On Serving the Ignored: Latinos, Crime and the Criminal Justice System

There are nuanced distinctions among Latinos, such as the differences between those native to the United States and those who are recent immigrants.There are also certain cultural factors that differentiate Latinos from other populations in the United States. Therefore, policies targeting factors in Latino communities, such as crime prevention, educational interventions, and community development, can (and should) take these unique cultural qualities into account. The range of the Latino experience is expansive, and the diversity within the population requires more embracement. It is essential to acknowledge and examine that variation, as it is to remember that many of the stereotypes surrounding Latinos and immigrants have been recycled from the past, and that previous research informs the present

Social Justice Guest Speaker Series: Does More Immigration Mean More Crime in the United States?

Professor Martinez is a quantitative criminologist. Within that broad arena, his work contributes to violent crime research. His core research agenda asks how does violence vary across ecological settings, and, does violent crime and violent deaths vary across racial/ethnic and immigrant groups? In 2011, he was a recipient of American Society of Criminology DPCC’s Lifetime Achievement for outstanding scholarship in the area of race, crime, and justice. In 2007 he was a recipient of American Society of Criminology DPCC’s Coramae Richey Mann Award for outstanding scholarship in the area of race, crime, and justice. In 2006 he was a recipient of the Florida International University Faculty Award for Excellence in Research and a Visiting Scholar, Center for Mexican American Studies, University of Houston. He previously received the American Sociological Association Latina/o Section Award for Distinguished Contributions to Research and a W.E.B. DuBois Fellowship from the National Institute of Justice. Since 2004 he has been a member of the National Science Foundation funded Racial Democracy, Crime and Justice-Network working group at The Ohio State University. At the national level, Martinez serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals and recently completed a three-year term as a member of the Sociology Advisory Panel at the National Science Foundation.https://digitalcommons.otterbein.edu/justiceactivism/1000/thumbnail.jp

A Look at Public Art: Examining the Importance of Public Art & How Cities are Making Their Collections More Accessible

The popularity of public art has grown in the past few decades; one of the main reasons for this is because public art brings a number of benefits to the city. Not only does public art create a more vibrant space for the residents of that city, it also helps attract businesses. The benefits that come with having public art have become evident to municipalities across the country, and in turn cities have started to invest more money and resources into their public art programs. One focus of these departments has been to develop a website that shows off their public art collection, and to develop a database that makes their public art even more accessible. In this paper I will examine the city of Austin’s public arts website, and contrast it with Minneapolis’ and Atlanta’s sites, as well as outline the importance of public art and how it has helped shaped Kansas City

“I Put a Mask on” the human side of deportation effects on Latino youth

Recent research on immigration has looked at forced deportation issues and specifically on the mental health issues of immigrant parents separated from their children rather than from the child’s experience. Hispanic adolescents residing in the United States who live with the fear of being separated from their parents either through forced parental deportation or as a result of being detained themselves may face serious health and mental health problems during the crucial developmental stage of adolescence and pre-adolescence. This study looks at twenty children ages 11-18 (males and females). Qualitative methods were used including focus groups and individual in-depth interviews to examine issues among youth who were at risk of being deported and/or whose parents had been deported or were at risk of deportation. Evidence from the study demonstrated that the youth have complex understandings of the stress of living in undocumented families that can be categorized in individual, social, and structural levels.http://jswhr.com/journals/jswhr/Vol_2_No_2_December_2014/3.pdfPublished versio

Intersections of Race, Ethnicity, and the Law

The development of law is inextricably linked to matters of race and ethnicity. The stories of minority citizens--the texture of their lives, the prejudices they have endured, and their struggles for fair treatment--have been documented in the pages of legal opinions, as judges over the years have wrestled with fundamental questions of racial bias and inequality. Studying race, ethnicity, and the law is challenging for many reasons, not the least of which is the prime difficulty of defining what we mean by race. Even the choice of words used to identify minority individuals has social and political ramifications. How law functions to oppress and liberate minorities has been a longstanding topic in the field of sociolegal studies. Issues of race, ethnicity, and law have taken on new urgency in recent years, as affirmative action and reverse discrimination claims as well as reapportionment battles and racial hate speech cases have come before the courts. This special issue of Law and Human Behavior focuses on social science research on race, ethnicity, and the law. Articles in the special issue consider the influence of race and ethnicity on substantive law, legal processes, and crime and deviance, and illustrate the tensions and contradictions that pervade the law\u27s treatment of racial and ethnic minorities. We conclude that taking race and ethnicity into account may force scholars to reconceptualize theories about law\u27s impact and that a greater number of racial and ethnic minority scholars would enrich the field of sociolegal studies

Biocatalytic modification of food lipids: reactions and applications

The acylglycerol structure exemplifies the major lipid building block and therefore is an interesting structure to modify. Such modification is driven by: (1) consumers who have become more concerned about the relationship between diet and wellness, and (2) new and novel functional compounds can be prepared when the original structure of a lipid is modified. This trend has led to the design of functional foods or nutraceuticals, namely, fortified, enriched, modified and enhanced foods. Advances in the biochemistry and engineering of enzymatic reactions and reactors have improved the knowledge and understanding of such reaction systems and thus, make available a generation of structured lipids. In the present work, we detail several eorts carried out to prepare novel compounds, as well as industrial applications and possible future enzymatic procedures to obtain new food products