cause, and preventing it is included as a United Nations Sustainable Development Goal to achieve gender equality and empower women and girls. This study sought to understand the digital activism strategies of one women's civic leadership organization, the Junior League, for human trafficking awareness. In addition, this project analyzed how those digital activism strategies did or did not align with social justice approaches to human trafficking and how those digital activism strategies did or did not translate to offline action. To address these research questions, a three-pronged, feminist approach to data collection and analysis examined textual documents and included a qualitative survey and follow-up semi-structured interviews. Analysis revealed the overall disconnect between the mission of this women's civic leadership organization, its human trafficking awareness work, and its offline actions. Recommendations offered for this organization and for any nonprofit working in the anti-trafficking space include messaging and campaign goals for digital activism; connecting online efforts with offline action; developing organizational partnerships that consider multiple perspectives versus only a law-and-order angle; and including survivor voices and experiences into all anti-trafficking work.

Research on the prevalence of human trafficking (HT) is relatively scarce, even though more attention has been brought to this human rights issue in the past couple of decades. Widely known as a form of modern day slavery, trafficking of persons for sexual exploitative reasons to earn a profit for the trafficker occurs in every major city across the country, despite common misconceptions that it only thrives in foreign countries. To expand on limited existing literature on human trafficking, this research study explores possible correlations among areas of high violent crime rates, drug arrests, the presence of demand reduction strategies, sociodemographic variables, and tourism measures among the Florida counties to determine if they can act as predictive measures to locate areas where a human trafficking arrest is the most likely to occur. These relationships were investigated through the Offender Based Transaction Systems (OBTS), documented court actions filed by prosecutors between 2012-2016 of human trafficking arrests, and comparing it to violent crime rates and drug arrest rates for the Florida counties using data from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, in conjunction with demand reduction efforts. The results from this study did not support the hypothesis that the higher rate of violent crime and drug arrest rates would significantly increase to the presence of a human trafficking arrest. Instead, demand reduction efforts, e.g. street and web sting operations, neighborhood action, and public awareness, emerged as the only significant variable that predicted the likelihood of a human trafficking arrest occurring in a county. These findings stress the importance of reduction efforts targeting the leading consumers in this lucrative market; the demand for sex from sex buyers.

Looking back, America has seen its fair share of differences among its population, so it should not come as a shock that sentencing disparities are a serious criminal justice issue in the United States. Each year, thousands of people are sent to Federal prisons where they receive sentences for crimes they have been convicted of committing. The United States Sentencing Commission publishes these results annually. No matter the number of persons entering the prison system on the federal level, the number of female offenders often remains about the same (8555 in 2000; 9451 in 2007; and 9302 in 2008). While it is illegal to openly discriminate against a defendant and give them a sentence based on his or her demographics, the laws are written in ways where discrimination can still be allowed. The current research examines the relationship between not only gender, but also looks to education, race, age, and the crime committed to explain this gap in sentencing. Methodology: The data for the current research are from the United States Sentencing Commission (USSC), an annual report comprised of details for every person who entered federal prison in the given year. The current research used data from the year 2016 and includes 67,660 cases. Findings: Findings are supportive of previous research. Whether or not a defendant will receive a sentence is influenced by gender, age, race, education, and offense type. Sex, race, and education also affected the length of the sentence received. Unlike previous studies, age did not appear to be significant when determining the length of a sentence.

The purpose of this study was to recognize and explore the reactions of employees to a deviant coworker. Specifically, I focused on the potential positive effects for employees who are in the presence of a coworker perceived as deviant, dysfunctional, or negative. Consistent with a labeling perspective on deviance, I argued that an employee may become a deviant as a result of social construction, fostered either by observed norm violations or the perceived dissimilarity of this person. Drawing on diverse theories from social psychology and sociology, I hypothesized that in the presence of a deviant coworker, other employees may have enhanced self-evaluations, better role clarity, and improved cohesiveness in work units. First, observers can set a contrast with the deviant and draw positive conclusions about themselves. Second, the "bad apple" can inform employees about organizational norms and alert them about "don't do" rules on the job, thereby improving their role clarity. Finally, by derogating the deviant, non-deviant members can unite against a "common enemy" and boost work unit cohesiveness. Positive effects were also expected to be contingent on individual characteristics and situational factors. In particular, social comparison orientation, coworkers' salience, and agreement about the deviant were hypothesized to strengthen observers' reactions to the deviant. The character of the deviant label and job interdependence, however, were expected to have a more complicated moderating role on the deviant's influence. Two samples generated from separate data collections were used to test the hypotheses. The positive relationship between the deviant's presence and employees' self-evaluations was supported. For employees with more interdependent jobs, role clarity was also positively associated with the presence of a deviant coworker. Contrary to predictions, cohesiveness was found to be lower for work units with a deviant employee at both individual and aggregate levels. Conceptual and empirical pitfalls relevant to the non-significant or opposite-to-prediction relationships are addressed. Finally, theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.

In these three essays, I examine the relationship between housing prices and civil disturbances. In the first essay, I examine the Ferguson Unrest in 2014 following the killing of Michael Brown. Using a hedonic model and a repeat sales model using data from ZTRAX, I find a highly significant negative affect around the events temporally and spatially. In the second essay I examine house price indices across the US during the onset of COVID and during the protests following the killing of George Floyd. I use the Zillow Home Value Index and I find cities which experienced protests experienced less growth than those which did not, and COVID requirements have a heterogeneous effect dependent on enforcement. The severity of the negative effect of the protest depends on protest size and the interaction between the COVID lockdown requirements. In the third and final essay, I continue using the Zillow Home Value Index and find the George Floyd protests had spillover effects into adjacent municipalities within the same metropolitan statistical area. Cities which experienced protests which resulted in a death experienced spillover effects with the adjacent municipalities having a statistically and economically significant reduction in housing price growth, but less severe than the city where the protest took place. Taken together the essays contribute to the literature on civil disturbances and their relationship with housing prices, the literature on crime and its relationship with housing prices, and the literature on COVID-19 restrictions and their relationship with housing

No description available.

Throughout the twentieth century, many behaviors previously considered criminal or immoral were instead defined as medical problems. This process is often referred to as the medicalization of deviance. Like many other behaviors once considered deviant, drug and alcohol abuse has been medicalizing, in a process that accelerated during the latter half of the twentieth century. Despite this movement along the path toward medicalization, drug use, and alcohol use to a lesser extent, are still also sanctioned and managed by the criminal justice system, resulting in a medical-legal-moral hybrid definition of these issues. Today we find instances where these two institutions overlap significantly. At the same time, their mutual involvement in defining and managing drug use is inconsistent. This research uses a qualitative research design to study how this medical-legal-moral hybrid definition of drug use and addiction is discussed and negotiated by various institutions that label and manage individuals who use drugs. I examined this issue by conducting interviews and observations in Philadelphia's Drug Treatment Court as well as in two outpatient drug treatment programs. Results indicate that individuals in both settings frame addiction as a "disease," although the definition is ambiguous and inconsistent. The court and the treatment programs use similar language and methods for assessing substance abuse and how to deal with it. Both also extend the definition of "addiction" to include aspects not directly related to the consumption of drugs or alcohol but to the "drug lifestyle" that includes selling drugs. Still, in neither location is a comprehensive, clear definition of "addiction" promoted and used consistently. This ambiguity results in an overlap of therapeutic and punitive methods to handle the individual's drug usage. In addition, both settings benefit from their interaction and cooperation in managing individuals with substance abuse problems, indicating that rather than moving toward a purely "medical" way of dealing with substance abuse, or placing the issue more firmly in the realm of the criminal justice system, the current mix of moral, criminal and medical methods of labeling and managing substance abuse problems may be more stagnant than the medicalization of deviance thesis suggests. / Sociology

The primary purpose of this research was to examine the relationship between individualism and attitudes toward four types of sexual behavior, specifically adolescent sex, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexual sexual behavior. A secondary purpose was to add to the conceptual and methodological discussions of individualism. In the United States these behaviors are becoming more common and attitudes generally more accepting. What remains unclear and under theorized is why? I address this question from the frame of the intersection of sexuality studies with the study of deviance as these behaviors have been considered to fit normative, absolutists, statistical and/or reactive definitions of deviance. This research was informed by Hawdon's recent general model of deviant behavior. In brief, one of Hawdon's contributions to the study of deviance is his addition of the cultural value of individualism as an explanatory variable related to cross-cultural rates of drug use. The primary research question that guided this research was: Is individualism related to attitudes toward adolescent sex, premarital sex, extramarital sex, and homosexual sexual behavior? Utilizing data from the General Social Survey, this question was examined using a variety of conceptualizations of individualism to test the relationship between individualism and attitudes toward the various sexual behaviors for five time periods--1998, 2000, 2002, 2004, and 2006. Three major hypotheses were posed regarding the relationship between individualism and attitudes toward perceived sexual deviance. The analysis did not support the hypotheses. Reasons for this lack of support for the theoretical perspective were discussed. / Ph. D.

The death penalty has been an area of focus in several academic disciplines, yet modest literature has been generated which examines the sanction from a sociological perspective. Most of the sociological interest in capital punishment is directed at examining and explaining racial disparities in sentencing, its effectiveness as a deterrent to violent crime, or its use as a mode of formal social control. Although execution methods have changed frequently over time in the United States, there is a paucity of research examining this phenomenon through a sociological lens. The extant literature identifies changing societal ideologies regarding the use of institutionalized violence as the impeti for legislative shifts in methods of execution. While these studies are useful in partially explaining method changes through time, there is a dearth of work which specifically addresses the dialectical process by which meanings attached to methods of punishment are socially constructed and negotiated, what social agents are engaged, and how this process occurs with respect to historical context. This dissertation examines the legislative changes in execution methods at two points in time in North Carolina's history, 1935 and 1983. Grounded in a hybrid theoretical foundation of functionalist and interactionist perspectives, this study is a qualitative analysis of historical primary and secondary data. One goal of this project is to identify how social context informed ideologies of state-sanctioned death. Furthermore, this study attempts to reveal some of the various social agents who engaged in the process of negotiating meaning, how this process manifested itself, and how historical context may have influenced differences in legislative motive during the two transition years. A comparative analysis of the data reveals that deference to the institutions of science, technology, and medicine was vital to the process of socially reconstructing and redefining methods of execution at both points in time. However, findings also indicate that public exposure to an existing method of execution as well as historically relative ideologies concerning state-sanctioned death greatly affect how the negotiation of meaning transpires. / Ph. D.