A major component of the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA) was funding police academies, as well as college-level criminal justice and correctional curricula. In this sense, academicians held a powerful sway on theories of crime causation and control. Unfortunately, inherent in this process was the flawed FBI data under the leadership of J. Edgar Hoover and a “white supremacy” (WASP) male-dominated perspective long held by the college and university elite regardless of their political orientations. Consequently, an internal debate emerged among the academic elites regarding not only causes but outcomes of crime and deviance, based on their liberal or conservative leanings. The fallacy of this thinking was that both camps thought that they knew what was best for the lesser classes, those most impacted by crime and violence. This theoretical pontification dominated the post–civil rights, anti-war, LEAA era and became inculcated in the textbooks of the era. With the advent of federal largess, textbooks on criminology, criminal justice, delinquency, and deviant behavior flooded the academic market, along with their theories and research. Indeed, LEAA fostered the birth of an independent discipline of criminal justice along with doctoral-degree programs. Prior to this, graduate-level criminology programs were generally housed within sociology departments while lower-level police training programs were associated with police academies or community colleges, aka “cop shops.”
Richard Quinney came to represent the left-leaning element of radical sociologists as is evident of his critique of the LEAA:
The modern era of repression has been realized in the rationalization of crime control. The legal order itself, as a rationalized form of regulation, continues to demand the latest techniques of control. It is only logical, then, that science should come to serve the state’s interest in crime control. And this use of science makes the modern legal order the most repressive (and rational) that any society has known. American society today is well on the way to, or has already reached, what may well be called “the police state.” What we are experiencing is the “Americanization of 1984,” a police state brought to you with the aid of science and modern techniques of control. . . . The move to apply the latest in science and technology to crime control by the state was made in the mid-1960s with the President’s Crime Commission (the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice). The state’s application of science and technology to crime control was probably inevitable, however, given the tendency to rationalize all systems of management and control. . . . The message of the task force’s research and analysis is 1) that crime control must become more scientific, 2) that crime control must utilize the kind of science and technology that already serves the military, and 3) that the federal government must institute and support such a program. In the traditional view, science and technology primarily means new equipment. . . . The similarities between military operations and domestic crime control are made clear, and the Crime Commission is advised to pursue the militarization of crime control.1
The problem with the scientific approach, one that found its way into the textbooks of the time, was a flawed methodology that had plagued sociologists and criminologists since the early 1900s—the ex post facto analysis. The “positivists” school, in turn, supported the eugenicist movement within academia, especially the elitists “Ivy League-type” schools of the twentieth century. America’s academic elite built upon the social philosophers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries such as Emile Durkheim, Herbert Spencer, Georg Simmel, and Max Weber. This new theory class emerged mid-twentieth century with the works of Edwin Sutherland, Robert K. Merton, Donald Cressey, Richard Cloward, Daniel Glazer, Edwin Schur, Thorsten Sellin, Gresham Sykes, Marvin Wolfgang, and others. Together these theories created a justification for the existing social order, providing a foundation for more effective social control over the inferior classes, often described as being impoverished, semiliterate, lazy, and “on the dole.” The idea was that “these people” were inferior and posed a threat to the larger society in terms of violence and economics. The idea that the underclasses may be due to an unfair social structure that served to perpetuate these circumstances was not seriously entertained by the major schools of social theory, although Robert K. Merton did offer a differential association model that was more sophisticated than that of Edwin Sutherland—one that addressed the likelihood of conformity relevant to one’s means to society’s success goals. The more conservative criminologists separated themselves from the more liberal-leaning sociologists of the time, creating their own academic association—the American Society of Criminology (ASC). The ASC was founded in Berkeley, California, in 1941 by August Vollmer, the city’s former chief of police who went on to retire as professor of police administration at the University of California. The initial goals of the ASC were 1) to associate officials engaged in professional police training at the college level; 2) to standardize the various police training curricula; 3) to standardize, insofar as possible, the subject matter of similar courses in the various schools; 4) to keep abreast of recent development and to foster research; 5) to disseminate information [journals, annual conferences]; 6) to elevate standards of police service; and 7) to stimulate the formation of police training schools in colleges throughout the nation. These goals and objectives are similar to the ones adopted by the LEAA component of the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act. In 1946 the organization was called the Society for the Advancement of Criminology, the forerunner to its current title—the ASC. Sociologists saw the ASC as an avenue for their research and it soon became dominated by theoreticians, leaving the police practitioners, the original audience, behind. The Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) emerged in 1963 in order to fill this void. The ACJS focuses more on police science and the role of the practitioner in both law enforcement and corrections while the ASC became more erudite, elitist, and theoretical. Both group of academicians subscribed to the positivists approach especially when LEAA funds (federal monies) became readily available in the 1970s.
The neo-positivists relied/rely heavily on emerging statistical methodologies, as the means to the end, instead of drawing on the volumes of work conducted during and immediately following WWII, such as Gunnar Myrdal’s study of post-slavery blacks in American society, and Samuel A. Stouffer’s group’s comprehensive study of American soldiers and how GIs coped under stress, or the work of Erich Fromm describing social conditions leading to alienation. With the Positivists, the focus is mainly on an inductive statistical study of a segment of crime in real time often relying on “canned” data—data that may, in fact, pass through layers of biased attrition prior to its final outcome. And from this biased attrition or questionable subjective “surveys,” contemporary criminologists infer to the larger population from which these subsamples are drawn, hence the Lombroso fallacy.
Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist/penologist and proponent of social Darwinism, purported an atavistic theory of potential violent criminals, one that closely supported Terman’s theory of innate human inferiority. The enduring quality of the Positive School was the easily recognizable physiological features of the inferior populace. J. Edgar Hoover, Harry Anslinger, and others readily applied this inherent inferiority to minorities, hence constituting the theory of a subculture of violence. According to the Positive School, the criminal is a throwback to a more primitive form of human being characterized by atavistic features. In Lombroso’s study, this included a large jaw, facial asymmetry, large ears, beady eyes—features that would readily identify the born criminal, allowing for preventive actions to be taken prior to their expressions of violence. Chester Gould aided J. Edgar Hoover in depicting the potential criminal as a social misfit, doing so in his long-running comic strip, Dick Tracy. Lombroso’s research was conducted on violent inmates incarcerated in Italian prisons. It was later disclosed that most of the inmates in his study were, in fact, of Sicilian ethnic heritage, a culture quite different from mainland Italy. Also omitted was the Sicilian “blood vengeance,” a cultural norm long held within their traditional tribal system of justice. The exposure of this methodological fallacy did little to deter the Positivists from continuing to promote their theories of a criminal subculture composed of inherently inferior humans, notably people of color.2
Indeed, studies at the University of Pennsylvania, a prominent Ivy League member, set the stage of a renewal of the Positive (evidence-based) School’s subculture of violence theme, under the direction of Thorsten Sellin, a prominent criminologist/sociologist of the twentieth century. Marvin Wolfgang did his sociology doctoral degrees at the University of Pennsylvania, where he later taught and directed similar doctoral research, under Thorsten Sellin, using police records, that is ex post facto analysis of “canned data,” and passing this off as viable empirical research. Given Sellin’s status in criminological sociology, the results of Wolfgang’s dissertation outcome became widely promulgated in sociology and criminology texts, at a time when criminal justice was blossoming as a popular major, due largely to the LEAA funds colleges and universities were receiving through grants. To illustrate, Marvin Wolfgang cited these dissertation results in a chapter, “Victim-Precipitated Criminal Homicide” in the popular Cressey and Ward textbook, Delinquency, Crime, and Social Process:
Empirical data for analysis of victim-precipitated homicides were collected from the files of the Homicide Squad of the Philadelphia Police Department, and included 588 consecutive cases of criminal homicide which occurred between January 1, 1948 and December 31, 1952. Because more than one person was sometimes involved in the slaying of a single victim, there was a total of 621 offenders responsible for the killing of 588 victims. The 588 criminal homicides provide sufficient background information to establish much about the nature of the victim-offender relationship. Of these cases, 150, or 26 percent, have been designated, on the basis of the previously stated definition, as VP [victim-precipitated] cases. The remaining 438, therefore, have been designated as non-VP cases, Because Negros and males have been shown by their high rates of homicide, assault against the person, etc., to be more criminally aggressive than whites and females, it may be inferred that there are more Negroes and males among VP victims than among non-VP victims. The data confirm this inference. Nearly 80 percent of VP cases compared to 70 percent of non-VP cases involve Negroes, a proportional difference that results in a significant association between race and VP homicide.3
Marvin Wolfgang
Marvin Wolfgang was a major influence within the field of criminal justice during the time when it was emerging as a separate discipline from its traditional roots as a subset of sociology. It was the timing of these circumstances, coupled with Wolfgang’s privileged education at the University of Pennsylvania and the ensuing civil rights movement, which ensured him his position of prominence, albeit questionable, in criminology and criminal justice.
Born on November 14, 1924, in Millersburg, Pennsylvania, a rural Dutch community, Wolfgang first attended Pennsylvania State University, as the first in his family to attend college. Service in the U.S. Army during World War II interrupted his education. However, this experience introduced him to Italy, where his research endeavors and interests took him during his professional career. Once released from the army, Wolfgang continued his college education at Dickerson College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, graduating with a bachelor of arts degree in 1948. He then pursed his masters of arts degree at the University of Pennsylvania, earning an MA in 1950 and continuing on for the PhD under the tutelage of Thorsten Sellin, one of the leading criminologists at the time. Wolfgang received the PhD in 1955 and married Lenora Poden, a faculty at Lehigh University, in 1957. Wolfgang remained at the University of Pennsylvania for his entire career, spanning forty-five years, benefitting greatly from his affiliation with Thorsten Sellin. One of these benefits was serving as president of the American Academy of Political and Social Sciences from 1972 until 1998, where Sellin was the long-term editor of the academy’s journal, The Annals, serving in this capacity from September 1929 until July 1968. Wolfgang went on to direct the Sellin Criminology Center for Studies in Criminology and Criminal Law from 1962 until his death in 1998. He also served a term as president of the ASC and was the recipient of numerous awards.
Nonetheless, Marvin Wolfgang’s fame and shame centered about his doctoral dissertation research conducted under Sellin’s supervision. His secondary (ex post facto) analysis of Philadelphia’s homicide data from January 1, 1948, until December 31, 1952 (which was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in 1958) propelled Wolfgang to the national scene and prominence within the fast-growing field of criminal justice. Patterns in Criminal Homicide, a book based on the 588 homicide cases presented in his dissertation, made it into all the major criminal justice textbooks of the time, overshadowing other competent research, including that of his mentor, Thorsten Sellin, as well as the works of Eleanor and Sheldon Glueck, Frank Tannenbaum, Stuart Palmer, Robert E. Park, John Dollard, Richard Quinney, Joe Himes, Franklin Frazer, and Kenneth Clark, to mention a few. His research, based on biased data, coupled with the unraveling of social discontent (civil rights movement; anti–Vietnam War demonstrations) made Wolfgang a leader of the emerging conservative “law and order” movement that inadvertently demonized blacks and other minorities, including protesting students.
Essentially Wolfgang’s (1958) homicide study along with that of his student Menachem Amir’s (1967) rape study became classics within criminal justice, serving as unchallenged models of society’s most serious forms of violence. Both studies came out of the criminology program at the University of Pennsylvania and involved secondary analysis of Philadelphia police data. From his data set, Wolfgang found that 621 offenders killed 588 victims, and that 26 percent of these cases (150) involved victim precipitation, thus concluding that homicides, in general, are characterized by: 1) Negro victims; 2) Negro offenders; 3) male victims, and the like. Amir’s data (for the calendar years 1958 and 1960) concluded that blacks are overrepresented in rape statistics, both as victims and as offenders, and that extremely violent rapes usually involve black men and white women.
Both these studies have been widely cited in criminal justice, criminology, deviance, and social problems texts, among others, with attention usually limited to their summary characteristics and with little attention paid to the methodology or the limitation of these studies. These studies were portrayed as being representative of the United States in general. A consequence of this dissemination has been a general misconception among college and university students, especially in white schools, across the nation and beyond. Hence, blacks are commonly associated with criminal violence such as murder and rape, contributing to the rapid emergence of racial profiling. Moreover, Wolfgang’s continued focus on the black subculture of violence, based on these oversimplified profiles, contributed greatly to a general fear of blacks by whites within American society, influencing passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act (PL 90-351) in 1968 and subsequently to the overrepresentation of blacks in U.S. prisons and on death row.
The limitations of Wolfgang’s dissertation data and subsequent research is that it did not attempt to control on intervening factors such as racism and prejudice within the Philadelphia police department at this time, or the biases of J. Edgar Hoover as director of the FBI who collected, compiled, and disseminated local Index Crime data in his annual Uniform Crime Report. It is now common knowledge that the Uniform Crime Report data was biased and unreliable prior to 1958 and that Frank Rizzo, the chief of police of Philadelphia and later mayor, was a racist. Francis “Frank” Rizzo was cut from the same cloth as J. Edgar Hoover and had the same racist bias. He joined the Philadelphia police department during WWII (1943) and served for twenty-eight years. He was the police commissioner from 1967–1971 and later served as mayor of Philadelphia (1972–1980). Rizzo’s relationship with the African American population in Philadelphia was notorious, a factor that helped get him elected mayor. Under his leadership, black neighborhoods were targeted, leading to a disproportionate number of arrests and convictions, a fact that greatly skewed the data Wolfgang used for his infamous theories portraying blacks as violent-prone and living in subcultures of violence due to their inherent inferiority, hence a population that police needed to be wary of.
Ironically, Marvin Wolfgang, who strongly associated himself with the Italian school of criminology, replicated the Lombroso fallacy—that is, inferring from a selective, biased data set to the general population. In 1967, Wolfgang and his Italian colleague, Franco Ferracuti, put forth their work on the subculture of violence, again using black Americans as an example of this phenomenon. Absent from their work was mention of the surge of violence precipitated by law enforcement and the military (National Guard) mainly toward nonviolent protests by African Americans. Wolfgang’s work remained unchallenged until the Department of Justice initiated and funded the Education Project in Criminal Justice in 1977 at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY-A). This program was intended to develop a minority criminal justice curriculum to be used in college and university programs. Toward this end, twenty “college instructors,” representing minority faculty from across the country, were to be tutored by a select group of major professors from leading criminal justice programs. The major block of college instructors (sixteen) represented the country’s HBCUs (Historical Black Colleges and Universities) while the major professors represented the SUNY-A faculty and other associates led by Marvin Wolfgang. The condescending arrogance of Wolfgang and company with their contention that they were there to teach the minority perspective led to a revolt among the minority participants (author included). The program’s outcome assessment stated that: “the patronizing elitism of the Major Professors and their associates obviated the two-way communication necessary for a project like this to succeed. The program evaluators, the National Council of Black Lawyers, concurred with this assessment. This project provided notice to the white-dominant, basically conservative, criminal justice educators, practitioners, and organizations (ASC, ACJS, and the like) that the Wolfgang model was not a viable one and that it would continue to be challenged. Marvin Wolfgang died without publicly acknowledging his negative impact on minority justice in the United States.4
Minorities and Criminal Justice Curriculum
The Reagan era as governor of California (1967–1975) in conjunction with Richard M. Nixon’s Presidency (1969–1974) greatly influenced the conservative movement toward policing in the United States at this time. Their influence carried into academia, leading to an explosion of “cop shop” programs funded by the LEAA. Colleges and universities in conservative states, public and private, began removing criminology from sociology and social sciences, instead creating new criminal justice, security, and police science departments. One such program was the federally funded “College Instructors Program Education Project in Criminal Justice” held at SUNY-A in 1978 and 1979. French described this project in a 1987 special minority justice issue of the Quarterly Journal of Ideology:
Minority justice, long an area of academic interest, spilled into the public areas following the bloody riots of the 1960s (Bronx, Watts, Detroit, Newark . . . ). Adverse public reaction led to numerous blue-ribbon commissions including the 1967 President’s Crime Commission Report, the Kerner Commission (Riot Commission), and the Eisenhower Commission (Violence Commission). The ensuing authorization for controlling these disruptive forces (minorities, anti-war activists) was passage of the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968. Its enforcement arm, the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, began in 1969, (LEAA). As an agency within the Department of Justice, the LEAA provided federal influence at the state and local level throughout the United States, an experiment that lasted from 1969 to 1980.
During this time, universal police standards were established as well as a national criminal information network among other positive contributions. These federal monies were also funneled into research and training programs bringing the Justice Department influence into colleges and universities. Unfortunately, in their quest for these lucrative federal monies, academic quality was often compromised with the Federal Justice Department becoming the weakest program within the school. Many of these degrees from the Associate of Arts to the Doctor of Philosophy became known as “Mickey Mouse” degrees. Consequently, a greater proportion of criminal justice practitioners, notably in law enforcement and corrections, acquired college and/or graduate degrees. Besides, during this era there emerged a substantial influx of new criminal justice departments to meet this new demand.
At the same time the minority perspective was shouting to be heard. Certainly, this was not an unwarranted response given that this federal windfall was predicated upon minority unrest. Nonetheless, attempts to introduce a viable minority component within criminal justice curriculum fell short of any realistic epistemological expectation with these programs rarely becoming a permanent part of the regular curriculum. In 1978, a nationwide minority project was conducted at the State University of New York at Albany (SUNY Project). However, without federal incentives for even token attention to minority issues and minority justice, since 1980, a marked decline in minority studies and the minority perspective has occurred within academe. This decline is especially noticeable in criminal justice programs and at professional meetings such as the Academy of Criminal Justice Sciences (ACJS) and the American Society of Criminology (ASC).5
Instead of providing a nationwide minorities in criminal justice curriculum, the SUNY Project (LEAA funded at over $400,000 per annum) failed due to its elitist pretense that Marvin Wolfgang and company were going to tutor minority faculty from mainly minority-serving colleges and universities on how to teach their African American, Hispanic, Asian, and American Indian students the ideal tenets of criminal justice, law enforcement, and corrections. The program was highly stratified by design, with the mainly white “Major and Associate Professors” instructing the mainly minority college instructors on how to teach criminal justice in minority-serving institutions of higher education. Marvin Wolfgang, Donald J. Newman, Fred Cohen, Michael Hindelang, and Marquetite Warren were the “Major Professors,” assisted by their chosen “Associate Professors” who were not SUNY-A faculty: Roy Austin (Pennsylvania State University); Robert Jackson (Rockhurst College); Gary Perlstein (Portland State University); Vincent Webb (University of Nebraska–Omaha); Laurin Wollan Jr. (Florida State University); Patrick McAnany (University of Illinois–Chicago Circle); William Wilbanks (Florida International University); and Tom Phelps (Sacramento State University). Roy Austin was the prominent black among the “Professor Associates.” The twenty “College Instructors,” on the other hand, comprised of nine African American males and three African American females; two Hispanics (Cuban and Mexican descent); an Asian (Chinese descent); an Arab; and four non-Hispanic whites. The black “Instructors” were from HBCUs, as was one of the white instructors and the Arab instructor (S. N. Wailes—Jackson State University; Khayrallah Safar—Florida A&M University). The Chicano was from Cal State–Long Beach) while the white-Hispanic was from Florida International University. The Asian was from Chaminade University in Hawaii. Clearly, the Jim Crow style of rank and status did little to facilitate a cooperative and productive milieu. Needless to say, the “College Instructors” along with Roy Austin and staff assistants, Daniel Georges and Scott Christianson, challenged Wolfgang and company on their ownership of theories of minority justice, especially the concepts of the violence-prone minority male and the inherent racial nature of subcultures of violence.6
The Quinn Bill in Massachusetts illustrates the level of abuse that occurred within certain academic settings relevant to LEAA funding for police training. Established during the LEAA era (1970), the Police Career Incentive Pay Program (Quinn Bill) has come to represent not only “status inflation” but bogus degrees offered by otherwise legitimate schools of higher education. Its end-oriented focus (pay raises) led to the proliferation of phony extended university campuses, mainly located near or at police stations and staffed by fellow police offers serving as “adjunct faculty.” With both enrollment and payment guaranteed, many colleges and universities in Massachusetts and surrounding states quickly abandoned academic ethics and standards for this financial (cash cow) windfall. Incredible as it seems, given that these programs apparently underwent both state and regional accreditation reviews and constant criticism and exposes in the Boston Globe, these diploma mills continue in some form to the present.
One of the worst offenders was Western New England College, which apparently inherited their “cop shop” program from New Hampshire College (now Southern New Hampshire University). It had twelve off-campus sites at the turn of the century, administered through its Office of Continuing Education, with eleven off-campus sites offering either the bachelor of science or master of sciences degrees, or both, in criminal justice administration. The exception was the program in Natick, Massachusetts, where the campus site is the Natick Army Laboratories. The Boston Globe exposed a number of problems with these programs, including the fact that many, if not most, of these courses are taught by part-time adjunct instructors, often fellow police officers. Moreover, the Globe pointed out the lack of quality control over course content and delivery while credit is liberally given for nonacademic “lifetime experiences” and for regular training such as attendance at the Police Academy, CPR courses, and the like. The Globe’s exposure of this sham finally led to a review in 2000, thirty years after the Quinn Bill. Ironically, the long-delayed review was by the Massachusetts Board of Education, the same board that supervises the curriculum of Harvard, Tuffs, Boston College, Boston University, Brandies University, the University of Massachusetts campuses (Amherst, Boston, Lowell), and Northeastern University.
The politics associated with the Quinn program is equally interesting. First, the president of the University of Massachusetts campuses at this time was former Senate President William Bulger, the brother of the now-captured and convicted notorious James “Whitey” Bulger, former crime boss of the Winter Hill Gang. William Bulger lost his lucrative position when, in December 2002, he pleaded the Fifth Amendment during a federal subpoena when asked if he knew the whereabouts of his brother. Facing serious cuts statewide due to Governor Mitt Romney’s proposed budget, the Quinn Bill was spared mainly due to the support Romney received from the law enforcement/police lobby. Hence, police continued to receive a guaranteed 10 percent raise for obtaining an associate degree, 20 percent increase for the bachelor’s degree, and between 25 and 30 percent increase for a graduate (master’s) degree, which many obtained from these fraudulent programs, adding an average of ten thousand dollars a year to their salary in addition to padding their pension as well. The pay increase was in addition to free tuition, costing the commonwealth tens of millions of dollars extra per year for bogus, empty degrees.7 The continued popularity of criminal justice and police sciences degrees continues unabated throughout academia, again with many being taught by adjunct (aka clinical faculty) instructors, many with law enforcement or judicial experience (JDs) but with minimal academic credentials, certainly not sufficient for regular tenure-track positions. Unfortunately, many initially saw the LEAA as providing incentives for better qualified law enforcement and correctional professionals so that they could transcend the conservative, often racist and sexists, biases long associated with these practitioners.
The “Blaming-the-Victim” Fallacy
The Wolfgang minority violence perspective was cemented at the 1978 SUNY Project. He became the prophet of academic racism, adding another important level of support for the Hoover/Anslinger neo-Jim Crow racist bias within law enforcement. The SUNY Project was Wolfgang’s venue for recruiting his disciples from within academia and both the ASC and the ACJS. The Wolfgang followers at the SUNY Project included “Major” and “Associate Professors” and at least one “College Instructor.” The Wolfgang perspective also transcended academic disciplines, including psychology, public administration, and history, along with sociology, political sciences, and the newly emerging criminal justice and justice studies programs. This interdisciplinary approach allowed for the generation of their own data base promulgated through their “official” journals. The journal, Criminology, began in 1962, at the beginning of the Wolfgang era. Its editorial advisory board affiliations are a good listing of conservative “cop shop” colleges and universities, those that are most likely to be awarded federal research grants. In 2017, this included: Arizona State University; University at Albany (formerly SUNY-A); University of Missouri–St. Louis; Florida State University; University of Cincinnati; University of New Mexico; Pennsylvania State University; University of Texas, Austin; University of New Hampshire; Sam Huston State University; Rutgers University; University of Maryland; University of Miami; George Mason University; the University of California–Davis; and the like, in addition to Simon Frazer University, the University of Montreal, and the University of Toronto in Canada, and the U.S. Marshals service.8
It is surprising that the Hoover/Anslinger/Wolfgang race and violence perspective continues to have such a hold throughout American society, especially within criminal justice programs, law enforcement, the judiciary, and corrections, especially since there were important social psychology studies that clearly debunked these theories. Kenneth Clark’s study in the 1950s was inadvertently supported with Philip Zimbardo’s 1971 imprisonment study conducted at Stanford University. In his study, Zimbardo showed that it is the circumstances of the situation that leads to abuse of power over others under our control, abuses that engender cruel and violent behaviors. Extrapolating from this experiment, conducted with white, upper-class, college youth, similar outcomes would likely result regardless of race, ethnic, sectarian, or social class. Other social psychologists, from both sociology and psychology disciplines, have written on the psychologically devastating effects of poverty, especially that forced upon minorities by the larger dominant society. Using Zimbardo’s research outcomes, whites forced into similar situations would face equal challenges. Robert K. Merton’s paradigm of social adaptations offered two choices for the desperate entrapped in ghetto-like environments—“retreatism” (drugs, alcohol, and the like) or “rebellion” (gangs, crime, delinquency, and so on). Ostensibly, these socially engineered ghetto-environments create the same problems that Wolfgang, Hoover, and Anslinger predicted—hence, a self-filling prophecy and a call for a better-armed police. A greater problem is that Wolfgang and company portrayed the marginalized, often alienated, young minority male as reflecting all members of this ethnicity, leading to any male of color being suspected of being not only criminal but potentially violent. This, perhaps more than any other factor, has fueled the current Black Lives Matter movement, as well as the anti-Hispanic and anti-Muslim furor contaminating the U.S. image throughout the world.9