The discussion about race and crime is hard to pin because
there are so many variables to consider.
Racism, self-control, socialization processes, poverty, suburbanization,
biological factors, and the “War on Drugs” are just some of the factors that
play a part in the high crime rate amongst criminals that are black.
I really dislike the term “black crime”. It is pejorative to all the upper-class,
middle-class, and poor people working 2 or 3 jobs a day that share nothing more
with some criminals than skin color.
Racism as a factor is hard to quantify. I doubt even Klansmen respond to surveys
admitting they are racist. How would you
measure somebody who had racist feelings but who held integrity as a higher
value and didn't commit racist acts?
I'll digress and refer to the literary howling over the “change” in the
character of Atticus Finch from To Kill A Mockingbird to Go Set A
Watchman. As a generalization,
though, my opinion is that white people underestimate the factor of racism
while black people overestimate it. Then again, how prevalent does white racism
have to be to have an effect on black success?
If only 20% of whites are indeed racist, that is still one racist per
black person. And yet, how often are things
accounted as racism that may have other causes?
Wilson (1992) contends that it is fear, not racism that results in de
facto segregation.
And it is not solely whites that segregate from poor black
neighborhoods. Hipp and Yates (2011)
describe the effects of the flight of the black middle-class, including
increased poverty and lack of social organization. Steffensmeier et al (2011) recognize the
flight of the black middle-class but do not account for it in their
conclusion. Without the influence of
middle-class values and its resultant social organization, poorer blacks are
subjected to socialization processes that inhibit the behavior patterns that
lead to success in life. Shihadeh and
Flynn (1996) point out the social costs of “acting white” by succeeding in
education and contrast this with the adult status given to young girls who
become mothers, whether wed or not, in poor segregated communities. I was once a proponent of self-control as a
primary crimogenic factor, but it has been made clear to me that socialization
plays a part in the amount of self-control a person has, and where that
self-control is targeted in personal goals.
You will notice that neither paragraph has a definitive
conclusion. Assigning any one of these
factors as a primary cause seems to me to prevent effective problem resolution
because other factors are discounted in “proving” that one viewpoint takes
precedence. For example, Steffensmeier
et al (2011) identify racial inequity as the independent variable, and a
primary cause, although they admit that the dependent variable of violent crime
committed by criminals that are black remained stable over the terms of their
study.
References
Hipp, J. R., & Yates, D. K. (2011). Ghettos, thresholds,
and crime: does concentrated poverty really have an accelerating increasing
effect on crime? Criminology, 49(4), 955–990.
http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2011.00249.x
Shihadeh, E. S., & Flynn, N. (1996). Segregation and
crime: the effect of black social isolation on the rates of black urban
violence. Social Forces, 74(4), 1325–1352.
Steffensmeier, D., Feldmeyer, B., Harris, C. T., & Ulmer,
J. T. (2011). Reassessing trends in black violent crime, 1980-2008: sorting out
the “Hispanic Effect” in Uniform Crime Reports arrests, National Crime
Victimization Survey offender estimates, and U.S. prisoner counts. Criminology, 49(1), 197–251. http://doi.org/10.1111/j.1745-9125.2010.00222.x
Wilson, J. Q. (1992). Crime, race, and values. Society, 30(1), 90–93.
