Crime and Deviance: Ethnicity and crime Flashcards
What does official statistics report on ethnicity and crime?
Black and Asian people are over represented in the system:
- Black people make up 3% of the population, but 13.1% of the prison population.
- Asians make up 6.5% of the population but 7.7% of the prison population.
Black people are also 7x more likely than their white counterparts to be stopped and searched and 3 1/2x more likely too be arrested and 5x more likely to be in prison.
Victim surveys
Structured interviews that ask individuals ehat crimes have been committed over the past 12 months given to people over the age of 10.
Findings of victim surveys
- Most crimes are intra-ethnic (black on black, white on white etc) - they do not take place between ethnic groups
- Black people are overrepresented as offenders of mugging.
- Ethnic minorities are less likely to report being a victim of a crime to the police
Implications of using victim surveys.
People could lie in surveys - invalid data
Excludes crimes committed by or against organisations, we have nothing on the ehtnicities of white collar or coporate criminals.
Self report findings
- Graham and Bowling found that black and white people had similar rates of offending
- Sharp and Budd found that 28% of black people committed crimes in their lifetimes compared to 40% of people from a white or mixed background
- White people have higher rates for class A drug use e.g. cocaine, ecstasy etc.
Self report studies
A way of measuring or studying crimes where people are asked to talk about crimes that they have committed. It produces useful data on petty crimes but not serious crimes.
Why do self report findings differ from official statistics and victim surveys?
Institutional racism
Institutional racism
Stephen Lawrence case - Murdered by a racist gang, nobody was prosecuted until 19 years later despite there being lots of evidence of the gang bragging on how they killed a black man. This led to the Metropolitan Police as being institutionally racist.
What do Bowling and Phillips argue about data being misleading?
They argue that EM cases are more likely to be dropped than whites due to the lack of evidence shown in order to prosecute them as it is mainly based on racist stereotyping.
Barroness Casey review
This review was triggered by the Sarah Everad case in which she found that the institution was racist, homophobic and mysoginistic.
Have the Metropolitan Police changed since the report?
No
Data that reflects institutional racism
In 2014, 65 black, 23 asian, 28 mixed race individuals were stopped and searched per every thousand in the population compared with 15 white individuals per every thousand.
Interactionist explanation of ethnic differences in crime
Deviancy amplification and secondary deviance: The media will exaggerate crimes that black people commit and label them as ‘folk devils’ which leads to more stops and searches occurring in society towards black people. Eventually, they will find something and the media will create a moral panic.
Differential association: Sutherland suggests that people learn deviant values through interactions and rherefore people living in, or brought up in areas with high crime levels might themselves become criminal. This can happen in ‘ghetto’ areas.
Marxist explanation of ethnicity and crime
Selective law enforcement - Laws are typically created by the upper class who are typically white, they tend to target lower class people who are typically black afro caribbean.
Neo marxist - Believe that ethnic differences in criminal activity is a process of social construction that stereotype EM as inherently more criminal than the majority of the population.
Left realist explanation for ethnicity and crime
Relative deprivation - Mainly black/asian minorities have harder times at finding jobs due to institutional racism, they are also less likely to be promoted and more likely to have relative deprivation thus causing them to commit crimes for more money for example.
Marginalisation - There is a lack of representation by the government and they are excluded from society.
