Topic 6 - Ethnicity, Crime and Justice

Question 1

What is an example of a official crime stat?

Answer 1

• Black people make up just 3% of the population but 13% make up the prison population

Question 2

What are the stages that an individual may go through during a custodial sentence?

Answer 2

• Policing
• Stop and Search, Police stop and search mainly ethnic minorities such as blacks and Asians
• Arrests and cautions, Black people in 18/19 arrest rate were over 3 times more than white people
• Prosecution and trial, Cases involving minority ethnic defendants are more likely to be dropped due to weak evidence
• Conviction and sentencing, Black and Asian offenders receive harsher sentences than white offenders, even for similar offences
• Pre- sentence reports
• Prison

Question 3

What are three reasons for the disproportionate use of stop and search against ethnic minorities?

Answer 3

• Police Racism, the Macpherson report(1999) on police investigation of the racist murder of the Stephen Lawrence concluded that there was institutional racism within the MET. And the Casey report (2023) shows that there is still institutional racism in the MET
• Ethnic differences in offending, some argue that higher stop and search rates simply reflect the different crime levels among ethnic groups
• Demographic factors, Minority Ethnic groups are over represented in the population groups of who are most likely to be stopped such as the young, unemployed and manual workers. These groups are more likely to be stopped regardless of their ethnicity

Question 4

How did Asians become criminalised?

Answer 4

• Around the 1990s crime by Asians became a problem in society with the media concerns about the growth of asian gangs
• The events of 9/11, helped to create the idea that Asian people, especially Muslims were an “enemy within”

Question 5

What are the two main explanations for ethnic differences in statistics?

Answer 5

• Left Realists, believe the statistics represent the real differences in rates of offending
• Neo Marxist, believe statistics are a social construct resulting from racist labelling and discrimination in the CJS

Question 6

What do Left Realists argue about ethnic differences ?

Answer 6

• LR such as Lea and Young argue that these differences are caused by relative deprivation, marginalisation and subculture formation
• argue that racism has led to marginalisation and economic exclusion of minority ethnic groups, who face higher levels of unemployment and poverty
• The media’s promotion of materialistic values contributes to feelings of exclusion and promotes a feeling of relative deprivation because it sets materialistic goals that ethnic minorities cannot achieve legitimately which thus leads to more utilitarian crimes such as theft
• Also leads to formation of delinquent sub cultures, especially by young black males and it because they are marginalised and they have no organisations to represent their interests they produce non utilitarian crime to show their frustration

Question 7

What do critics of Left Realists agrue?

Answer 7

• Lea and Young can be criticised for their views on the role of police racism for example arrest rates for Asians may be lower than black people but not because they are less likely to offend it because police stereotype the two groups differently , black people as aggressive and asian people as passive
• doesnt fully explain how the police distort crime statistics

Question 8

What do Neo Marxist argue about ethnic differences in crime?

Answer 8

• They reject the idea that statistics reflect reality and they instead believe that official statistics are socially constructed and shaped by racism
• argue that ethnic minority crime is a myth constructed by the state to control and divide the working class

Question 9

What does Gilroy argue?

Answer 9

• Argues that the idea of black criminality is a racist myth of African, Caribbean and Asian people
• And argues that Ethnic minorities are no more criminal than others, and due to this stereotype it has led to the Police and CJS to act on them and this leads to ethnic minorities becoming criminalised
• sees some ethnic crime as a form of political resistance against a racist society
• Most black and Asian people in the UK originated in former British Colonies, where their struggles taught them how to resist opposition for example through riots and demonstrations. So when they found themselves facing racism in the UK they used the same forms of resistance that they used to perform, however this time it was criminalised by the government

Question 10

What is evaluation of Gilroy?

Answer 10

• Lea and Young criticise and argue that most crime is intra-ethnic meaning that criminals and their victims are usually from the same ethnic background, so it cannot be seen as an anti-colonial struggle against racism
• First generation immigrants from the 1950s and 60s were very law abiding, so it is unlikely that they passed down a tradition of anti-colonial struggle to their children

Question 11

What does Hall et al argue?

Answer 11

• argues that the 1970s saw a moral panic over black ‘muggers’
• In the 1970s, there was the emergence of media driven moral panic about the new crime ‘mugging’. Hall et al notes there was no evidence of the increase of ‘mugging’ but it was always associated with black youths by the police, media and politicians
• Hall et al also argues that the emergence of the moral panic about mugging as a black crime and at the same time as the crisis of capitalism was no coincidence, this was done in order to distract attention from the true cause of problems such as unemployment
  -By presenting black youths as a threat to society, the moral panic helped to divide the working class racially and thus weakened the opposition to capitalism

Question 12

What is evaluation of Hall et al?

Answer 12

• Downes and Rock argue that there was a real increase in black crime because of unemployment
• Down play individual responsibility
• lacks evidence that a moral panic truly existed and was widespread

Question 13

What are other explanations for ethnic differences in crime?

Answer 13

• Sociologists such as FitzGerald et al mow look at neighbourhood factors in explaining the greater involvement of black youths in street robbery, they found that poor areas with limited opportunities and also where deprived young people cam into contact with affluent groups was where robbery rates were highest. Young black youths are more likely to live in these areas
• However white people could also be put in these affected by this but black people may be more likely to live in poor areas due to racial discrimination
• Sociologist such as Sharp and Budd look at the differential risks of getting caught to explain ethnic differences in crime, they found that black offenders were more likely to be arrested than white offenders, because they were more likely to commit crimes such as robbery where victims could easily identify them

Question 14

Why are ethnic groups more likely to be victims of crime?

Answer 14

• For example violent crime, factors such as being young, male and unemployed are strongly linked with victimisation and ethnic groups have a higher proportion of young males and thus more likely to have higher rates of victimisation

Question 15

How do ethnic minorities respond to victimisation?

Answer 15

• Members of ethnic minority communities often respond to victimisation with situational crime prevention methods such as installing CCTV, fireproof doores and organising self defense campaigns