The largest protests in U.S. history occurred during summer 2020. Despite being overwhelmingly peaceful, some property damage, looting, and violence transpired. This study used Wave 68 of the American Trends Panel, collected by the Pew Research Center 10 days after Minneapolis police murdered George Floyd, to test whether: (1) Black people are less likely than white people to oppose Black Lives Matter (BLM); (2) compared to white people, Black people perceive individuals who use protests as a pretext for committing crime to comprise a smaller proportion of the overall protest movement; and (3) opposition to BLM mediates some or all of the relationship between race and perceptions of the degree to which people who use protests as a pretext to commit crime comprise the overall protest movement. Results from generalized ordered logistic regression analyses confirmed that, compared to white people, Black people were less likely to oppose BLM and perceived the summer 2020 protest movement to have contained fewer opportunistic individuals looking to commit crime. Pathway analysis results showed that BLM opposition fully mediated the relationship between race and how much of the overall protest movement participants thought consisted of individuals using protests to commit crime.

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Black people may view the January 6th, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol as the latest development in a long series of threats that white supremacy poses to their status in the U.S., whereas white people may apply a colorblind perspective. Thus, Black people were hypothesized to support prosecuting insurrectionists at higher rates than white people because they want the federal government to protect Black people’s status. Results from a nationally representative dataset revealed that while a majority of both Black and white participants considered it very important for federal law enforcement agencies to find and prosecute those who broke into the Capitol, the odds of Black participants endorsing this view were 72% greater than the odds for white people.

Mental health issues experienced by jail inmates in Texas: An overview of diagnostic problemsThe main purpose of the article is to show selected aspects of prisoners’ mental health in the United States using the example of the state of Texas. The article indicates the nature and scope of needs in the area of inmates’ mental health in various correctional units and shows some aspects of the diagnosis problems. The authors analyze the reasons for the transfer of responsibility for mental health of prisoners sentenced to the administration of correctional facilities, especially jails. The article also shows the needs of the Prison Administration regarding convicts’ mental health training and classification systems for prisoners in Texas.