NCJ Number
150423
Date Published
1991
Length
25 pages
Annotation
This study examines how factors associated with race and class influence the proportion of races and classes involved in various types of crime.
Abstract
The author first examines the possibility that bias in the criminal justice system accounts for differential rates of offending across races. He dismisses this factor as the prime explanatory factor, as well as other explanations, not the least of which is that crime differences mirror biological variation. He examines instead some ironies of class and family composition, as well as subcultural differences in degree of proscription of certain offenses across races. The author concludes that the key criminological issues to resolve about race may reduce to other, more manageable issues, such as general questions about pressures to commit crime, the constraints against committing crime, the opportunities to commit crime, and the relative attractiveness of one type of crime versus another. The issue of race's relationship to crime ought not to signal the question regarding which racial group is more likely to commit crime; rather it ought to focus on the issue as to which type of crime is this disadvantaged group or this advantaged group more likely to commit. America's long-standing history of the caste segregation of blacks and whites has created a parallel caste segregation in the commission of street and "suite" (white-collar) crime. 5 figures