Race and crime in the United States
The NCVS also includes supplemental questions which allow information to be gathered on tangentially relevant issues such as school violence, attitudes towards law enforcement or perceptions regarding crime.
[38] Despite the differences in the amount of crime reported, comparisons of the UCR and NCVS data sets show there to be a high degree of correspondence between the two systems.
[43] Scholars have found that some racial and ethnic minorities, particularly African-Americans, are disproportionately represented in the arrest and victimization reports which are used to compile crime rate statistics in the United States.
The study was conducted amongst the perceptions of residents in neighborhoods in Chicago, Seattle, and Baltimore in comparison with census data and police department crime statistics.
[79][80][81] In-group bias has been observed when it comes to traffic citations following accidents, as black and white police in one state were found to be more lenient to suspects of their own race, resulting in a 3% discrepancy.
[88] A 2018 study in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that tall young black men are especially likely to receive unjustified attention by law enforcement.
[90] White and black families have no major difference in child abuse except in the $6,000-$11,999 income range (which falls under the Poverty Threshold in the United States).
In a survey of 2,248 sixth, eighth, and tenth graders in an urban public school system, “Schwab-Stone et al (1995) found that 40% of youth reported exposure to a shooting or a stabbing in the past year.
For example, Robert J. Sampson has reported that most of the reason violent crime rates are so high among blacks originates mainly from unemployment, economic deprivation, and family disorganization.
[96] Sampson et al. (2005) and Phillips (2002) have reported that at least half of the black-white homicide offending differential is attributable to structural factors such as parental marital status and social context.
[105] Vélez et al. (2003) concluded that, within residentially segregated cities, white advantages in homeownership, median income, college graduation, and employment better explain racial homicide rate differences than do black disadvantages.
[101] Wright and Younts (2009) found that some social variables, such as higher religiosity, stronger family ties, and lower alcohol consumption, reduced black crime rates.
[111] Additionally, "Hagan and Peterson (1995) further propose that the segregation of racial minorities in sections of concentrated poverty contributes to inferior educational and employment opportunities, which, in turn, enhance the likelihood of crime and delinquency.
Regardless of their views regarding causation, scholars acknowledge that some racial and ethnic minorities are disproportionately represented in the arrest and victimization reports which are used to compile crime rate statistics.
Bernstein, arguing that carceral labor, which disproportionately affected African Americans, began in the North and existed well before the Civil War, demonstrates that Freeman's crime and trial was a product of the Auburn Prison System.
Bernstein summarizes the case stating: Importantly, neither Seward nor Van Buren suggested that poor education might cause some Black children to become criminals in the future.
This biological perspective, sometimes seen as racist,[122] was criticized by early 20th century scholars, including Frances Kellor, Johan Thorsten Sellin and William Du Bois, who argued that other circumstances, such as social and economic conditions, were the central factors which led to criminal behavior, regardless of race.
About seventy percent of all prisoners in the South are black; this, however, is in part explained by the fact that accused Negroes are still easily convicted and get long sentences, while whites still continue to escape the penalty of many crimes even among themselves.
[123]The debate that ensued remained largely academic[clarification needed] until the late 20th century, when the relationship between race and crime became a recognized field of specialized study in criminology.
[127] The form of conflict theory which emphasizes the role of economics, being heavily influenced by the work of Karl Marx and sometimes referred to as Marxist criminology, views crime as a natural response to the inequality arising from the competition inherent in capitalist society.
Though this line of thinking has been criticized for requiring the establishment of a utopian socialist society,[129] the notion that the disproportionality observed in minority representation in crime rate statistics could be understood as the result of systematic economic disadvantage found its way into many of the theories developed in subsequent generations.
[130] The recent work of Gregory J. Howard, Joshua D. Freilich and Graeme R. Newman applies culture conflict theory to the issue of immigrant and minority crime around the world.
[130] According to conflict theorists such as Marvin Wolfgang, Hubert Blalock and William Chambliss, the disproportionate representation of racial minorities in crime statistics and in the prison population is the result of race- and class-motivated disparities in arrests, prosecutions and sentencing rather than differences in actual participation in criminal activity, an approach which has also been taken by proponents of critical race theory.
[133] Barbara D. Warner, associate professor of criminal justice and police studies at Eastern Kentucky University, notes that conflict theory has been the subject of increasing criticism in recent years.
Thus, conflict theory encounters difficulties in attempting to account for the high levels of violent crime such as murder, homicide and rape, in minority populations.
The diversity of minority cultures present in poverty-stricken neighborhoods prevents the formation of strong social bonds and leaves inhabitants uninterested in maintaining positive community relationships.
Social disorganization theory has been instrumental in establishing the notion that stable, culturally homogeneous communities have lower rates of delinquency and crime regardless of race.
[143] Anthony Walsh criticizes the attempt to use the macrostructural opportunity model to explain interracial rape as has been done in studies conducted in the past few decades, pointing out that such a defense is directly contradicted by the data related to homicide.
Building upon the work of cultural anthropologist Walter B. Miller's focal concerns theory, which focused on the social mechanisms behind delinquency in adolescents, sociologists Marvin Wolfgang and Franco Ferracuti proposed that the disproportionally high rate of crime among African Americans could be explained by their possessing a unique racial subculture in which violence is experienced and perceived in a manner different from that commonly observed in mainstream American culture.
As noted in several studies conducted throughout the 1960s and 1970s, there is a traditional north–south discrepancy in the distribution of homicide in the US, regardless of race, and this, it was argued, indicates that lower-class Southern blacks and Whites share the same subculture of violence.
