Race and Crime

Question 1

Peterson & Krivo (2010). DIvergent Social Worlds: Neighborhood Crima and the Racial-Spatial Divide

Answer 1

• National Neighborhood Crime Study (NNCS)
• representative sample of urban census tracts
• disadvantage: very few White neighborhoods had low levels of disdvantage, a large share of Black neighborhoods had large levels of disadvantage (same general pattern when comparing Latino neighborhoods to White neighborhoods, but advantage is less extensive in Latino communities than Black communities)
• white neighborhoods have less violent crime than areas of all other colors before neighbood influences are included
• violent crime would be more similar in racially and ehtnically distinct types of areas if their internal character were equalized
• crime would vary very little from white to minority neighborhoods if the social locations were equalized

Question 2

Krivo, Peterson, & Kuhl. (2009). Segregation, Racial Structure, and Neighborhood Violent Crime1

Answer 2

• NCCS data
• assess role of citywide racial residential segregation in levels of neighborhood violence
• rates of violent crime are significnatly higher in more highly segregated cities in the case for areas that are White, Black, Latino, Mixed minority, and integrated

Question 3

Western (2006). Punishment and Inequality in America

Answer 3

• demonstrates how the growth of incarceration/imprisonment in the US has contributed to and exacerbated social inequality, especially minority populations

Question 4

Historical Context of Racism in Police (Palmer et al., 2022)

Answer 4

• South: policing started with slave patrols
• aafter abolition of slavery, used police to criminalize Blacks through vagrancy laws
• “frontier”: White settlers used police to push out Mexicans
• Reconstruction preiod: lynching of Black people was used as method of social control
• state sanctioned violence by police continued through today
• videos of police killings make the killings public like lynchings

Question 5

Historical Context of Racism in Incarceration (Palmer et al., 2022)

Answer 5

• prisons and jails did not start out racist because they were seen as places of reform and rehabilitation whereas minorities were not seen as worthy of that and Black individudals were enslaved
• once prisons used as a place of punishment, became racialized and used as unpaid labor (“prison shops” in the North were contracted prison labor)
• “Reconstruction Period” used 13th amendment to enslave Black people through imprisonment through Black Codes. “Convict leasing system” sent Black people back to the jobs that they had done as slaves
• “war on crime” leading to the new Jim Crow era increasing number of Black people in prison and jail

Question 6

Wells-Barnett (1985) A Red Record

Answer 6

• overviewed lynching as a representative example of state organized state violence

Question 7

The Congress of Racial Equality

Question 8

Michelle Alexander (2010, Book). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Era of Color-blindness

Answer 8

• most widely read text on American criminal justice system ever published
• popularized the concept that over the past half-century, in Amerca, mass incarceration has functioned as a “new racial caste system” fueled by a seemingly colorblind system

Question 9

Thompson. (2010). Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History

Answer 9

• ground breaking essay about the effects of mass incarceration including its history tied to slavery and colonialism

Question 10

Omnibus Crime Contrl and Safe Streets Act of 1986

Answer 10

• allocated an investment of $300 million into the war on crime
• created the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, which administered funding to local criminal justice agencies
• led to the expansion of supervision and control in low-income urban communities