My undergraduate minor was criminology. I've always been fascinated by the psychology of social deviance.
I went to the University of California at Berkeley as an undergraduate, and Berkeley is shoved right up against the border with Oakland, which in the early 1970s, was a kind of slash-and-burn place. It's since evolved into an upscale suburb for Silicon Valley workers.
I had to write a mini-thesis for the minor, so I wrote one about the Oakland police department, which at the time was one of the most corrupt police departments in the U.S.
I did a lot of interviews for the project. I'll note here that I am a wonderful interviewer, very good at getting subjects to trust me. I vividly remember one lieutenant telling me that he'd joined the police department because he wanted to help people. But then what happened is he kept going to parties where everyone would treat him normally until the conversation inevitably progressed to, And what do you do for a living?
Once they found out, of course he became a pariah. Which threw him more and more in the company of other cops, thereby reinforcing all the negative in-group/out-group dynamics.
It's hard to see any component of I want to help people in prison guards and border patrol people, of course.
I dunno. I think everybody needs to break out, and if you don't give people a relatively harmless way to break out behind the scenes, they're gonna break out publicly and destructively.
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timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2019-07-07 11:55 am (UTC)My undergraduate minor was criminology. I've always been fascinated by the psychology of social deviance.
I went to the University of California at Berkeley as an undergraduate, and Berkeley is shoved right up against the border with Oakland, which in the early 1970s, was a kind of slash-and-burn place. It's since evolved into an upscale suburb for Silicon Valley workers.
I had to write a mini-thesis for the minor, so I wrote one about the Oakland police department, which at the time was one of the most corrupt police departments in the U.S.
I did a lot of interviews for the project. I'll note here that I am a wonderful interviewer, very good at getting subjects to trust me. I vividly remember one lieutenant telling me that he'd joined the police department because he wanted to help people. But then what happened is he kept going to parties where everyone would treat him normally until the conversation inevitably progressed to, And what do you do for a living?
Once they found out, of course he became a pariah. Which threw him more and more in the company of other cops, thereby reinforcing all the negative in-group/out-group dynamics.
It's hard to see any component of I want to help people in prison guards and border patrol people, of course.
I dunno. I think everybody needs to break out, and if you don't give people a relatively harmless way to break out behind the scenes, they're gonna break out publicly and destructively.