...Affermative Action Two words that can bring about emotionally charged debates on the validity of this policy. Is it a fair practice, as proponents argue, or simply a form of reverse discrimination? It is not always been easy to decide on this issue -- for the Supreme Court or society. As it intended, affirmative action means that people from a particular group should enjoy special consideration or benefits in job placement or college admissions. Usually, when one speaks of affirmative action, it is in relation to racial discrimination (although women, as a minority group, are also included), and some people feel that the government should have unrestricted freedom in developing plans to make up for past offenses. Other people argue that enforcing this plan is little more than an obviouse reverse discrimination, and it should not be allowed. The Supreme Court has placed affirmative action plans into two basic groups--quota plans and race-plus plans. Under a quota plan, a state or local government has to use different criteria when considering someone of a minority group for a job or admission to a university. There is usually a quota for the number of people of the particular group who must be granted benefits, based on percentage of the population. Race-plus uses as its guidelines the particular racial characteristics of a certain group, and this is to be considered a plus in making the decision on who does or does not receive the benefit (McWhirter, 1). Affirmative...
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...Introduction Policing has always been a form of the criminal justice system. Dating back to early civilization, people have always wanted some form of protection over themselves and their belongings. Policing arose as a means of social control, subduing Indians through violence, and watching over slaves to prevent them from escaping and causing a riot. Before the 1830’s, only watchman existed as a form of protection. It wasn’t until crime began to grow around the 1861 when cities began to establish police forces to fight crime. With crime and social problems evolving, the United States developed levels of policing. Policing comes in three stages of development. The first stage of policing is when the entire community share responsibility equally in contributing to the protection of the citizens and keeping order in the community. This stage is called informal policing. The second stage of policing is when the functions of the police are assigned to a specific part of the community or citizens. This form is called transitional policing. The third stage is called formal policing. Formal policing is when certain members of society take an oath to protect and keep order of the community. As society evolves, policing has gone from informal to formal due to the society going from having beliefs and values similar to society being dependent upon social control. As a result, there was a little need for formal policing in early civilization because the community...
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...said that he turned and blindly fired a shot while trying to escape. Furman was tried for murder and was found guilty based on his on testimony. He was sentenced to death, but the punishment was not carried out. As a civilized society, we ought to have in placed a system by which we protect our citizens from criminals who seek to do harm to the public. We have had a long history of trials and errors from incarceration in dungeons and jails, to capital punishment. Carried out by hanging, beating, and burning, sacrificing, lethal injection, electric chair, and the list goes on. The writer do believe that harden criminals who commit the most heinous crimes warrants that most severe punishments. However, it must be empowered with a blind eye for discrimination and other arbitrary ways of thinking. In the case of Furman V. Georgia case, the death penalty was not imposed because the court held that the death penalty was being administered in an arbitrary and capricious manner that amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Judge H. Lee Sarokin, U.S Court of Appeals, Third Circuit said it best when he said "The system is too fraught with variables to survive. Whether or not one receives...
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...believed that the prisoners were being mistreated and deserved better treatment than they were being given. She felt so strongly about this that she went to a court and won. She went to jails and almshouses to take notes for a document she was creating and then gave it to the Massachusetts Legislature. The document that she drafted was accepted and allowed funds to go to the Worcester state hospitals that she was going to make. She ended helping fund 32 mental hospitals, 1 school for the Blind, and a couple of nursing training facilities. (A) Enoch Wines and Theodore Dwight tried to make sure that prisons were focused on trying to rehabilitate inmates and not use punishment. (E) Dorothea Dix tried to pass a national bill for support for the mentally ill. before the other bill that was accepted later in the 19th century. but this bill was vetoed by President Franklin because he believed that the states should be responsible for the funding not the federal government. (E) How: The philadelphia society for helping public prisons persuaded the state legislature to make an act for prisons to be reformed. So they two new prisons were built as a solution. (E) The women’s prisons association (WPA) legislation passed that helped advocate for children of imprisoned mothers and created programs to help support families with imprisoned family members being brought together again. In the 19th century civil rights organizations filed lawsuits against prisons. They sued them because they thought...
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...Marxism Within Black Theology of Liberation. This study seeks to expose the ways in which Black Theology of Liberation was shaped by Marxism through the writings of its founders, concentrating predominantly on the need to bring about the liberation of the poor African-Americans from their repressive white racist oppressors by any means necessary, and the redistribution of wealth to those deprived of it by their white capitalist oppressors. The theme of this researched remained embed in my mind during, and after the 2008-09 presidential campaign of former Sen. Barack Obama, when some of his political opponents thought it beneficial to disclose Obama’s connections to a Black Theology of Liberation. Through this research I seek not only to obtain a broader understanding of this particular theology of liberation, but also to understand the Marxist ideological concept within the Black Theology of Liberation. Towards the culmination of the decade which witnessed the peak of the Civil Rights movement, black churches throughout America in the 1960s began to search for avenues through which they could help their communities cope with racial discrimination. Caught between the contradicting preachings of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, a peculiar young theology student from Union Theological Seminary of New York City, James H. Cone, published his proposal for a Black Theology of Liberation titled Black Theology and Black Power (1969). This first scholarly work served...
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...------------------------------------------------- Research: Affirmative Action. Do you feel that affirmative action has a place in today's society? Do you support or oppose its role in today's politics and our lives? Why? Affirmative action is a term most Americans are familiar with, but a term that is not always well understood. To clarify, as defined in Politics in America by Thomas Dye, affirmative action is any government or private program designed to help offset the effects of “past unequal treatment of minorities and/or women by giving members of these groups preferential treatment in admissions, hiring, promotions, or other aspects of life” (Dye, 2009, p. 551). Over time, affirmative action has resulted in an array of policies or programs specifically designed with the intention to enhance employment and business opportunities, or educational programs for groups, such as ethnic or racial minorities, as well as women, who all, as a group, have suffered discrimination. However, the approach in which these policies or programs are employed, the forms of action they entail, and the far-reaching repercussions they convey for our society may deviate from one specific program to another. Since its founding, the belief in human equality has guided the American republic. Of the truths held to be self-evident in the Declaration of Independence, the very first and foremost is that “all men are created equal.” This certainty is deep-seated as we recognize intuitively the equality...
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...by police in Cleveland, Ohio. He was 12 years old and playing with a toy pistol. On April 4, 2015, Walter L. Scott was shot by a police officer after a routine traffic stop in North Charleston, S.C. The same month, Freddie Gray died while in police custody in Baltimore, setting off widespread unrest. The policeman in the South Carolina case, Michael T. Slager, was charged with murder based on a cellphone video. In Baltimore, the driver of the police van in which Gray died, Caesar Goodson, was charged with second-degree murder, with lesser charges for five other officers. There have been no indictments in the earlier cases. These follow other recent incidents and controversies, including an April 2014 finding by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ), following a two-year investigation, that the Albuquerque, N.M., police department “engages in a pattern or practice of use of excessive force, including deadly force, in violation of the Fourth Amendment,” and a similar DOJ finding in December 2014 with regard to the Cleveland police department. In March 2015, the DOJ also issued a report detailing a pattern of “clear racial disparities” and “discriminatory intent” on the part of the Ferguson, Mo., police department. As the Washington Post reported in July 2015, a...
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...communities of color for toxic waste disposal and the sitting of polluting industries. It is racial discrimination in the official sanctioning of the life-threatening presence of poisons and pollutants in communities of color. And, it is racial discrimination in the history of excluding people of color from the mainstream environmental groups, decision-making boards, commissions, and regulatory bodies. (3) Environmental justice on the other hand, is a form of environmental equity. It refers to “the equal protection of environmental laws amongst all people, irrespective of their race or social status. (Peluso 389) With very little influence in decision-making from minority groups, policymakers deliberately target these low-income communities of visible minorities. Environmental racism is evident as the transnational corporations are allowed to dump toxic waste and acquire land to set up polluting industries in these communities. The results are the exposure of children and adults in these communities to thousands of deadly chemicals. (Kapoor, Environmental Justice) These are considered callous...
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...After graduating nursing school I immediately obtained a position in the Emergency Room at East Houston Regional Medical Center. During my time in the Emergency Center I became an Advance Cardiac Life Support (ACLS) instructor and CardioPulmonary Resusciation ( CPR) instructor for American Heart Association. I stayed in that position until I became pregnant, which was a year and a half after becoming and registered nurse. Then I transferred to Labor & Delivery (L&D) as a staff nurse. I spent all of maybe four weeks in orientation, because of my previous experience prior to becoming a nurse was ten years as a scrub tech in labor & delivery. Shortly after learning the ropes in L&D maybe a month or so I became a charge nurse on that unit. I stayed at East Houston Regional Medical Center as a nurse for seven years until I transferred to Ben Taub General Hospital within the Harris County Hospital District. Once I arrived to this facility it was long before I became a charge nurse as well in the labor & delivery unit. This facility happened to be different, educational and more of a challenge than where I had come from. Ben Taub is one of the two county facilities in Houston. This particular facility has a Level 1 trauma facility therefore our unit was able to see some pretty ill, near death patients in the L&D unit. For example, one night a patient was admitted for a postmortem cesarean section after a very traumatic and fatal car accident. Well while the obstetrical physicians were...
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...Northern Baptist Seminary ! ! ! ! ! ! ! God and Job ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! ! A Research Paper Printed in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Course OT 458 Old Testament Theology ! ! ! by James L. Brooks May 27, 2013 ! ! ! !2 ! ! ! Introduction The book of Job is a classic. Many have read this book, especially when seeking answers to suffering. Whenever Christians talk about suffering, more than likely the story of Job will be mentioned and Job’s sayings will be quoted. Although the “Job story” is frequently discussed, there are still many unanswered questions. Where was God? Why did God allow Job to go through all the trials and tribulations? What kind of God is this? Why does God make a deal with Satan? What about Job’s friends and their response to his suffering? These are all questions that will continue to haunt readers after reading the story of Job. This paper will examine the character of God and his parental attributes. No matter what the reader may think, God is ultimately in control. Although God gives Satan the latitude to do what he will with Job, short of killing him, still it is all within the scope of God’s permissive will. The story of Job, although it may be rather simple to read, is complex in theological understanding. The God of Job is inscrutable, but yet he is in control. “The book of Job challenges the principle of retribution: that trouble in life must be a person’s own fault.”1 The prologue is in prose. The epilogue is in poetry. The conclusion...
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...Mockingbird‘s Faded Childhood Innocence Irish poet William Butler Yeats once said, “The innocent and the beautiful have no enemy but time.” There is no truer an example in literature than in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird. In the novel the author uses the perspective of the novel’s storyteller, Miss Jean Louise Finch, more commonly known as Scout, and her brother Jeremy, nicknamed Jem, to highlight the blind innocence that comes as a byproduct of childhood. It is this innocence that also disappears from the children’s perspective in the novel. At least at first the two, blinded by their innocence, are unaware of the more mature and even sometimes ominous events and actions that eventually occur in the novel’s unveiling plot. It is because of their unwearied characters that Lee is able to best show how the events that occur in the lives of young characters causes blind innocence to disappear over time. Throughout the novel, there is a constant turn of events that ultimately leaves the children disillusioned with all their preconceived notions of all that is morally just and good. As Yeats said, time indeed proves to be the enemy for the children’s innocence, and by the novel’s end their worldly perspective is irreversibly changed. In the opening of the novel, Jean Louise Finch is revealed to be a grown woman looking back on her youth. The focal point of the narrative in particular is an innocent period from her childhood when she is six years old, just...
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...Functionalist Explanations of Crime and Deviance Functionalist’s believe that shared norms and values are the basis of social order and social solidarity. They see crime and deviance as dysfunctional to society. However, functionalist’s do see some crime as being ‘normal’. Merton took functionalist views further by saying that crime and deviance were a strain between the socially accepted goals of society and the socially approved means of achieving them - this strain then results in deviance. The American Dream states that anyone can make it to the top. However, emphasis is placed on material success so people feel pressure to deviate from accepted norms and values. People are tempted to reach the top even by illegal means, he explains this as ‘Anomie’. Anomie means normlessness - where norms no longer guide behaviour and instead anything goes. Merton identifies five possible responses of a strain to anomie. Conformity; people conform even if they are unlikely to achieve the goal. Innovation; accepting the goal of success but have little chance of achieving through normal means, turning to illegal means. Ritualism; abandoning the goal of success but stick to the rules (working in a dead end job). Retreatism; reject the goal of success and normal means to achieve it, drop out of school becoming tramps and drug addicts. Rebellion; reject the conventional goals and means of achieving them and replace them with alternative ways. Merton’s theory offered an explanation for...
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...Labor Management Relations Labor management as a definitive term spans over the centuries. Despite the age and issues presented over the years, labor management and, more pointedly, unions continue to be the subject of great debate in today’s business and government environments. As workers and union representatives remain in the forefront of corporate debates over workers rights and wages, one must question how effective labor management relations are today. Unions present the opportunity for workers to have a representative voice; however, as history proves, unions also present the opportunity for union heads to fulfill self-serving agendas that offer little, if any, respite to workers. As such, this paper examines the history of labor management relations to set the stage for included discussion on current labor and union issues to determine how beneficial unions are and whether they do more harm than good in protecting workers’ rights. History Von Otter defines labor management relations as being related to “the rules and policies which govern and organize employment, how these are established and implemented, and how they affect the needs and interests of employees and employers” (np). Labor management relations involves both industry and economics and often encompasses strategic human resources. However, not all sectors of business, economic and social environments “work” well together as history has proven. The world economy experienced massive growth in the twentieth...
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...Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research, Practice, and Organizational Change for Psychologists American Psychological Association Approved as APA Policy by the APA Council of Representatives, August, 2002 Copyright, American Psychological Association, 2002 Author Note: This document was approved as policy of the American Psychological Association (APA) by the APA Council of Representatives in August, 2002. This document was drafted by a joint Task Force of APA Divisions 17 (Counseling Psychology) and 45 (The Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues). These guidelines have been in the process of development for 22 years, so many individuals and groups require acknowledgement. The Divisions 17/45 writing team for the present document included Nadya Fouad, PhD, Co-Chair, Patricia Arredondo, EdD, Co-Chair, Michael D’Andrea, EdD and Allen Ivey, EdD. These guidelines build on work related to multicultural counseling competencies by Division 17 (Sue et al., 1982) and the Association of Multicultural Counseling and Development (Arredondo et al., 1996; Sue, Arredondo, & McDavis, 1992). The Task Force acknowledges Allen Ivey, EdD, Thomas Parham, PhD, and Derald Wing Sue, PhD for their leadership related to the work on competencies. The Divisions 17/45 writing team for these guidelines was assisted in reviewing the relevant literature by Rod Goodyear, PhD, Jeffrey S. Mio, PhD, Ruperto (Toti) Perez, PhD, William Parham, PhD, and Derald Wing Sue...
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...01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 Step 7 A Judge Is Assigned to Hear the Case ❖ 01 02 03 04 05 06 07 08 09 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 N 30 L In the previous two chapters, we learned about the two attorneys in the courtroom drama, the prosecutor and the defense attorney. In this chapter, we turn our attention to the third member of the courtroom work group, the judge. We will learn what judges do and how they become judges. Then, we will look at judges’ discretion and how it affects their relationships with others. INTRODUCTION Judges are by far the most easily recognized member of the courtroom work group, both by their conspicuous robes and by their prominent position in the courtroom. They are also the subject of many stereotypes because the public wants to believe that judges combine patience, wisdom, and compassion to arrive at fair decisions, while they eschew the character flaws that sometimes form the basis of decisions by others, including prejudice, intolerance, favoritism, and hostility. Unfortunately, judges are human and their decisions occasionally reflect such a reality. One West Virginia judge, for example, became so enraged at a defendant who began cursing at him in court that he jumped down from his bench, tore off his judicial robe, and bit the tip off the defendant’s nose (Smith, 1998). He served five days in jail on state assault...
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