Blog Post #9

         For this week’s blog we were asked to do an environmental scan based on the research that we will be doing for the final project for this class. Two of the three of these are digital projects and the other uses graphs and other digital tools to support its research.  The research I will be doing for my final project will look at crime, punishment, and race in Seminole County, Florida, assisting my professor with his own research. This topic of research is also similar to my own research topic for my master’s thesis that is on crime, punishment, and race in Sanford, Florida, located in Seminole County.  The first of these digital projects is “Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia.”
            It contains a word cloud, with links that will take you to an individual who was lynched and where this occurred.  You can also search the victims by decades and on a map of the state of Virgina.  One can look at a place like Virginia to set the precedent on crime and punishment since there is not much if any scholarship on crime and punishment in Florida. Also, lynching was at first used as a tactic by white citizens to take the power into their own hands and away from the courts and jails, often breaking African Americans that they believe had committed a crime out of jail to be lynched. However, the court system would take that power back.
Another website that I was directed to by my professor was “The Proceedings of the Old Bailey: London’s Central Criminal Court, 1674 to 1913.”  Prominently, there is an interesting digital tool called the “Digital Panopticon.” Once you click it, a flowchart appears that shows the types of crimes people were tried for and what the outcomes of the trials were. Scrolling down, a section on “Data Visualisations” contains graphs like the ratio of male to female inmates and locations of crimes.  These graphs give us a good sense what people were being tried for in the court system in London, and give a sense about crime and identity in general, not exclusively in the South.
Lastly, I found a PDF online entitled “Race and Punishment: Racial Perceptions of Crime and Support for Punitive Policies.”  Most of its graphs look at modern punitive systems, with one specifically looking at the period of 1951-2013.  I thought it would be an interesting perspective since many of the books in my own research in the Sanford records go through those dates. The first graph looks at opinions of the punitive system over the dates stated above, while another graph looked at the percentage of groups who supported the death penalty for individuals convicted of murder. 63% of people who supported the death penalty were White, 40% were Hispanic, and 36% were Black. This information gives us a different perspective to contrast much of what we have seen to this point. This is important because it gives our work a more multifaceted approach.

Racial Terror: Lynching in Virginia:
https://sites.jmu.edu/valynchings/

The Old Bailey:
https://www.oldbaileyonline.org

The Sentencing Project:

https://www.sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/11/Race-and-Punishment.pdf

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Blog Post #3

In relation to digital tools, what comes to mind when you think of text mining? Personally, I have rarely used text mining tools. Before the digital age was in full swing, we used the precursor to text mining tools, word bubbles, and we would have to scan the documents ourselves, and even then it was subject to human error. In the digital age, with digital tools there are still errors that can be made both by humans through incorrect information that we input as well as computer error. However in an age where technology is becoming more prevalent, like we talked about in class, it is important to have an extra backup or save file of our important documents to account for error of any kind. Text mining is a program in which you can look at online articles or books and find the words that are most frequently used. This week our Professor tasked us with using text mining tools to see what word might be used the most in an article of our choice. To find the article I used JSTOR, which I...
Read more

Blog Post #10

Seminole County: Race, Crime, and Punishment in Florida             Abstract: There is very little to no scholarship on crime and punishment as it pertains to race in the state of Florida. In Seminole county, men were being arrested and incarcerated in far greater numbers than women, however, non-white men were being arrested and incarcerated in even greater numbers than white men – 570 non-white men and 64 non-white women. In terms of white individuals arrested and incarcerated, 309 were white males and 18 were white females. This data based on sex of these individuals shows in part that they were largely multi-racial men that were being arrested. In Seminole county, non-white people were largely arrested for alcohol related crimes, assault, and finally, larceny. Depending on the year many of these crimes were committed, for example, when looking at alcohol related crimes, they were likely the highest during the Prohibition ye...
Read more