Culture and criminality

In May 2013, the FSB expelled an American diplomat on the grounds that he was spying for the CIA. Listed among the alleged spy’s suspicious possessions were ‘means of altering appearance’. It was later revealed that this disguise kit contained a variety of wigs and sunglasses. These paraphernalia were so ill-fitting that they seemed to belong in a comedy performance, but they provoked some serious debate. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Today programme, former CIA operative, Robert Baer, described the thick-rimmed glasses and stick-on moustaches that he and his colleagues had worn to break up facial contours. The aim of these disguises was to make people remember ‘something other than the face’.
An individual’s identity is bound up in his or face more so than any other body part. Passport photographs, portraits, and other images related to personal identity, tend to feature the face. It is for this reason that criminal photo-fits tend to feature only the head, and why criminals’ disguises concentrate on concealing the face and head. The problem with any mask or facial disguise is that it immediately marks someone out as a wrong-doer. The mere act of wearing a mask may itself be considered morally questionable, as it is a deception of sorts. The ‘mask has come to connote something disingenuous, something false’. It is overtly a disguise. David Napier observes that it is this sense of an incomplete identity that drives audiences to seek out the secret alternative identity hidden underneath. The mask is ‘known to have no inside’ and this ‘invit[es] the audience to peer behind the mask’.
This paper will explore the problem of the mask and its use in disguise. While effective disguise often necessitates the use of a mask (or other artefacts that distort or conceal the face), facial disguises often heighten the observer’s sense of curiosity about the identity beneath. Taking recent and historical examples of physical disguise, the paper will identify why the mask is the cornerstone of disguise, and simultaneously the disguise’s greatest point of vulnerability.

The image of criminality in a community has not only a present but it also has a past, a history and that history continued down to the present. My student Santanu, and I began from the ‘ethnographic present’ among the Lodhas, like field anthropologists and gradually realised that we got a link with the history. Pages of archive matched with recent happenings and the present plight of the community. The question of power was involved. Because in India 'Communities' rather than individuals matter much. The Rajputs, and Punjabis are regarded as brave people who fought wars and battles with the Mughals and British and they are still regarded as brave communities and although they killed many people, they were never designated by the colonial administration as 'Criminal Communities' probably because they were not poor gatherer-hunters and marginalised like the Lodhas.
Surely, the Lodhas of West Bengal is one such community which has a long history of marginalization and oppression by the state and the dominant communities and they also have a history of demarginalization which had started in the post colonial period by the efforts of the state and non-state actors as well as the members of the community themselves. This paper explored the above issues.

While the risks that felony disenfranchisement poses to democracy are increasingly recognized, this article expands the scope of scholarly concern with mass conviction in the United States, examining the ways in which the ever-expanding panoply of state-imposed post-conviction legal restrictions (referred to as “collateral consequences of conviction”) diminish the experience of citizenship for those burdened with them and threaten democratic equality. Considering a sampling of common restrictions on the privacy, civic participation, and economic opportunities of former offenders, I argue that many common, easily overlooked collateral consequences can, in fact, produce a version of second-class American citizenship for the millions of people subject to them.

This chapter of Richard Marsh, Popular Fiction and Literary Culture, 1890-1915: Rereading the Fin De Siecle ties Richard Marsh’s novel Mrs Musgrave – And Her Husband (1895) to the anxiety surrounding the degeneration debate. The chapter argues that novel provides a unique contribution to the debate surrounding hereditary criminality by simultaneously and deliberately validating and critiquing the racist and sexist matrix that arguably informed late-nineteenth-century British culture and society. Unlike much other late-nineteenth-century fiction, the novel employs a pattern where racial and sexual discourses are repeatedly set on course only to be derailed, and derailed only to be brought back on track again.

Dans son article sur les sociétés post-traditionnelles, Giddens recommande l'instauration d'une « démocratie dialogique » pour remplir le vide laissé par la disparition des ordres moraux traditionnels. Dans cet article, je suggère qu'au Brésil, une démocratie dialogique factice, fondée sur l'inversion, a pour effet de réduire au silence la voix de nombreux acteurs sociaux impliqués dans le drame de la violence urbaine. On trouve dans les médias, mais aussi dans les débats politiques sur l'identité nationale, des récits publics définissant et fusionnant des valeurs traditionnellement opposées comme le bien et le mal, les riches et les pauvres, les bandits et les héros. Au Brésil se développe actuellement une fascination pour les bandits, redéfinis comme de nouveaux héros. Deux histoires tirées de la presse locale illustrent ce phénomène. La première raconte l'histoire de Mauricinho Botafogo, un bandit issu de la classe moyenne et l'autre, celle de Marcinho VP, un trafiquant de drogue et leader d'une favela (un bidonville) de Rio de Janeiro — Michael Jackson a dû lui demander la permission de tourner un vidéo-clip sur « sa » montagne. VP a aussi reçu une « subvention » de la part d'un membre d'une des plus riches familles de Rio de Janeiro pour écrire un livre sur sa vision du monde ; il s'y présente lui-même comme un Lampião moderne (le Robin des bois brésilien) et la victime d'une société inégalitaire. La fascination pour des bandits comme Marcinho et Mauricinho nourrit la banalisation et l'esthétisation croissantes de la violence, ainsi que l'indifférence à son égard.

In May 2013, the FSB expelled an American diplomat on the grounds that he was spying for the CIA. Listed among the alleged spy’s suspicious possessions were ‘means of altering appearance’. It was later revealed that this disguise kit contained a variety of wigs and sunglasses. These paraphernalia were so ill-fitting that they seemed to belong in a comedy performance, but they provoked some serious debate. Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme, former CIA operative, Robert Baer, described the thick-rimmed glasses and stick-on moustaches that he and his colleagues had worn to break up facial contours. The aim of these disguises was to make people remember ‘something other than the face’. An individual’s identity is bound up in his or face more so than any other body part. Passport photographs, portraits, and other images related to personal identity, tend to feature the face. It is for this reason that criminal photo-fits tend to feature only the head, and why criminals’ disguises concentrate on concealing the face and head. The problem with any mask or facial disguise is that it immediately marks someone out as a wrong-doer. The mere act of wearing a mask may itself be considered morally questionable, as it is a deception of sorts. The ‘mask has come to connote something disingenuous, something false’. It is overtly a disguise. David Napier observes that it is this sense of an incomplete identity that drives audiences to seek out the secret alternative identity hidden underneath. The mask is ‘known to have no inside’ and this ‘invit[es] the audience to peer behind the mask’. This paper will explore the problem of the mask and its use in disguise. While effective disguise often necessitates the use of a mask (or other artefacts that distort or conceal the face), facial disguises often heighten the observer’s sense of curiosity about the identity beneath. Taking recent and historical examples of physical disguise, the paper will identify why the mask is the cornerstone of disguise, and simultaneously the disguise’s greatest point of vulnerability.Non peer reviewe

The intersection of race and poverty continue to play an integral role in maintaining historical disparities in the distribution of social and economic opportunities. In this regard, they are inextricably tied to the preservation of institutionalized segregation in human development. Equally true is that arrested human development has a direct correlation to criminality, where socioeconomic marginalization resulting from entrenched poverty impedes the value judgments of high-at-risk youth, adversely impacting their behavior and public safety. Our public schools are ill-equipped to meet the human development needs of high-at-risk youth with respect to redressing the socioeconomic traumatization they are subjected to, rendering public schools ineffective in educating and developing high-at-risk youth toward becoming emotionally and healthy productive individuals outside of the criminal justice system. The rapid growth in criminality among this population will, without intervention, inevitably reach a tipping point on a critical mass trajectory, in which socioeconomic costs will surpass the public will to maintain the established choice of mass incarceration as an acceptable public policy; if not because of the choice being morally repugnant, it will happen due to the financial strain this choice places on the broader community to combat recidivist criminality and preserve public safety. Sustainable Public Policy Today's established public policy choices work to maintain the underlying socioeconomic segregation of human development opportunities. Sustainable public safety requires sweeping policy reforms that focus on supporting the rehabilitation of high-at-risk youth. Only then, can we redress the critical mass concerns left unchecked by a failing mass incarceration policy choice to police the ills of systemic arrested human development.