Video and Multimedia

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Video Links

  • The New Asylums 
    Many of those incarcerated in the nation’s prisons have a diagnosable mental illness. This program goes inside an Ohio correctional facility that is making an effort to address the mental health needs of prisoners.
     
  • The Released 
    This program is a follow-up to The New Asylums (see above). Filmed five years after the original program it examines how mentally ill ex-convicts fare after release.
     
  • Amy Winehouse Dead: Why Did No One Help Her? 
    News segment from the day following the death of soul singer Amy Winehouse. The clip contains footage from the makeshift memorial that fans created outside of her house as well as a recap of her brief career.
     
  • Celebrity Rehab 5: Intake (Full episode) 
    Episode from the VH1 reality show Celebrity Rehab. B-list celebrities who are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol “check-in” to a rehabilitation facility. This episode introduces the celebrities and shows the admissions process.
     
  • Sex Offender Village 
    The stigma attached to the label “sex-offender” is strong and this makes it difficult for those who have been convicted of sexual crimes to reenter society following incarceration. In fact many communities have rules in place that prevent sex-offenders from living in certain areas—within so many miles of a school, for example. Miracle Village was established to address the problem of sex-offender reentry. This video offers a tour of the village that houses up to 100 offenders.

Audio Links

  • This American Life 207: Special Ed 
    This program is composed of stories about people who were told that they're different. Some of them were comfortable with it. Some didn't understand it. And some understood, but didn't like it.  Act one is a series of interviews with three of the people involved in making the documentary How’s Your News?, about a team of developmentally disabled people who travel across the country doing man-on-the-street interviews. The interviewer talks to two of the developmentally disabled reporters, Susan Harrington and Joe Simon, and to the film's non-disabled director, Arthur Bradford. Act two we hear from a mother and her son. By age seven, he'd had heart failure and been diagnosed as bipolar. And then—after a period as the world's youngest Stephen Hawking fan—he got better.  In the third act a woman tells the story of her developmentally disabled brother Vincent, who one day quit his job and then quit everything else, mystifying everyone in his life.

  • 356: The Prosecutor 
    A lawyer in the Justice Department gets the professional opportunity of a lifetime: to be the lead prosecutor in one of the first high-profile terrorist cases since 9/11. But things go badly for him. His convictions get overturned, he loses his job, and he ends up on trial himself, in federal court.
     
  • Digital Music Sampling: Creativity Or Criminality? 
    This program explores the practice of “sampling”—using a snippet of another person’s recording, often a drumbeat or hook, as an element in the creation of a new piece of music. Sampling is integral to hip hop and rap music, but many consider it a criminal activity. This segment considers how we define the activity: is it collaboration or theft?
     
  • College and Partying (Think with Krys Boyd) 
    Sociologist Thomas Vander Ven talks with Krys Boyd about the reasons college students drink.

Web Resources

Professional Resources 

The study of deviant behavior has long been central to sociology, and it is the focus of affiliates of the American Sociological Association (ASA)

Data Resources

  • The Bureau of Justice Statistics 
    The Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) collects, analyzes, publishes, and disseminates statistics on crime, victims of crime, criminal offenders, and operations of justice systems at all levels of government throughout the United States. 
     
  • The National Institute of Justice 
    The National Institute of Justice’s Data Resources Program was established to ensure the preservation and availability of research and evaluation data collected through NIJ-funded research.
     
  • The National Criminal Justice Reference Service 
    The National Criminal Justice Reference Service (NCJRS) is a federally sponsored information clearinghouse for people around the country and the world involved with research, policy, and practice related to criminal and juvenile justice and drug control.
     
  • The Urban Ethnography of Latino Street Gangs 
    The Urban Ethnography of Latino Street Gangs site originally focused on Los Angeles and Ventura counties. It has expanded to include studies of street gangs in Albuquerque and Phoenix. The goal of this site is to find solutions, to share an ever-expanding body of data and literature on Latino street gangs, and to locate successful strategies for prevention and intervention with at-risk youths.

Other Resources

  • The Women’s Prison Association 
    The Women’s Prison Association (WPA) is a service and advocacy organization committed to helping women with criminal justice histories realize new possibilities for themselves and their families. Our program services make it possible for women to obtain work, housing, and health care; to rebuild their families; and to participate fully in civic life. Through the Institute on Women & Criminal Justice, WPA pursues a rigorous policy, advocacy, and research agenda to bring new perspectives to public debates on women and criminal justice.

  • The Innocence Project 
    The Innocence Project was founded in 1992 by Barry C. Scheck and Peter J. Neufeld at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University to assist prisoners who could be proven innocent through DNA testing. To date, 273 people in the United States have been exonerated by DNA testing, including 17 who served time on death row. These people served an average of 13 years in prison before exoneration and release. The Innocence Project’s full-time staff attorneys and Cardozo clinic students provide direct representation or critical assistance in most of these cases. The Innocence Project’s groundbreaking use of DNA technology to free innocent people has provided irrefutable proof that wrongful convictions are not isolated or rare events but instead arise from systemic defects. Now an independent nonprofit organization closely affiliated with Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University, the Innocence Project’s mission is nothing less than to free the staggering numbers of innocent people who remain incarcerated and to bring substantive reform to the system responsible for their unjust imprisonment.