Terrorist Suspect Religious Identity and Public Support for Harsh Interrogation and Detention Practices

Does the U.S. public's support for the use of harsh interrogation and detention practices against terrorism suspects depend upon the religious identity of the alleged perpetrators? Some scholarly research indicates greater public acceptance for abridging the rights of Muslims after 9/11. This is consistent with literature suggesting that heightened perception of threat decreases popular tolerance for racial, ethnic, and religious outgroups. This study executes a survey experiment and finds respondents to be more permissive of the use of extraordinary detention practices, such as indefinite detention and denying suspects access to legal counsel and civilian criminal courts, against terror suspects identified as Muslims. Furthermore, the study reveals that respondents are significantly less likely to treat domestic, right‐wing terrorist suspects with extraordinary detention, suggesting ingroup leniency.     

Social Dominance and the Cultural Politics of Immigration

We argue that conflict over immigration largely concerns who bears the burden of cultural transaction costs, which we define as the costs associated with overcoming cultural barriers (e.g., language) to social exchange. Our framework suggests that the ability of native‐born citizens to push cultural transaction costs onto immigrant out‐groups serves as an important expression of social dominance. In two novel studies, we demonstrate that social dominance motives condition emotional responses to encountering cultural transaction costs, shape engagement in cultural accommodation behavior toward immigrants, and affect immigration attitudes and policy preferences.     

Anxiety,Immigration, and the Search for Information

In this article, we use the issue of immigration to explore the role of anxiety in responses to political appeals. According to previous literature, anxiety motivates citizens to learn and pay more attention to news coverage. Literature in psychology demonstrates that anxiety is associated with a tendency to pay closer attention to threatening information. We predict that anxious citizens will seek more information but that they will seek out and be attracted to threatening information. In an experiment, we induce anxiety about immigration and then subjects have the opportunity to search for additional information in a website designed to mimic online news sources. The website has both immigration and nonimmigration stories, and the immigration stories are split between threatening coverage and nonthreatening coverage. We find that anxious subjects exhibit biased information processing; they read, remember, and agree with threatening information.     

La rétention de sûreté : punir,prévenir et guérir des troubles de la personnalité ?

The law of February 25, 2008 introduced security detention. This is a post-sentence measure intended for offenders who have served their sentence. This may apply to people with personality disorders. Because of these disorders, they are considered too dangerous to be left in society but the importance of the disorders was not sufficient to benefit from the mechanism of criminal irresponsibility. Is the real objective of preventive detention, as indicated in the law, to treat disorders or, more pernicious, to eliminate ex-convicts from society?     

“Y'all trying to make a mockery out of me.” The confined sexualities of girls in a US juvenile detention facility

This paper examines how girls confined in a juvenile detention facility contend with messages from adult staff about their gender, sexual, and racial identities and practices. I show that girls are perpetually on the cusp of being punished for sexual misconduct for merely being sexually expressive, although actual punishment is arbitrary and inconsistently applied by staff. More importantly, girls' stories about their sexualities illuminate the force of punitive confinement sculpted by intergenerational relations that mask carceral logics under a façade of adult care. Constant surveillance and behavioral evaluations deem all sexuality to be available for inspection and introspection. I explore how girls come to understand their capacities for sexual expression within these limits of tight spatial control, persistent behavioral scrutiny, and a pervasive adult language of youth pathology. Racism and heterosexism centrally situate intergenerational relations of control and care in the facility, disturbingly burdening African-American and queer girls with the added pain of coming to terms with the impossibility of achieving the conformity that they are taught should be within their grasp with proper gender-sexual behaviors. Thus, rehabilitation is perpetually beyond girls' reach, since in spaces of juvenile detention personal and behavioral reform is an unending process.     

‘Would it not be better to get someone out workin?’: ‘Safe prejudice’ against Polish workers

One recurring criticism of immigrant groups is their alleged failure to be employed and contribute to the host society. Here we examine how speakers mobilise a criticism that has attracted less research attention: that through their economic activity immigrant groups usurp others’ employment entitlements. Discourse analysis of data from seven focus group discussions about pre-Brexit Polish immigration into the UK, involving 31 UK nationals, shows that participants accomplish exclusionary outcomes in two divergent ways. The first attributes qualities to Polish workers but also makes explicit the consequences of these attributions for UK nationals, rendering speakers’ investment in such claims visible. The second relies on the production of category pairs, within which claims can be made for the category that excludes Polish workers. This use of categories comprises ‘safe prejudice’, a form of prejudice not previously identified but which is less open to challenge than other forms of prejudiced talk.     

Sikh millennials of the ‘kirtan generation’ in the making of an ‘American Sikhism’

ABSTRACT

This essay focuses on the millennial generation of Sikhs in the United States. Based on extended ethnographic research in Sikh communities, the author explores the role of Sikh millennials in the making of an ‘American Sikhism’, the contours of which are taking shape having followed after the explosive growth of gurdwara communities – and the educational, social, and other resources they provide – which were largely made possible by the affluence of Sikh communities beginning with the previous ‘Brain Drain’ generation. In particular, the author discusses this ‘kirtan generation’ of Sikhs, educated in gurdwara schools, and their growing leadership of Sikh communities.