Lynsey Black recently published a great blog post, "Male Jealousy & Questions of Sexual Honor: A Look at Historical Cases of Domestic Murder in Ireland," the first three paragraphs of which follow:
At present in Ireland, a Domestic Violence Bill is rumbling its way through the Irish parliament, a welcome albeit overdue development. Louise Crowley has noted that failures to enshrine domestic violence as a discrete criminal offense have gone hand-in-hand with Ireland’s historic reluctance to intervene in such cases. A look at gendered violence in Ireland, focusing on historical cases of domestic murder, can help illustrate the contours of gender. Investigating cases of men who were convicted of murdering women from motives attributed to jealousy can reveal Irish societal attitudes to sexual honor and women’s sexuality.
My research focuses on the period 1864 to 1914. In this 51-year span, I have so far identified eleven cases in which men were convicted of the murder of a female partner in circumstances that were explicitly understood through the motive of jealousy. The research project is ongoing, and further research may reveal other cases in which jealousy was present as a less overt motivation.
However, what is clear so far is that these cases exist against a backdrop of violence against women — in the 51-year period, 28 men in total were convicted of the murder of a wife, a number of other men murdered unmarried partners, while other cases reveal sexually-motivated killings. In a majority of cases in which men killed partners, there was a history of domestic violence in the relationship; within this context, jealousy was a common trigger for violent behavior.
Alessandro De Giorgi has been contributed a fantastic series entitled, "Reentry To Nothing" to the Social Justice Blog. Here is a brief overview of the project:
The materials presented in this blog series draw from an ethnographic study on prisoner reentry I have been conducting between March 2011 and March 2014 in a neighborhood of West Oakland, California, which is plagued by chronically high levels of poverty, unemployment, homelessness, drug addiction, and street crime. Since 2011, with the agreement of a local community health clinic that provides free basic health care and other basic services to marginalized populations in the area, I have been conducting participant observation among several returning prisoners, mostly African American and Latino men between the ages of 25 and 50. In this series of blog entries, I will be presenting ethnographic snapshots of some of these men (and often their partners) as they struggle for survival after prison in a postindustrial ghetto. For more detailed information on this project, please read here. To read the previous entries, please follow these links: Get a Job, Any Job (#1), The Working Poor (#2), Home, Sweet Home (#3).
The latest entry, "In the Shadow of the Jailhouse," De Giorgi examines the relationship between the urban impoverished and local jails. This piece triggered thoughts about "sociological ambivalence"---the complicated relationship incarcerated people (and their families and neighbors) have with carceral institutions and policies of the kind discussed by Megan Comfort, Todd Clear, and others when discussing prisons. Prison, for these groups, has both positive and negative effects---mostly negative, but (surprisingly) some positive. However, De Giorgi is examining the role of local jails, which are increasingly taking a larger role in California's penal landscape following Realignment (2011). He's also focusing particularly on the way in which, in our post-welfare society, one of the largest providers of services to the poor are jails.
In the following notes I document how, despite the abysmal levels of neglect and abuse characterizing these institutions—particularly in terms of the physical and mental health of their guests—jails have come to represent one of the few residual forms of “public relief” from the sheer destitution the poor experience in the postindustrial ghetto, often representing their only chance to gain access to food, shelter, and sporadic healthcare. Of course, this is not to suggest that prisons should continue to offer their “services” to the urban poor; however, we should wonder whether the hands-off approach currently advocated by reformers and presidential candidates across the political spectrum represents nothing more than the latest chapter in a long history of public retrenchment from the ghetto and malign neglect toward racialized urban poverty.
His post offers one of the more jarring accounts of sociological ambivalence. The post discusses a morning when Alessandro is driving Rico to Marin County to pick up his girlfriend, Naira, from the Marin County Jail. On the way over, Rico tells Alessandro that he expects Naira to look better than she had, to be healthier after her stint in jail because she'll have been fed, have had time to sober up, sleep, and get her head right. On the way back to the East Bay, Naira tells Rico and Alessandro of her time in the jail, especially of the long delay before the people are giving their medications and the many people with serious mental illnesses and the various forms of decompensation they experience. With a healthy dose of irony, the post closes with the group running into a friend of Rico and Naira's; the friend "tells Rico that Naira looks much healthier after her period in jail. As she lights his cigarette, he comments, 'You look good, Naira! You really needed it, uh?'" Despite the terrible the jail conditions, they are still better than some of the conditions Naira faced on the outside.
The other posts are also worth checking out:
NBC's new series Aquarius is a police procedural set in 1968 Los Angeles. The hero, Sam Hodiak, and his sidekick, undercover cop Brian Shafe, tackle a smorgasbord of Sixties' issues, chief among which is the disappearance of a teenage girl into Charlie Manson's nascent "family".
Given my interest in the Manson "family"--I'm working on a book about parole hearings, using their hearing transcripts as my source materials--I was very eager to watch the show, and have put up reviews of all the episodes on California Correctional Crisis (check the sidebar there for links). The bottom line is that I'm far less impressed with the fictionalization of the Manson story than I am with the policing side of the show. The latter, I think, could be a useful teaching tool for those of us teaching the Warren Court revolution.
Aquarius uses a fairly tired trope--the buddy-cop show--which is, of course, hardly a novelty. What's useful about it in this case, though, is that the show is set shortly after the advent of Miranda, leading to interesting interrogation scenes. In the scene that follows, Hodiak and Shafe embody, respectively, Packer's crime control and due process models, and could be used as illustrations of the models in class.
Hodiak and Shafe's fictional successor--Dirty Harry, policing San Francisco--is the embodiment of the post-Warren-court resentment about the advent of due process. This is his conversation with the District Attorney, making full use of the "out on a technicality" trope:
