Honey Bee Nutrition and Colony Collapse Disorder: How legislation can curtail bee population decline
In the last decade, California’s imprisoned population of women has increased by nearly 400% (Chesney-Lind, 2012). The focus of this thesis is to discuss the treatment—or lack thereof—of women within California’s criminal justice system and sentencing laws. By exploring its historical approach to two criminal actions related to women, the Three Strikes law (including non-violent drug crimes) and the absence of laws accounting for experiences of female victims of domestic violence who killed their abusers, I explore how California’s criminal code has marginalized women, and present a summary of the adverse effects brought about by the gender invisibility that is endemic within sentencing policies and practice. I also discuss recent attempted and successful reforms related to these issues, which evidence a shift toward social dialogue on sentencing aiming to address gender inequity in the sentencing code. These reforms were the result of activism; organizations, academics and individuals successfully raised awareness regarding excessive and undue sentencing of women and compelled action by the legislature.
By method of a feminist analysis of these histories, I explore these two pertinent issues in California; both are related to women who, under harsh sentencing laws, were incarcerated under the state’s male-focused legislation. Responses to the inequalities found in these laws included attempts toward both visibility for women and reform related to sentencing. I analyze the ontology of sentencing reform as it relates to activism in order to discuss the implications of further criminal code legislation, as well as the implications of the 2012 reforms in practice. Through the paper, I focus upon how women have become a target of arrest and long sentences not because they are strategically arrested to equalize their representation behind bars, but because the “tough on crime” framework in the criminal code cast a wide and fixed net that incarcerated increasingly more women following the codification of both mandatory minimums and a male-oriented approach to sentencing (Chesney-Lind et. al, 2012).
Many Americans are sentimental about horses and believe that American horses deserve special treatment under the law for their important roles in American culture and history. In 2006, the House of Representatives passed a bill, known as H.R. 503, to end horse slaughter for human consumption in the U.S., and the following year in 2007, the horse slaughter ban began in the U.S. In this paper, the ineffectiveness of the horse slaughter ban to protect unwanted horses in the U.S. is demonstrated. More horses have been transported to less-humane slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada, and more horses have been abandoned, abused, and neglected in the U.S. since the horse slaughter ban began. It is important to consider how American sentiments about horses contributed to H.R. 503 to better understand the ineffectiveness of the horse slaughter ban. People who were in favor of H.R. 503 relied on animal rights arguments, which tend to be more emotional than animal welfare arguments, by appealing to American sentiments about horses. The public increasingly believes that animals have rights. If animal rights activists do not find ways to protect unwanted animals, their ideas can infringe on animal welfare.