The West Virginia University (WVU) Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) system was built between 1971 and 1975 in Morgantown, West Virginia to be a prototype transportation system of the future. Envisioned as a hybrid of public and automotive transportation, the fully automated cars deliver passengers directly to their destinations without stopping at intervening stations. The PRT concept may be familiar to STS scholars through Latour's study of Aramis, a PRT in Paris that was never completed. This article recounts a history with the opposite ending: the successful realization of a PRT in West Virginia. Our account supplements existing ones, which explain the construction of the WVUPRT primarily as the product of geography and politics. While not denying these factors, we carve out an explanatory role for another influence: a public narrative about the dangers of hitchhiking and crimes that might ensue from that practice. In weaving together that narrative with the history of the WVUPRT, we show how public narratives of crime authorize technological infrastructure.
The presence of employment centers provides the potential for reducing commuting distance. However, employment centers have distinct attributes, which may lead to varied impacts on commuting outcomes. We examine how proximity to employment centers can influence commuting distance with consideration of the heterogeneity of employment centers and workers. Specifically, we consider various attributes of employment centers related to location, persistency, job density, industry diversity, and size and analyze their impacts on the commuting patterns of low- and high-income workers using panel (2002-2019) data. Our analysis of the Los Angeles region shows that increasing proximity to the nearest employment center decreases commuting distance even after controlling for the job attributes located in the neighborhood of workers. The results further suggest that employment centers are not equal in terms of their impact on commute distance and that their impact is different for commuters from different income groups. Our findings contribute to the literature by deciphering the location and attributes of employment centers that may exert a greater impact on commuting patterns.
Geospatial population data are typically organized into nested hierarchies of areal units, in which each unit is a union of units at the next lower level. There is increasing interest in analyses at fine geographic detail, but these lowest rungs of the areal unit hierarchy are often incompletely tabulated because of cost, privacy, or other considerations. Here, the authors introduce a novel algorithm to impute crosstabs of up to three dimensions (e.g., race, ethnicity, and gender) from marginal data combined with data at higher levels of aggregation. This method exactly preserves the observed fine-grained marginals, while approximating higher-order correlations observed in more complete higher level data. The authors show how this approach can be used with U.S. census data via a case study involving differences in exposure to crime across demographic groups, showing that the imputation process introduces very little error into downstream analysis, while depicting social process at the more fine-grained level.
Abstract: Research summary: In recent years, there has been a rise in so‐called “progressive prosecutors” focused on criminal justice reforms. Although there has been considerable debate about the relationship between progressive prosecution policies and crime rates, there has been surprisingly little empirical research on the topic. Building on the limited extant research, we examined whether the inauguration of progressive prosecutors in the nation's 100 most populous counties impacted crime rates during a 21‐year period (2000 to 2020). After developing an original database of progressive prosecutors in the 100 largest counties, we used heterogeneous difference‐in‐differences regressions to examine the influence of progressive prosecutors on crime rates. Results show that the inauguration of progressive prosecutors led to statistically higher index property (∼7%) and total crime rates (driven by rising property crimes), and these effects were strongest since 2013—a period with an increasing number of progressive prosecutors. However, violent crime rates generally were not higher after a progressive prosecutor assumed control. Policy implications: Despite concerns that the election of progressive prosecutors leads to “surging” levels of violence, these findings suggest that progressive‐oriented prosecutorial reforms led to relatively higher rates of property crime but had limited impact on rates of violent crime. In fact, in absolute terms, crime rates fell in jurisdictions with traditional and progressive prosecutors. Yet, relative property crime rates were greater after the inauguration of progressive prosecutors. Given that prior research shows progressive prosecutors reduce mass incarceration and racial inequalities, our findings indicate that higher property crime rates may be the price for these advancements.
This paper wrestles with the concept of care and its role in the movement towards abolitionist education. I draw from my experiences as a teacher / ethnographer in an alternative high school, called FREE LA, that serves and was created by system-impacted young people who have been pushed out of or barred from, or otherwise refused to participate in, traditional schooling. Grounded in students’ perceptions of how this space departs from traditional schools and other carceral institutions, I grapple with their consistent emphasis on care. Students’ juxtaposition between the type of care they experienced in traditional schools, and a different type of care experienced at FREE LA, leads me to consider both the violent genealogies of conditional care as endemic to state schooling, and the potential for reclaiming old-new genealogies of unconditional care that map radically reimagined educational space(s). The juxtaposition between these two types of care opens broader questions about the limitations of educational reform and the possibilities for abolitionist departure.
America’s juvenile justice system was founded on the notion that the juvenile court would serve as the “ultimate parent” for youth. Yet, the history of youth punishment challenges the promise of juvenile “justice.” To offer a more comprehensive account of the family systems in juvenile court, this study draws from the insights of historical research on youth punishment and family criminalization to examine juvenile court outcomes in Arizona. Combining a historical lens with insights from attribution theory, we use quantitative and qualitative methods to examine the relationship between diverse family systems, including single mothers, single fathers, extended families, and foster care families, and juvenile court outcomes (i.e., diversion, preadjudication detention, petition, and judicial dismissal). Our findings suggest the need for more complex understandings of both family and punishment, and more expansive theorizations of the sorts of solutions that match the scope and scale of the problem.
While there is a long history of racial change in the United States, and how this plays out within neighbourhoods, a key recurring question is whether some neighbourhoods are able to achieve and maintain racial diversity, or whether they simply transition to dominance by a new racial group. We test and find evidence of 1631 neighbourhoods across the United States from 1980 to 2020 that exhibit persistent racial diversity (PRD), and assess where this PRD occurs. Our analysis shows that PRD neighbourhoods (PRDNs) are likely to be present in counties with more economic opportunities–that is, counties with higher socioeconomic status (SES). PRDNs themselves, however, tend to be relatively lower SES neighbourhoods within relatively higher SES counties, suggesting that affordable locations surrounded by more economic opportunities may have served as an environment in which diversity can persist over a long period of time in the United States.
In 2019 the Hispanic population of the United States surpassed sixty million—or sixty-four million if the inhabitants of the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico are included. Only Mexico is larger among Spanish-speaking countries in the world. The rapid growth of the Hispanic population—which had been estimated at only four million in 1950—has been stunning. The US Census Bureau has projected that, given moderate levels of immigration and natural increase, Hispanics would grow by 2060 to an estimated 111 million people (about 28 percent of the US population), significantly exceeding the proportions of other ethnic or racial minorities. And while Hispanic Americans now account for one of every six persons in the United States, their impact—social, cultural, political, and economic—is much more profound because of their concentration in particular states and localities. Hispanics are at once a new and an old population, made up both of recently arrived newcomers and of old timers with deeper roots in American soil than any other ethnic groups except for the indigenous peoples of the continent. They comprise a population that can claim both a history and a territory in what is now the United States that precede the establishment of the nation. At the same time, it is a population that has emerged seemingly suddenly, its growth driven by immigration from the Spanish-speaking countries of Latin America—above all from Mexico—and by high rates of natural increase. Today, a third of the Hispanic population is foreign- born, and another third consists of a growing second generation of US-born children of immigrants. And the label itself—“Hispanic”— is new, an instance of a pan-ethnic category that was created by official edict in the 1970s. The ethnic groups subsumed under this label were not “Hispanics” or “Latinos” in their countries of origin; rather, they only became so in the United States. But the Spanish roots of the United States antedate by a century the creation of an English colony in North America and have left an indelible if ignored Spanish imprint, especially across the southern rim of the United States, from the Atlantic to the Pacific. In US popular culture and in official narrative and ritual the American past has been portrayed as the story of the expansion of English America, suppressing if not silencing the Hispanic presence from the nation’s collective memory. But past is prologue, and no understanding of the Hispanic peoples in the United States today or of the category under which they are now grouped can ignore the historical and geographic contexts of their incorporation.
