By: Dan Stageman, PhD – Director of Research Operations in the Office for the Advancement of Research at CUNY – John Jay College.

I began drafting a speculative blog entry about the Trump Administration’s likely actions on immigration enforcement before I caught the news of yesterday’s executive orders on the subject. That entry began with some thoughts on the uncertainty and unpredictability of the new administration’s actions in the immigration arena or any other. Just 24 hours later, those introductory paragraphs read like clueless optimism – the sort of hopeful, best-case-scenario thinking that many of us have continued to indulge in defiance of all evidence to the contrary.

As of January 25^th, I’m ready to declare myself officially done trying to find silver linings. What is left for advocates and others concerned with the well-being of America’s immigrant communities is to gird for a long and bitter fight. As I begin to shape my own part in this fight, the anxiety around where to get the most return on investment for my limited time, energy, and expertise is profound. I don’t think there are any easy answers to this dilemma, but the time-honored exhortation to “think globally, act locally” has particular relevance in the context of an immigration enforcement regime that looks set to outdo all prior efforts to involve local law enforcement agencies as a “force multiplier.” Trump’s “deportation force” – an accurate-enough label for the planned trebling of the ranks of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents, a glaring exception to an overall federal hiring freeze – will take considerable time to implement. In the meantime, he has clearly signaled his intention to rely on local law enforcement agencies to quickly ramp up deportation efforts, to a level that will likely make the record-setting pace of expulsions reached under President Obama’s first term seem humane by comparison.

In my last essay on this topic, I speculated that the Trump Administration might choose to take the broadest possible interpretation of section 287g of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, allowing it to ‘deputize’ any interested local law enforcement agency by signing a memorandum of agreement including the bare minimum of training and oversight. Trump’s January 25^th executive order in fact goes much further, making a blanket declaration empowering local and state police to “perform the functions of immigration officers in relation to the investigation, apprehension, or detention” of undocumented or deportable immigrants, “under section 287(g) of the INA, or otherwise.”

It remains to be seen how the Trump administration and potential local partners will interpret these provisions, just as it remains to be seen where and how they will be challenged by states and localities, in practice or in court. My own prior work on local immigration enforcement partnerships leads me to believe that local enforcement will be restarted (or ramped up, where it has been ongoing under 287g “jail enforcement” agreements signed with the Obama Administration) first – and with the most significant impact and potential harm to immigrant communities – in jurisdictions that fit a few key criteria. First, these “early adopter” jurisdictions will be headed by the same chief executives (most commonly elected county sheriffs) who signed 287g memorandums of agreement in the past. Second, they will be jurisdictions that started deportation proceedings for significant numbers of immigrant arrestees under these programs in the past. And third, they will be jurisdictions that have clear incentive(s) for directly involving their personnel in immigration enforcement at the local level. These incentives can be politically cynical or ideologically symbolic, but they are often straightforwardly financial: many of the same jurisdictions that have held 287g enforcement agreements in the past also host private/for-profit immigrant detention facilities to which they maintain close ties, or detain immigrants themselves under potentially lucrative Intergovernmental Service Agreements (IGSAs) under which ICE pays the jurisdiction a set per-day fee for each immigrant detained.

Using these and other characteristics, I believe we can anticipate with some accuracy the first round of jurisdictions that will move forward with local immigration enforcement efforts under cooperative agreements with the Trump Administration. We can also make informed judgements about the potential harm these agreements will pose to immigrant communities residing within the jurisdictions in question – and the potential for legislative, legal, political, or practical challenges brought by advocates to mitigate this harm.

In an effort to help advocates better focus their limited resources on effective and broadly impactful challenges to the Trump Administration’s local immigration enforcement efforts, I have begun pulling together the relevant data that I believe will help us make these judgements. This is the first entry in a series I have planned to highlight “five jurisdictions to watch” under the Trump administration’s local enforcement partnership efforts.

There are of course many more than five jurisdictions where ramped up local enforcement efforts are likely to harm immigrant communities, and even the most comprehensive statistical analysis would be limited in the predictive power it could provide. The purpose of organizing this series as a “listicle” is an acquiescence both to blogging culture and to the limits of my own time. It is not my intention, however, to promote an academic project, or protect and withhold privileged academic data. On the contrary, I plan to post the database as a public data tool, and I hope that sharing it in this and other forums helps to generate discussion on ways to make it more useful as a tool for advocates. Please contact me (or contribute a public comment) if you have any thoughts on how to do that.

Each jurisdiction profile will include the full list of facts and figures that justify its inclusion, along with a discussion of its previous involvement in immigration enforcement, its local political and state legislative context, its immigrant communities, and thoughts on what advocates could do (in many cases what they are already doing) to challenge or mitigate the potential harm of local enforcement. The five jurisdictions that I will profile are:

• Orange County, California (Sheriff Sandra Hutchens)
• Etowah County, Alabama (Sheriff Todd Entrekin)
• Frederick County, Maryland (Sheriff Charles Jenkins)
• Alamance County, North Carolina (Sheriff Terry S. Johnson)
• Gwinett County, Georgia (Sheriff Butch Conway)

Time permitting, I will also include “(dis)honorable mention” profiles of Monmouth County, New Jersey (Sheriff Shaun Golden) and Butler County, Ohio (Sheriff Richard K. Jones). Note that these jurisdictions do not simply represent the top jurisdictions in terms of likelihood or likely harm of local immigration enforcement; as noted above, they are included based on my own best judgement of the available data. I’ve also made an effort to include jurisdictions from across a broad regional spectrum, to highlight the reality that this phenomenon is not exclusive to any given region – and the equally important fact that federal-state tensions on immigration are reflected in parallel state-local tensions. Thus our first profile will focus on Orange County, the lone 287g holdout in what is arguably the most pro-immigrant state in the nation.

Those who are interested should watch this space. I will post these profiles as I complete them, singly or in multiples as time permits. In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to comment or contact me with any thoughts, questions, or requests.

Daniel L. Stageman, PhD is Director of Research Operations at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice. He is also a criminologist whose scholarship focuses on making sense of America’s punitive approach to immigrants. He can be contacted at dstageman(at)jjay.cuny.edu

Ahead of the upcoming publication of her book, Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality: Examining Attitudes across the Globe, Research Operations Assistant Laura Lutgen took the opportunity to interview Professor Amy Adamczyk. 

Laura Lutgen (LL): I was told by another doctoral student that you worked in fashion prior to academia. Is that true? What brought you into sociology? What brought you to John Jay?

Amy Adamczyk (AA): Yes, it is true. My first degree is an ASS in Fashion Design. As a kid, I dreamed of moving to the city and becoming a designer.  My mom taught me how to sew and I eventually found myself studying at the Fashion Institute of Technology in New York City.  After obtaining my associate’s degree I worked for a few years in the fashion industry, but it was nothing like what I expected (i.e., Devil Wears Prada).  I therefore decided to go back to school and since I was living in NYC I selected one of the local colleges –Hunter College.  While I was there I fell in love with sociology and my professors encouraged me to consider graduate school.  From there I got a MA from the University of Chicago.  I then enrolled in the Graduate Center’s (GC) Ph.D. Program in Sociology.  However, I was interested in the sociology of religion and there were few professors doing that work at the time. After obtaining an en-route MA degree from the GC I transferred to Pennsylvania State University where I worked closely with Roger Finke, who is a sociologist of religion. After graduating with my doctorate my first job was at Wayne State University in Detroit.  When I was at the Graduate Center I had grown fond of NYC.  While I was at Wayne State I decided to see if I could get a position in NYC.  That year John Jay College was hiring a lot of assistant professors and in 2007 I came here.

LL: It seems like you’ve done a vast amount of research on religion, sexuality, and terrorism/extremism (not always intertwined, of course). Where did it all begin? How has your earlier work influenced your current work and your next chapter (no pun intended)?

AA: My first subarea of interest was the sociology of religion. I grew up in rural Wisconsin on a dairy farm (my parents were part of the back-to-the-land movement).  My parents were very religious, but politically liberal.  There was a lot of life and death on the farm and as a kid I thought a lot about the cycle of life.  This was supplemented with ideas from our conservative Protestant faith. I was always interested in how religion shapes people’s attitudes and behaviors, so it is fitting that this became one of my major areas of study.

As I have studied religion I have become increasingly interested in how it shapes people’s deviant attitudes and behaviors. Religion often limits minor deviant acts and illegal behaviors and similarly shapes people’s views on issues like homosexuality, abortion, minor substance use, and premarital sex. I typically study attitudes and behaviors that are on the edge of being illegal.  Terrorism too can be similar to these other issues. In some places behaviors that might otherwise be described as “terrorism”, may be seen as political protest or freedom fighting.  It can depend on the context. I am curious about how the larger social, economic, national, and historical context shapes the way these behaviors (e.g., political protest, same-sex sexual relations, abortion, etc.,) get viewed and the characteristics influencing the likelihood that people will engage in them.

LL: Tell us about your book, Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality. What sparked your motivation for such a project, both in terms of the subject matter and methodology but also in terms of taking on such a large endeavor? Have you always seen yourself as wanting to write a book? What are you most exited about and what are some of the key take-aways?

AA: Public opinion about homosexuality varies substantially around the world. While residents in some nations have embraced gay rights as human rights, people in many other countries find homosexuality unacceptable. In the book I use survey data from almost ninety societies, case studies of various countries, content analysis of newspaper articles, and in-depth interviews to examine how individual and country characteristics influence acceptance of homosexuality.  The survey data show that cross-national differences in opinion can be explained by three primary factors -the strength of democratic institutions, the level of economic development, and the religious context of the places where people live.  The world’s poorest, least democratic and most religious countries are more likely to have laws that punish same-sex sexual behaviors and have a high proportion of residents who disapprove of homosexuality.  While the United States has high levels of economic development and a strong democracy, it has been slower to change its laws and attitudes about homosexuality than some of its European counterparts, in part, because the US is a more religious country.

While some books have been published on the factors shaping attitudes about homosexuality in the US, I do not know of any book-length study that examines the factors shaping attitudes across nations.  I published a journal article on this issue several years ago in Social Science Research (Adamczyk and Pitt 2009) and it remains one of the most cited articles in the journal and is the most cited article I have written.  That helped give me the confidence to move forward.  I also got some grants and fellowships that made doing the research feasible, especially the fieldwork in Taiwan and content analysis of 800 newspaper articles, where the help of doctoral student coders was needed.

Disciplines vary in the extent to which researchers write books versus academic articles.  The humanities publish the most books and the natural sciences mostly focus on journal articles. The social sciences are in the middle. Until now almost all of my research has been published in peer-reviewed journal articles (35) and reports (10). I wanted to write a book because I thought I could offer hundreds of pages of insight on this topic and I wanted to reach people outside of academia.  I also got a lot of encouragement from my colleagues, editor, and friends.

LL: You’ve traveled quite extensively – Europe, Asia, Africa. Tell us about these experiences. What was your most rewarding experience, both professionally and personally?

AA: I have been fortunate to have a lot of opportunities for international travel.  Over the last five years I have spent time in Europe (e.g., Italy, Germany, Poland, Switzerland, France, the Netherlands), Africa (Kenya, Uganda, South Africa, etc.), and Asia (e.g., Taiwan, China, Indonesia, Thailand, Vietnam, etc.).  A lot of this travel is related to my research.  For example, one of the chapters in my book focuses on Taiwan.  I spent a couple of months there doing research for the book which entailed talking with journalists, religious leaders, academics, activists, and political leaders about how they thought the Taiwanese viewed homosexuality. I really learned a lot and made several friends. The research assistant (Angel Liao) that I hired to help me is now working on her doctorate in sociology at the CUNY Graduate Center.

In addition to some trips where I really got to know residents, I have had some fun adventures. About five years ago I participated in a workshop in Uganda where I also had a chance to go white water rafting on the Nile which at the time had some 5-grade rapids.  I still have dreams/nightmares about that experience.

LL: As a doctoral student, what advice as a senior professor would you give someone at my level? Any tips/tricks you’ve come across? What are some things we can do now that will benefit us throughout our academic career and, especially, in preparing and taking on the academic job market?

AA: My areas of research are really intriguing to me and I am genuinely curious about the research questions I investigate. I would urge students to find something about which they are passionate since there are aspects of this job that are really boring.  Being genuinely curious will help you get through the less exciting parts.

I think it is important to also remember that everyone gets rejected and that a big part of this job is getting grants and papers rejected.  Nevertheless, you have to keep submitting, as every now and then something hits, and over time you get better at both handling the rejection and developing successful projects. Having good collaborators also helps.

Finally, the job market for professors is tight.  If doctoral students want to study something that is a little esoteric (e.g., sociology of religion) it would be a good idea to pair that interest with a more popular area of study like criminology. In the end you want to be able to enjoy what you do and get paid for it, so it is a good to be at least somewhat practical.

Our latest blog entry comes from Dan Stageman, Director of Research Operations for the Office for the Advancement of Research at John Jay College. 

By:  Dan Stageman, 11/15/16

On the morning of Wednesday November 9^th, I shook off the cobwebs of a thoroughly sleepless night to drive my partner and children to John Jay College and successfully defend my dissertation with them looking on. I had even prepared for the proud moment by reprinting my business cards in anticipation of my success; what I hadn’t prepared for was to present the accumulated insights of seven years’ work on the deportation of American immigrants the day after the most shocking presidential election result of my lifetime.

I had no illusion that the study of deportation could ever be a dry academic exercise; nothing that so profoundly affects the lives of so many Americans ever could be. I was, however, expecting to approach my work as scholarship first and foremost: a well-earned break until the New Year, followed by redoubled efforts to submit parts of my dissertation for publication in academic journals, and revise others into a book with a reputable university press.

These plans are now on hold. The implications of my work for immigrant communities across the US insist upon a different approach, and a more immediate kind of discussion. Most importantly, I believe that many of the predictions and expectations I have read since the election have the wrong idea about the incoming administration’s approach to fulfilling the President-Elect’s recent pronouncements on deportation. Specifically, in widely reported comments during his interview for the November 13 edition of 60 Minutes, the President-Elect had the following to say about his administration’s immediate deportation plans:

What we are going to do is get the people that are criminal and have criminal records, gang members, drug dealers, we have a lot of these people, probably two million, it could be even three million, we are getting them out of our country or we are going to incarcerate. But we’re getting them out of our country, they’re here illegally.

Leaving aside the reality that there aren’t two million undocumented immigrants with criminal records for Trump to deport, National Immigration Forum Executive Director Ali Noorani notes in an interview with USA Today that the President-Elect “would need congressional approval to hire more […] Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents” – an expansion of federal bureaucracy that might be a hard sell to a congress that has vowed to slash government spending – but “doesn’t need any new money to change the focus of the immigration agents who are already in place.”

While it is heartening to see immigration advocates like Mr. Noorani treating the President-Elect’s campaign rhetoric about a national ‘deportation force’ with rational circumspection, his continued focus on ICE enforcement activity misses an important consideration: the necessary tools are already in place to effect a massive ramp up of deportations by relying on local law enforcement agencies to take the lead on apprehension – and potentially contribute to the resulting need for increased detention capacity as well. Not only are these tools already in place, but so is a pre-existing incentive structure to encourage local law enforcement agencies to put them to use.

My research focuses on these pre-existing federal-local immigration enforcement partnerships, and the incentive structures that give local governments, and the people who run them, self-interested justifications to apprehend and detain undocumented immigrants in their communities and set them on the road to deportation. I found that, of the approximately 1.5 million deportations carried out during the Obama administration’s first term (2009-12), at least a third (500 thousand) began with a local law enforcement agency apprehension. Two programs – the 287g program,and Secure Communities – made this level of local law enforcement participation possible.

What are the incentives for local governments to participate in these programs? There are many.  County Sheriffs enter into these agreements for political gain, pursuing nativist votes by tapping into anti-immigrant sentiment. New Jersey’s current Lieutenant Governor Kim Guadagno launched her political career by running for Monmouth County Sheriff – a campaign that she won on a promise (later fulfilled) to enter the county into a 287g agreement if elected. Others, like former Hall County (Georgia) Sheriff Steve Cronic, combined political motivations with financial ones: a contract with the Corrections Corporation of America provided the ostensible economic benefits of siting the North Georgia Detention Center within the heart of the county, while a 287g agreement provided the means to fill its beds with immigrant detainees.

These federal-local partnership enforcement programs are not going away, and the incentives for local governments to enter into them will only become stronger under the Trump administration.Calls like that of National Day Laborer Organizing Network Executive Director Pablo Alvarado for President Obama to use his remaining time in office to “sever the link between police and ICE that his administration created” are unlikely to have the intended effect of “innoculat[ing] against a domestic human rights crisis[.]” While it is true that the Obama administration relied heavily on these programs to ramp up US deportations to their highest ever levels during his first term in office, the law that makes them possible dates to the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) passed by Congress in 1996.

I believe that it is this law and its possible interpretations that will allow the incoming administration a wide latitude to involve local law enforcement in the promised mass deportation effort. Section 287(g) begins with the following language:

[ICE] may enter into a written agreement with a State, or any political subdivision of a State, pursuant to which an officer or employee of the State or subdivision, who is determined by [ICE] to be qualified to perform a function of an immigration officer in relation to the investigation, apprehension, or detention of aliens in the United States (including the transportation of such aliens across State lines to detention centers), may carry out such function at the expense of the State or political subdivision and to the extent consistent with State and local law.

The parameters of such agreements, or the training that local law enforcement officers require under them, are left ambiguous. Notwithstanding the established practice of ICE under the Obama administration (or the GW Bush administration prior to that), it is certainly conceivable that a Trump administration could severely reduce the rigor of established training requirements, along with the strictures laid out in ICE’s current Memorandum of Agreement template, leaving a loose and undemanding structure to induce local law enforcement agencies to join. The new administration could further incentivize these agreements through the use of Intergovernmental Service Agreements(IGSAs) that reimburse local jails and related facilities for detaining immigrants – a situation that looks likely to lead to an explosion of new management contracts for the Correctional Corporation of America and its competitors in the private/for-profit prison industry.

I’ve found in my research that it’s possible to make empirical predictions about the places where the incentive for local governments to enter into immigration enforcement agreements is highest – and consequently, where the most vulnerable immigrant communities are located. The first places where we should expect to see local enforcement ramping up in support of the Trump administration’s deportation efforts are small-towns and rural areas where undocumented immigrants are visible, visibly working, and just beginning to put down roots. These are places where nativism commonly runs strong, fueled not only by anxieties about immigrant domination of local labor markets, but also by ill-founded concerns about non-laboring immigrant dependents ‘stealing’ taxpayer supported government services.

For the policy and advocacy organizations tasked with supporting immigrant communities, the challenges presented by local enforcement are manifold. Effective legal challenges will be hampered at many levels and in many areas by a judicial system that appears likely to tilt in favor of the incoming administration. Shaming or otherwise shedding an unfavorable light on participating jurisdictions will be ineffective where nativist voters represent an electoral majority. Under the circumstances, the most promising strategies are likely to be those that focus on the direct and practical organization of immigrant communities themselves. Education efforts that help immigrants to know their rights when faced with imminent enforcement actions are one example. Efforts that help immigrant communities avoid common patterns of local enforcement are another, recognizing that roadblocks and other forms of traffic enforcement are a common approach.

Finally, a focus on local enforcement allows advocates and allies to organize counter-efforts in jurisdictions where governments and law enforcement agencies value close working relationships with immigrant communities in their efforts to prevent and respond to crime. The movement by immigrant supporting jurisdictions to refuse ICE detainer requests based on the 4^th Amendment interpretation laid out in Miranda-Olivares v. Clackamas County has only grown since that case was determined in 2014. While we should realistically expect this movement to come under sustained legal assault by the new administration, recent statements like that of LAPD Chief Charlie Beck that his department is “not going to work in conjunction with Homeland Security on deportation efforts” offer some reassurance that such efforts are antithetical to contemporary professionalism in police leadership.

Advocates should not, however, simply take law enforcement executives’ word for it. By most accounts, Charlie Beck is a dedicated law enforcement officer and a decent human being (see e.g. Joe Domanick’s recent history of LAPD reform Blue); nevertheless, his word remains that of a public figure on an issue of momentarily intense media scrutiny. As such, no individual or organization with a vested interest should operate under the assumption that it represents immutable LAPD policy. Advocacy organizations need to hold Beck and other law enforcement leaders to these non-cooperation pledges with every tool at their disposal. Verifying that they represent official departmental policy and are incorporated into department manuals and standard operating procedures is a good start, and, along with mandated formal training, the first step toward ensuring they are incorporated into departmental culture in meaningful, lasting ways.

For myself, I will continue writing and presenting on the Trump administration’s likely approach to fulfilling candidate Trump’s deportation campaign promises, and supporting efforts to organize immigrant communities to face the coming storm. I was lucky enough to arise last Wednesday morning with a clear mission laid out before me, a signal to cut through the noise of a thousand progressive policy goals being forcibly dismantled in the bleak years to come. Now is the time to decide what we believe in and focus our time and energy on protecting it. I believe that the United States must remain a nation of immigrants.

Ahead of the February 2017 release of her book, “Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality: Examining Attitudes across the Globe,” our latest blog entry comes from Amy Adamczyk, Professor of Sociology at John Jay College and the Graduate Center of CUNY. This entry was originally posted on the University of California Press Blog.

By:  Amy Adamczyk, 11/11/16

Like many academics, I was surprised at how well Donald Trump did early in the presidential election, securing the Republican nomination and at times rivaling Hillary Clinton in the polls. Part of the reason I was so surprised is because almost everyone I know and spend time with is a staunch democrat, socialist, or even communist. For many academics most of our friends are very liberal left-leaning highly educated people. For me it is even more extreme because I am childless and live in Manhattan. So the thought of millions of Trump enthusiasts has been hard to fathom.

That a social scientist like myself, trained to avoid generalizing from personal experience, is nonetheless taken aback by the Trump phenomenon is a testament to the power of context. Simply put, those with whom we interact have a powerful role in shaping our views. And our friendship groups tend not to be very diverse, so it’s easy to find ourselves in an echo chamber soundproofed from the voices of the outside world. This is especially true for people at opposite ends of the educational spectrum, whose friendship networks tend to be particularly homogeneous.

The media coverage of the presidential election provides repeated reminders of the deep cultural divides within our country. When we regularly see our fellow citizens cheering on a candidate who we find outrageous or worse, it is easy to forget all the subjects on which most of us agree, and how this agreement is fostered by the cultural and structural context we share as residents of the United States. For example, the issue of gay rights, a wedge issue in past elections, has faded from view in the current election. Opposition to same-sex marriage has narrowed over the last two decades and this year Republicans nominated someone who appears only now to oppose same-sex marriage out of political expediency. Meanwhile, there are nations where a person can be put to death for being gay. As great as the cultural differences among our fellow citizens, the differences between nations are vaster still, especially on key issues like gay rights.

In my forthcoming book, Cross-National Public Opinion about Homosexuality: Examining Attitudes across the Globe, I show just how vast the differences are across nations on this important issue. What accounts for such dramatic differences across nations? The book shows that much of the variation in attitudes about homosexuality can be traced back to differences in the degree of economic development, democratic governance and religious fervor. The book also shows how these factors interact in complex ways with a nation’s unique history and geographic location to produce divergent cultural and structural climates.

The interesting thing about contextual forces, whether they are operating within friendship groups, regions, or nations, is that we often do not know they are there. It takes something like a divisive national election or stories about the denial of civil rights to remind us of the different worlds in which we live.

Ahead of his scheduled November 15 book talk on “Not So Different: Finding Human Nature in Animals,” our latest blog entry comes from Nathan Lents, Associate Professor in John Jay’s Department of Sciences. This entry was originally posted on his “The Human Evolution Blog.” 

By:  Nathan Lents, 10/19/16

Fear is a powerful motivator. It’s also a very interesting social behavior. Fear is a psychological tool that animal species use as a mechanism for avoidance.

Fear is one of our most basic emotions and is processed by a part of the brain called the amygdala. Animals, including humans, can have genetic predispositions toward fearing certain things. This has great adaptive value. For example, as I’ve written about previously, many prey animals are naturally fearful of their predators. Mice don’t have to learn to avoid snakes and cats; they are born fearing them. Many nocturnal animals have photophobia, which helps them stay out of moonlight and avoid being spotted. Inborn fears reveal past natural selection because animals that are naturally afraid of their main predators will be more likely to survive and pass on that genetically encoded fear.

Fear can also be learned. During times of danger, alarm, or even stress, our amygdala activates the fear response. This serves to train us to fear that danger when we see it again and thus avoid it. If you were mauled by a dog when you were young, you have a good chance of being fearful of dogs the rest of your life. Repeated exposure to dogs may not even help because, often, exposure simply boots up the fear program again, which could actually reinforce, rather than diminish, the fear.

One cool aspect of fear is that it can be learned vicariously by humans and other animals. That is to say, social animals can learn to fear some dangers simply by observing others experience the danger and without having to experience it first-hand. This is powerfully adaptive for the obvious reason that it reduces exposure to danger even without a priming event.

While vicarious learning of fear in nonhuman animals may have sounded far-fetched in previous decades, researchers on animal emotion and cognition have found that social mammals experience empathy and animal contagion. Animals are keenly aware of the emotional state of their fellow conspecifics, so it’s only natural that they would notice, and learn from, another animal in fear, pain, or danger.

The first rigorous scientific study of vicarious fear training in animals was published in 1984 by Susan Mineka and colleagues. In that groundbreaking study, Professor Mineka showed that juvenile rhesus monkeys learn to fear snakes not necessarily through their own dangerous exposure but by observing their parents behaving fearfully around them. In other words, the fear of snakes in monkeys can be a function of social learning. Since that now-classic study, vicarious fear training has been observed in a variety of social animals and has been used to probe genetic fear dispositions, empathy, neurodiversity, and many other social and evolutionary phenomena.

Researchers Carolyn Jones and Marie Monfils of the University of Texas recently discovered that vicarious fear learning in rats depends on dominance relationships.

To do this study, Jones employed a clever spin on a common experimental design. Before doing any fear training, she placed three rats in a cage and let them live and play together from the time of weaning until the experiment was done, 12-14 weeks later. This way, she could observe and document the social relationships that formed. As she told me, “Rats are very commonly used in behavioral studies, [but] usually we just order however many rats are necessary for the experiment, put them in a cage together, run the experiment after an allotted ‘acclimation’ period, and that’s it.” By letting the rats bond first, she could ask if dominance status mattered in the second-hand learning of fear.

Rats are very playful and social animals. They also exhibit dominance-based social ranking in their relationships. After watching each rat triad carefully for three weeks, Jones noted that one rat established himself as the dominant rat (D), another as submissive-1 (S1), and the third as the submissive-2 (S2). S1 is defined as the preferred target of the D rat, while S2 is the least involved in play behaviors, tending to avoid the D rat’s play invitations.

(All rats in this study were male to avoid the formation of reproduction-based relationships. Female rats were used in a different study on fear transmission by this group. The assignment of rats to these different social ranks was carried out according to established method involving video recordings of play behaviors and statistical analysis of dominant behaviors. For more detail, see the methods section of the paper.)

Once the social rankings were established, Jones selected one member of the triad to be the subject of fear conditioning involving the emission of a 20-second tone followed by a mild electric shock to the feet. This rat would quickly learn to fear the tone and so this rat is called the fear-conditioned (FC) rat.

The next day, Jones placed the FC rat together with one of the other rats, and then played the tone, this time without a shock. The FC rat became fearful upon hearing the tone and then second rat did (or did not) pick up this fear from the first one, without any shocks being delivered. This rat was then called fear-conditioned-by-proxy (FCbP).

On the third day, all three rats were put together again, the third rat not having been trained to fear the tone either with shocks or by-proxy, so was called “No FC.” Tones were played again and the fear responses were measured. In these experiments, fear was measured as “freezing behavior.” The experiments were run in all possible combinations of dominant and submissive rats playing the role of the FC, FCbP, and No FC. With six replicates for each type of triad and 96 rats in total, robust statistical analyses were possible.

The results were both surprising and clear. The S1 rats (the submissive rats that were the preferred target of the dominant rats) were able to become fear-conditioned by-proxy regardless of whether they took their training from the D rat or the S2 rat. The S2 rats, however, would only learn fear from the D rats, not the S1 rats. Further still, the D rats did not become fear-conditioned by-proxy from either the S1 or S2 rats. In other words, dominant rats would never learn fear from submissive rats; the play-avoidant submissive rats would only learn from the dominant rats; and the playful submissive rats would learn from both superiors and other submissives.

Jones then went on to study the vocalizations that took place during the fear-condition by-proxy attempts, as a means to possibly explain why fear-learning takes place in some combinations and not in others. She focused on low-frequency calls that rats sometimes make that correspond to negative emotions, including fear. Aside from big mouse-to-mouse differences with most mice not vocalizing at all, Jones found that the low-frequency vocalizations, when they did occur, correlated well with the learning of fear by-proxy. this is, some of the rats that learned to fear the warning tones may have done so because the FC rats were giving a warning to them.

The use of warning calls to signal the danger may provide the explanation for the fear-condition because it makes sense that rats would call out danger to warn those they have social alliances with while being less likely to warn animals they are indifferent to. As Jones told me, “the fear-conditioned demonstrators were more likely to emit alarm vocalizations if they had, for lack of a better word, a ‘friendly’ relationship with the observer rat.” Rats, it seems, look out for their friends.

The study goes on the explore serum corticosterone levels, expression of c-FOS in two different areas of the rats’ brains, and other mechanistic items of interest to those who specialize in the neuroscience of fear. The main take-away from this study is that rats, like humans, experience their world through the lens of social contact. Those of high social rank are more influential on others, while being less likely to be influenced by others. Those of lower social rank, on the other hand, have their own advantage: by paying attention to both superiors and other subordinates, they are able to learn from all of members of the group equally.

FDR famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” But when it comes to learning from others, evolution has seen things differently.

Our latest blog entry comes from Dan Stageman, Director of Research Operations in the Office for the Advancement of Research at John Jay College. 

By: Dan Stageman, 8/22/16

Late last week the criminal justice blogosphere was abuzz with attempts to process the latest bit of good news dropped into the national conversation around mass incarceration. On August 18^th, the United States Department of Justice announced its intention to end the federal Bureau of Prison’s fourteen contracts with private/for-profit prison providers, citing as cause its own August 2016 investigation into the safety and security of these contract facilities. The report was, to put it mildly, damning:

We found that in a majority of the categories we examined, contract prisons incurred more safety and security incidents per capita than comparable BOP institutions. […] For example, the contract prisons confiscated eight times as many contraband cell phones […] had higher rates of assaults, both by inmates on other inmates and by inmates on staff […] serious or systemic deficiencies such as failure to initiate discipline in over 50 percent of incidents […] were improperly housing new inmates in Special Housing Units [i.e. solitary confinement][etc.] (p. ii)

While I of course ‘cherry-picked’ this litany of deficiencies from the DOJ report’s executive summary, they represent a fairly neutered echo of the similar findings that advocacy organizations – from the ACLU, to Human Rights Watch,Detention Watch Network to The Sentencing Project – have presented to the public and the federal government for ten-plus years to little effect.

It is a meaningful victory, for these organizations and the very real people whose interests they represent, that someone in the federal government finally decided to listen to their recommendations – and more importantly, to act on them decisively. It is a victory that will result in a measurable improvement in quality of life for thousands of prisoners and their families. It should not, however, be mistaken for a solution to the problem of for-profit/private prisons. To be fair, most of the media coverage of the DOJ announcement that I have reviewed has been appropriately circumspect. The Guardian’s Jon Swaine and his co-authors, for example, note that the BOP’s for-profit contract facilities “almost exclusively incarcerate low-risk inmates convicted of immigration offenses […] around 22,000 people at an annual cost of $600m.” This is about ten percent of the BOP’s total inmate population.

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics report linked above, it is also about 17% of the total population of US prisoners held in private/for-profit facilities – a proportion that might help to explain the precipitous drops in stock value experienced by the two largest publicly traded US private prison operators on the day of the DOJ’s announcement. The Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) lost 52% of its share value; GEO Group lost 45%. The third largest operator, Management and Training Corporation (MTC), is privately held, so we can only speculate that it lost a similar proportion of its market value. All three companies are unsurprisingly putting on a brave public face in the wake of the announcement: CCA touts its “keen observ[ation] of the BOP’s declining inmate population over the last three years”, implying the decision is less important than the market has made it out to be; GEO Group focuses its terse statement on its “efforts to provide industry-leading offender rehabilitation programs and reentry services”; MTC takes direct issue with the findings of the DOJ report, trumpeting in the title of its response that “Contract Prisons Provide Great Value to Corrections.”

Do these for-profit prison corporations indeed have reason to remain optimistic about an apparently shrinking market? Both CCA’s and GEO Group’s stock prices rebounded significantly on Friday from their precipitous Thursday lows, while remaining well below their previous averages. The answer, however, may lie less in watching the reactions of the market than in the clues we can glean from two less widely-reported recent news stories. The first is a two-week old investigation from the Guardian’s Renee Feltz on (and watch out here for flying acronyms) the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) successor program to Secure Communities (SComm), the Priority Enforcement Program (PEP). The second is from the Guardian’s chief reporter Ed Pilkington: an exposé of detention conditions in border facilities operated by ICE’s sister-agency, Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

A lot of folks have a working knowledge – accompanied by an appropriate degree of moral outrage – of what private/for-profit prisons are, what mass incarceration is, what is generally wrong with the criminal justice system. A lot fewer folks, in my experience, have a parallel knowledge of the immigrant detention system: the shortlist of people who I can talk to about Secure Communities without supplying a detailed explanation seems to be limited primarily to other academic researchers and advocates in the field. Most people register surprise when I tell them that a quarter of CCA’s 2015 revenue in 2015 came from immigrant detention – specifically, from Immigration and Customs Enforcement – or that GEO Group’s revenue breakdowns are similar. Immigrant detention remains, for a variety of reasons, a uniquely profitable segment of the private corrections industry. The DOJ’s recent announcement will do nothing to reduce that.

What should have reduced the profitability of immigrant detention was the transition from the SComm to PEP. SComm has been described by Stanford researcher Juan M. Pedroza as a “water mill that collects removable aliens in successive buckets […] without pause across levels of priority” (Pedroza 2013, p.62) – an apt description of how the program operated for the most part indiscriminately. Secure Communities, in place from 2008 through its discontinuation in 2014, used the FBI’s National Crime Information Center (NCIC) system to allow ICE to surveil (at its peak) every arrest by a local law enforcement agency nationwide to determine whether the arrestee had any known immigration violations on her record. Any such violation, whether criminal or not – i.e. visa overstays, prior unauthorized entry, exclusions, etc. – would result in ICE issuing a ‘detainer’ to the arresting agency. A detainer is a request that the arresting agency hold the arrestee until ICE can take her into custody – whether the arrest results in criminal charges or not.

SComm came under criticism because of the frequency with which it led to the eventual deportation of individuals with no criminal records or very minor ones (such as status offenses like loitering, or traffic offenses like broken taillights) – some 178 thousand, or nearly half, of the 375 thousand deportations attributed to the program throughout seven years of its existence. PEP was intended to solve this very problem, ostensibly restricting detainer requests to arrestees who had been “convicted of an offense listed under the DHS civil immigration priorities, […] intentionally participated in an organized criminal gang to further the illegal activity of the gang, or poses a danger to national security”.

Except, according to Feltz’s review of data from Syracuse University’s Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse(TRAC), it hasn’t turned out that way. Instead, “half of the so-called ‘holds’ were placed on people who had been arrested but actually had no criminal conviction.” In fact, the TRAC report indicates that some two-thirds of the detainer requests issued by ICE under the Priority Enforcement Program were for individuals with no criminal conviction or the lowest level of offense – a proportion exceeding the approximately 50% with similar offenses (or lack thereof) detained under Secure Communities. TRAC goes on to break down the detainers by crime type; after ‘No Criminal Conviction’, offenses like ‘Traffic Offense’ (5,310 detainers in 2014), ‘Public Order Crimes’ (1,425), ‘Disorderly Conduct’ (1,223) and ‘Drug Possession’ (2,004) feature prominently. Major crimes like ‘Homicide’ (603) and ‘Sex Assault’ (1,272) together represent about 1% of the total.

Numbers like these, in the context of an ostensibly reformed immigration enforcement program, illustrate the tenacity of ICE’s institutional orientation towards maximizing deportation – as well as the difficulty of calling the deportation regime to heel, after ten-plus years of increasing local control. It is the problem that John Jay political scientist and geographer Monica Varsanyi and her co-authors address in their recent book, Policing Immigrants: Local Law Enforcement on the Front Lines (U. Chicago Press, 2016):

Being found in the country without authorization is not currently a crime, but it is increasingly regarded as such because of the merging of law-enforcement responsibilities with immigration enforcement. […] The federal government has avoided critically examining how local law-enforcement agencies identify and process the suspected unauthorized immigrants they turn over to federal immigration authorities. (p.5-6)

The thousands of unauthorized immigrants detained under PEP are, like those detained under its predecessor SComm, originally arrested by local law enforcement agencies, under local policy and for local reasons. ICE, along with its sister agency Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), have in effect become bureaucratic middle-men between local law enforcement and private/for-profit prison corporations: facilitating apprehension over which they have minimal influence, and funding detention over which they exercise minimal oversight.

It is the latter issue that Ed Pilkington’s exposé of the CBP’s Tucson holding facility brings into sharp focus.

The several deeply disturbing image show immigrant detainees packed “like sardines in a tin” under emergency blankets in a filthy holding cell. Another shows another changing a baby’s diaper amid a pile of trash on a concrete floor.

It isn’t clear whether these facilities are privately owned or operated; CBP is more opaque than ICE in this regard, and in any case, detainees are unlikely to spend more than a few days in CBP holding facilities before being deported – in contrast to ICE facilities, where immigrants can spend years before their eventual deportation. What is clear, however, is that these immigrants have been snared by an institutional culture that regards them as less than human – treating them (if the above photos are any indication) as commodities to be processed. It may be that there is no profit to be made via CBP’s short-term detention of immigrants in holding cells, but there is certainly profit to be made in returning them to the southern side of the border: Security Firm G4S contracts with CBP to remove the immigrants on what it dubs (in its promotional literature) “The Bus No One Wants to Catch”. The Marshall Project’s recent exposé (by Eli Hager and Alysia Santo) on the private prisoner transport industry demonstrates pretty decisively how this moniker is earned.

Unauthorized immigrants, regardless of the symbolic importance of the DOJ’s decision on private prisons, will remain at the center of this deadly triangle: at one end an anti-immigrant local politics of enforcement; at another the dehumanizing institutional culture of two massive federal bureaucracies; and at the third, a constantly adapting market, twisting the human bodies of detainees into corporate profit. Well-meaning federal decrees cannot substitute for deep and abiding organizational reform, or binding legislative policy; indeed, it is entirely possible they could be reversed at the stroke of a pen, depending on the results November 8^th. Advocates and researchers cannot afford to take a victory lap while for-profit prison corporations adapt, and immigrant detainees suffer.

Our latest blog entry comes from Peggilee Wupperman, Associate Professor of Psychology at John Jay College. This entry was originally posted on 7/30/2016 on her “Beyond Self-Destructive Behavior” Blog at Psychology Today.

You have promised yourself that you are not going to engage in any dysregulated behavior this evening.

You’ve told yourself that you absolutely, positively will NOT (pick one or more: have that drink, binge on that food, take those pills, engage in self-harm, place that bet, etcetera). And you are determined to keep that promise.

Then you get home.

You have not had a particularly bad day. You cannot pinpoint any specific reason why you are experiencing cravings and/or urges that feel intolerable. And yet, suddenly all you can think about is that drink/food/pills/harm/bet/etc.

Your situation is not uncommon.

It can be easy to judge yourself in such circumstances. It can also be easy for other people to judge someone who says she/he is going to stop a dysregulated behavior – but then does not do so.

The following is a paraphrased analogy told by a woman who was working to stop drinking; however, it is also relevant to the cravings and urges often experienced when stopping any dysregulated behavior.

People who have never felt controlled by a dysregulated behavior often don’t understand why the behavior can feel so impossible to stop. So let me tell you what the cravings and urges feel like:

Imagine that you have not had any food or beverage except water for more than two days, and you feel famished. At some point, imagine that a person sets up a large buffet in the living room of your home. (This is an analogy; it does not have to make sense.) The buffet contains all of your favorite foods, and the scent of the food is overwhelming.

The person tells you that guests will be arriving to eat the food in a few hours, and you are not supposed to eat or even touch the food – since it is not yours. You agree that you will not eat any of the food.

Then the person leaves. You will be alone with the food for several hours. And you have not had anything to eat for more than two days.

At first, you might try to focus on other things – perhaps watch TV, surf the web, catch up on paperwork from the office, or talk to friends/family. However, you will likely have difficulty focusing on anything other than your intense hunger and the smell of the food.

Eventually, your cravings and urges will likely become so strong that you find it impossible to think about anything else. The urge to eat the food will seem like a powerful force that is almost controlling you. Over time, resisting your cravings/urges for even a few more minutes may feel utterly intolerable.   

That is what cravings and urges feel like when I try to stop my dsyregulated behavior.

Of course, the above story does not fit exactly with all behaviors. However, the intensity and intolerability of the cravings and/or urges do fit what many people feel when working to stop dysregulated behaviors.

Why is the intensity so strong? Earlier posts have discussed why some people find dysregulated behaviors almost impossible to resist. (For the basics, click here. For more details, click here, here, here, and here.) However, the purpose of this post is not to talk about cause. Instead, the purpose is to:

• decrease judgement, and
• increase understanding of what cravings and urges can feel like to someone who is in the midst of them.

The above analogy explains why distraction and good ol’ fashioned willpower will often only work for a short time. Methods do exist to help cravings and urges become more tolerable – and eventually help you feel that you are no longer controlled by cravings and urges. Most of those methods often require some form of empirically supported therapy. More details on finding such therapy will be provided in future posts.

Until then, please remember:

• Before you judge someone who struggles with dysregulated behavior, take a moment to consider that the person’s cravings and urges may feel more intolerable than you can even imagine.

• Before judging yourself for struggling with cravings and urges, take a moment to remind yourself that your experiences are more common than you may realize.

Our latest blog entry comes from Heath Brown, Assistant Professor of Public Management at John Jay College. This entry was originally posted on 7/17/2016 at The New West (the official blog of the Western Political Science Association).

Blog entry by: Heath Brown, 7/18/2016

It is Veepstakes time again and all eyes are on the choices Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are making. Much media attention has been drawn to the possibility that the vice presidential picks will help win a key swing state in November, serve as an “attack dog” on the campaign trail, or sparkle in a future debate. While this is all possible, and negative media coverage may deter some candidates, especially women, from seeking the post, there seems to be little evidence that it ultimately matters that much for the election. (See Kyle Kopko and Christopher Devine’s Politico piece from April on this, and also Boris Heersink and Brenton Peterson’s Monkey Cage blog piece that suggests small VP effects).

Probably of more importance, Dave Hopkins argues convincingly on his blog, is that VP choices matter because of “the window that they provide into the presidential candidates who select them.” Donald Trump’s much anticipated, but ultimately delayed VP announcement, probably says something about his style of deliberation over difficult decisions.

Another reason to pay attention to the vice presidential choices are the role the person plays in presidential transition planning and early governance of the administration. Gone are the days when the vice president was referred to as “his superfluous Excellency” as one snarky Senator referred to Vice President John Adams.

In his new book, The White House Vice President: The Path to Significance, Mondale to Biden (University Press of Kansas), Joel K. Goldstein shows how since 1976 the vice presidency has been on the rise. No longer are the responsibilities of the office what Woodrow Wilson’s Vice President surmised: “to ring the White House bell every morning and ask what is the state of the health of the president.”

Instead, vice presidents have taken on major responsibilities for assuring the success of the president, and that has commenced during the transition period. Carter announced immediately after the election that Mondale would work closely with him on selecting high-ranking administration officials and that he would consult with Mondale on program initiatives. Mondale is given particular credit for persuading Carter to choose Joseph Califano to head Housing, Education, and Welfare (HEW) and Robert Bergland as Secretary of Agriculture. Vice presidents-elect had never before held such sway during the transition period.

Mondale’s legacy has not been forgotten. Twenty-five years later, Dick Cheney, who was famously involved in his own selection, went on to direct the Bush presidential transition team. Goldstein suggests that some of Cheney’s eventual power in the White House, especially in the first-term, derived from his opportunity to “place allies in important positions” during the transition period.

Much remains the same today, and it seems likely that the eventual winner of this fall’s election will have relied on their running mate, as much for helping to secure votes, as for their work planning for the transition to power. Presidential transitions may officially begin after Election Day, but (as I wrote about on this blog in June), in reality they begin long before. Already, Trump has named Governor Chris Christie to begin his transition planning, and Clinton likely has a large transition team at work as well. I suspect their choice of running mate will join in that pre-election transition planning, helping to vet potential cabinet nominees, develop policy proposals, and figure out what the organization of new White House will look like.

While much of this planning will occur in private, out of the eye of the voting public and under-reported by the media, it lays the ground-work for governance. For this reason, while we may not be able to observe it now, the soundness of the vice presidential picks will be later judged in the effectiveness of our next president and the sound functioning of the future White House.

Our latest blog entry comes from Adam Berlin, Professor of English at John Jay College. This entry was originally posted on 5/6/2016 at newsmax.com.

Blog entry by: Adam Berlin, 5/16/2016

I watch my news on MSNBC.

In the mornings I like “Morning Joe” because conservative Joe Scarborough and liberal Mika Brzezinski speak their biased hearts, yet are willing to call out inconsistencies and stupidities in their own parties.

In the evenings, I tolerate the caricatures that Rachel Madow and Chris Hayes (sometimes interchangeable from their glasses on down) have become, because they’re liberals who sometimes dig deeper into headline news and because, well, they’re smart. (Catch Rachel Madow on any show but her own and she’s a star, so much more powerful and impassioned than her I’m-so-cute-and-interesting-[and falsely humble] TV persona.)

I put up with Chris Mathews who delivers monologues instead of interviews during his interviews, and shills his books during his monologues.

I try to stay patient as Lawrence O’Donnel enunciates every single word, turning twenty minutes of material into an hour.

I’m a liberal and prefer my TV media liberal. And I certainly prefer MSNBC’s hosts to CNN’s more-conservative takes on the news. Perhaps what I like best about MSNBC is that each host has a sense of humor, can laugh openly, can take a breath and crack a joke. That’s not the case with CNN’s dour Wolf Blitzer or buttoned-up John King. I’ll give Anderson Cooper a bye for two reasons: People stop me on the street thinking I’m him, and, far more important, he can laugh at himself and others.

A sense of humor — I’m starting to think that’s the real litmus test when separating liberals from conservatives. Have you ever seen Mitch McConnell’s pursed lips smile? Have you ever heard Rush Limbaugh laugh a genuine, non-sneering laugh? Have you ever noticed what really makes that famous politically-split couple, James Carville and Mary Matalin, so different? Answer — one laughs a lot, the other perpetually scowls.

But when Cruz and Kasich got KO’d by Donald Trump, well inside the distance, MSNBC lost its sense of humor. Sure, there were lecherously-playful comments about Melania’s runway walk toward the podium where Trump would declare victory in Indiana. There were comments about the spokesmodels behind him.

Still, the predominant emotion at MSNBC wasn’t humor, wasn’t an absurdist’s delight in this new reality, a blustering reality star with the ego the size of Manhattan had become the Republican nominee. Instead, there was outrage. Instead there was incredulity and even shock. Instead, there was a reiterative listing of all the things Trump has supposedly done so wrong, so stupidly, so irresponsibly. He was labelled a hater and a racist. He was labelled a man who knows nothing about politics. He was labelled, even as he won, a loser and liability. And, by insinuation, all the people who voted for him were fools.

Here’s the rub: MSNBC is as responsible as anyone for Donald Trump’s victory. The coverage of The Don was non-stop. The discussion about The Don was non-stop. When The Don held a rally, MSNBC was there more than any other network. The reason is crass-clear — MSNBC wanted the ratings. And it’s a hell of a lot easier to criticize and make fun of than to compliment and analyze. (I’m guilty as charged in my first paragraphs here.)

Had MSNBC been principled, had they truly wanted to make a unified effort to stop Trump (which would have reflected their political views, which I’m sure, each MSNBC host would tell you, are based on principle) then they would have put their coverage where their collective mouth was. They would have limited Trump coverage. They would have given their air time to Hillary and Bernie and to some of the larger political issues that this country faces.

Several news stories that highlighted the dangers of free trade might have cut into Trump’s appeal. In-depth reporting on bankruptcies might have helped the cause. A more timely look at the history of Trump’s recently-anointed campaign manager Paul Manafort and Manafort’s relationship to Vladimir Putin might have highlighted the hypocrisy of Trump’s isolationist rants.

Instead, it was Trump-time all the time on MSNBC.

They made a choice: they covered Trump for ratings; they traded integrity for a bigger piece of the viewing pie. There’s a political word for this, a word we hear very often these days — it’s called pandering. MSNBC revealed itself as the Hillary Clinton of news stations.

I’ll keep watching MSNBC. Just like too many democrats will vote for Hillary Clinton in the general election. There’s no better alternative.

But MSNBC should come clean. MSNBC’s talking heads should remove their false masks of outrage and incredulity. They know the truth. They helped make Donald Trump possible. And, for them, that should be no laughing matter.