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| ISBN-13: | 9780226337579 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press Journals |
| Publication date: | 12/20/2015 |
| Series: | Crime and Justice: A Review of Research , #44 |
| Pages: | 512 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.30(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.50(d) |
About the Author
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Crime and Justice
A Review of Research
By Michael Tonry
University of Chicago Press
Copyright © 2015 The University of ChicagoAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-33757-9
CHAPTER 1
From Slavery to Social Class to Disadvantage: An Intellectual History of the Use of Class to Explain Racial Differences in Criminal Involvement
Robert D. Crutchfield
abstract
Social class differences have been invoked to explain perceived racial differences in criminal involvement in the United States since the middle of the nineteenth century. Scholars have joined with the public and the media to make such arguments with mixed success. Despite criticism of the theories and research methods used and contradictory evidence, social class arguments have persisted. Among the most enduring are subculture of violence and subculture of poverty theories, which purportedly explain instrumental crimes such as property crime, drug sales, and robbery, but also violence including homicide and assault. Proponents argue that African Americans are carriers of pro-crime norms and values. Criminologists and sociologists have recently advanced more parsimonious theories that posit that structured social and economic disadvantage account for racial and ethnic patterns of crime. Good data and analysis provide compelling supporting evidence. Ethnographic evidence has compellingly shown that observable cultural differences are consequences of disadvantage and not causes of the conditions in which the impoverished poor live.
If you have thought about crime in the United States, you have thought about race and crime. To think about crime anywhere in the world is to think also about how and why some segments of the population have more criminal involvement and more victimization, or about differences in how states vary in responding to crimes by people of different groups (e.g., Tonry 1995; Wortley 2003; Crutchfield and Pettinicchio 2009; Crutchfield, Pettinicchio, and Robbins 2013). Where race is not the focus, differences in ethnicity, religion, immigration status, or some other marker of being "the other" are part of how we think about and talk about crime. In the United States and increasingly in other nations, higher levels of criminality among "others" are popularly attributed to one of two factors: inferiority or social class position. The "inferiority" explanations range from misplaced and antiquated biological conceptions of race to ethnocentric comparisons of cultures. A popular explanation of anti–Latin American immigration riots in Spain, for example, was that rioters were reacting to imported gang activity (Harter 2007). The French foreign minister at the time, and later president, Nicholas Sarkozy justified punitive police actions in Paris suburbs on the basis that the rioters were merely "thugs," who just happened to be North African and Muslim "immigrants." Notably, many participants have been residents of France for more than a generation, were French citizens, or both, but still were not considered to be French (Haddad and Balz 2006).
Efforts to explain racial and ethnic differences in criminality by explaining that "subordinated others" frequently are of the lower social and economic classes are common among both scholars and the general public, especially among those of a more liberal political persuasion. These explanations are the subject of this essay.
Some basic definitional clarifications are in order. Here in writing about race and ethnicity, I refer to basic understandings by educated Americans that are used by most scholars of race, crime, and ethnicity. The relevant groups in the United States are Asians, blacks, Latinos, Native Americans, and whites or, if one prefers, European Americans. These categories are socially constructed and meld scholarly understanding of the meaning of race and ethnicity. Within these groups there are important subdivisions. Within the category "black" are African Americans, a growing African immigrant population, and people whose families trace their lineage to the islands of the Caribbean. The Latino or "Hispanic" population is lumped together in government data collections but includes groups of people who have been in what is now the United States far longer than many who are generally referred to as "white." Hispanics include people from many different nations, people who are native to the United States, immigrants who have long lived in the United States, and more recent arrivals. The same is true of "Asians." Unfortunately, criminologists have only recently begun to explore this complexity. Most of the arguments and research discussed here use the black/white dichotomy that has long characterized the criminological literature. Since the 2010 census of the US population, Latinos have been the second-largest demographic group in the country, and criminologists have fortunately moved beyond the black/white dichotomy (Peterson, Krivo, and Hagan 2006). Where appropriate, I discuss some of that more recent literature, mostly concerning Latinos.
It is also important to define what is meant by "crime." My focus is on common crimes of property and violence, because that is where the literature on race and crime has focused. If we begin a conversation that asks "what racial group commits more crime, and why?" we come to very different answers if the focus is on common crimes, as has been true of most criminological literature on race, crime, and social class. If the focus is on white-collar crime, or even includes white-collar crime (or organized crime), we would be asking "why are white folks so crime-prone?" Unfortunately, criminologists have not frequently paid much attention to that issue and would likely say the reason is simply that whites are more frequently positioned to have opportunities for white-collar violations, so it is not very interesting. Some would disagree. Still others say that the lack of serious work on this topic says a great deal about American society and perhaps even more about American criminology. Nevertheless, my aim here is to examine the intellectual history of our collective use of conceptions of social class to explain why there are racial differences in common crime involvement.
Social class explanations for racial differences in criminality are popular because of two sets of observed correlations. First, more African Americans are involved in some types of crimes, especially the kinds of crimes likely to result in prison sentences, than are whites, and mostly people from the lower social classes serve time for these offenses. African Americans are overrepresented among lower socioeconomic classes. Second, neighborhoods, cities, and states with larger African American populations have higher crime rates, and those same places frequently also have higher poverty rates. No serious scholar should stumble into the ecological fallacy and interpret this second set of correlations in aggregate data as meaning that poor black people are the ones committing the crimes. Just that connection, however, perhaps because of the first set of correlations, is frequently made in the criminological literature, and it is certainly made in "polite company." In examining the intellectual history of use of social class to explain the correlation between race and crime, we should be careful to note that this explanation has been made at both individual and aggregate levels. Both levels have implications for our capacity to understand race and crime better by taking account of differences in racial distribution across social classes.
I use the notion of social class very broadly, unencumbered by the usual measurements of socioeconomic status or SES employed by social scientists. By social class I mean any and all distinctions in economic positioning or standing of individuals or groups. That ranges from aligning people on a linear social class hierarchy based on income and occupation to slave and free distinctions and variations between these poles such as those invented by Jim Crow, post–Civil War America. In this essay I trace efforts to explain that African Americans and increasingly Latinos engage in more crime because they disproportionately come from or live as lower social class people.
The intellectual history of this line of reasoning is rooted far back in American history. It predates the founding of the United States. Justifications for the slave trade included European conceptions of Africans as lazy and brutish and included assertions that they had only themselves to "blame" for the conditions in which they lived (conditions that were negatively and ethnocentrically evaluated by Eurocentric writers) and their enslavement (Daykin 2006; Rönnbäck 2014). Along the way, I consider arguments and evidence that contest the assertion that members of these groups are indeed more criminal, because much of that challenge is based on disputed conceptions of what social class means and how scholars have measured the critical concepts race and crime.
The first part of this essay briefly considers conceptions of Africans, slavery, and violations of law before the twentieth century. It should not be a surprise that conceptions were crude, but they set the stage for arguments that became popular in the last half of the twentieth century. The second section explores early answers to the question "why are more blacks arrested?" This became an important question as the United States became increasingly urbanized at the same time as large numbers of African Americans moved from the rural South to cities in the North, South, and West in what demographers call the Great Migration. Subcultural theories emerged to explain higher black crime rates that became evident when the federal government established the Uniform Crime Reports. A survey of theoretical and methodological debates follows. Finally, I discuss the reemergence of structural arguments that focus on social and economic disadvantage, and more nuanced versions of cultural considerations, that help provide good sociological-criminological explanations for why members of some communities of color have higher rates of crime.
I. The Early Years
We have no good measures to distinguish racial or ethnic differences in criminality before the middle of the twentieth century, and the measures developed then have been subjected to considerable criticism. The lack of measurement, though, did not stop people from asserting that blacks were more violent, more dangerous. The nineteenth-century southern writer and reformer, George W. Cable, describing the "sentiments" of white America that justified slavery wrote,
First, then, what are these sentiments? Foremost among them stands the idea that he is of necessity an alien. He was brought to our shores a naked, brutish, unclean, captive, pagan savage, to be and remain a kind of connecting link between man and the beasts of burden. The great changes to result from his contract with a superb race of masters were not taken into account. As a social factor he was intended to be as purely zero as the brute at the other end of his plow-line.
Sometimes he was not a mere savage but a trading, smithing, weaving, town-building, crop-raising barbarian. (Cable [1889] 1969, p. 6)
Where did these early conceptions of Africans come from? Thomson (2008) argues that there was not a coherent narrative about Africans to base the slave trade on until the abolition movement gained traction in Europe in the mid-eighteenth century. The abolitionists' narrative was countered by people who used "science" to justify slavery by arguing that Africans were a different sort of human, in need of the civilizing influence and religious enlightenment that Europeans could provide within the context of slavery. Scientific racism continued to be a basis for opposing equality for blacks in the United States well after emancipation (Smith 2007).
Perhaps ironically, in spite of the "brutish," "dangerous" nature of the African, very few were imprisoned in the slave-holding South before the Civil War. That region lagged behind the rest of the nation in penal reforms begun by Jeremy Bentham and others that led to the building of penitentiaries in the North. It made little economic sense to punish black law violators by locking them up and depriving their masters of their labor, so punishment, frequently harsh and "brutish," was left to the master. After the war, after emancipation, when black southerners were no longer the property of slaveholders, when they were freedmen, the numbers of blacks held in captivity as convicts by states grew dramatically (Crutchfield and Finke 1983).
It is popularly believed that the convict lease system in the South after Reconstruction was a means of reinstating slavery. It is more accurate to portray it as part of a larger system to subjugate blacks and keep them subservient and available as cheap labor, shifting the economic or class position of blacks from being slaves to their new roles as sharecroppers and tenant farmers. The convict leasing system provided labor for dangerous and difficult jobs including mining and railroad construction and served as a threat to keep free black workers in line (Adamson 1983).
Cable's description of the lease system indicates how racialized it was. Cable, when studying southern prisons, found the published census numbers to be hiding something onerous, much as contemporary sociologists studying American prisons have done (Pettit and Western 2004; Pettit and Lyons 2009; Pettit 2012):
The official testimony of the prisons themselves is before the world to establish the conjectures that spring from our reasoning. After the erroneous takings of the census of 1880 in South Carolina had been corrected the population was shown to consist of about twenty blacks to every thirteen whites. One would therefore look for a preponderance of blacks on the prison lists; and inasmuch as they are a people only twenty years ago released from servile captivity, one would not be surprised to see that preponderance large. Yet, when the actual numbers confront us, our speculations are stopped with a rude shock; for what is to account for the fact that in 1881 there were committed to the State prison in Columbia South Carolina, 406 colored persons and but 25 whites? The proportion of blacks sentenced to the whole black population was one into every 1488; that of the whites to the white population was but one in every 15,644. (Cable 1969, pp. 32–33)
The difference was that blacks were disproportionately held outside of what were, even by standards of the day, awful prison conditions in the South Carolina penitentiary, in the much worse lease systems, exploiting their labor, shortening their lives, and buttressing the post-Reconstruction racial and social hierarchy. Cable noted similar distributions in other states that used variations on the convict leasing systems.
We cannot credibly use racial distributions in nineteenth-century imprisonment to say anything meaningful about differences in criminal involvement, but at that time they were used for that purpose. This changed only marginally well into the twentieth century before the public, politicians, and even criminologists made the "enlightened" move toward using arrest statistics to demonstrate that blacks engaged in more crime than whites (e.g., von Hentig 1940; McKeown 1948). And, like the apologists for slavery noted by Cable, some attributed the higher number of blacks in confinement in the nineteenth century and higher levels of arrests in the twentieth century to the brutish nature of people of African blood. More liberal thinkers, like Cable himself, pointed to social conditions and notably blacks' economic positioning and social conditions.
II. Why Are More Blacks Arrested?
When the FBI began collecting crime statistics for the Uniform Crime Reports in the early 1930s, arrest rates became available nationally, or nearly nationally. It became possible to make statements about characteristics of those taken into custody. Higher black arrest rates fit with the predominant belief that blacks were more involved in crime than whites. That led for many to the conclusion that blacks were more frequently arrested because they engage in more and more serious criminal behavior. This was a data source in which the more "liberal" explanation, the lower social class position occupied by nearly all black people, could not be tested.
While many assumed that social class differences explained racial differences, others took a different tack: blacks commit more crimes because they are embedded in a pro-crime subculture. That alternative is a hybrid of the two extremes I described above: either the brutish, in-born constitution of people of African descent makes them more criminal or continuous occupation of the lower rungs of the social class stratification ladder is responsible. This argument has the added benefit that it can explain their higher levels of both materially motivated property crime and violence. Underlying many low-SES-leads- to-high-crime arguments is an instrumental conception of crime motivation. With the exception of robbery and homicides resulting from robbery, however, additional conceptual work is required to explain why people from the lower social classes would be any more likely than other people to commit rapes or assaults or to kill without pecuniary motivation. That explanation was provided by those who argued that African Americans were affected by a subculture of violence or by subcultures of poverty values and beliefs.
A. Crime-Conducive Subcultures
African Americans who must live in lower-income places, which meant nearly all until late in the twentieth century, were exposed to and said to be more likely to internalize norms and values and patterns of behavior that made crime more likely. They became carriers of a crime-conducive subculture. Two variants of subculture theory link racial differences in crime to racial differences in social class: most prominently the subculture of violence thesis advanced by Wolfgang and Ferracuti (1967) and various theories of the subculture of poverty that have been prominent in sociology and criminology (e.g., Banfield 1970; Murray 1984).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Crime and Justice by Michael Tonry. Copyright © 2015 The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of University of Chicago Press.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Preface Michael Tonry,From Slavery to Social Class to Disadvantage: An Intellectual History of the Use of Class to Explain Racial Differences in Criminal Involvement Robert D. Crutchfield,
Race, Crime, and Punishment in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries Cassia Spohn,
Federal Sentencing "Reform" since 1984: The Awful as Enemy of the Good Michael Tonry,
Drug Policy: The "Dutch Model" Marianne van Ooyen-Houben and Edward Kleemans,
What Can Be Learned from Cross-National Comparisons of Data on Illegal Drugs? Beau Kilmer, Peter Reuter, and Luca Giommoni,
Crime Trends and the Elasticity of Evil: Has a Broadening View of Violence Affected Our Statistical Indicators? James P. Lynch and Lynn A. Addington,
Community Design and Crime: The Impact of Housing and the Built Environment John MacDonald,
Does Marriage Reduce Crime? Torbjørn Skardhamar, Jukka Savolainen, Kjersti N. Aase, and Torkild H. Lyngstad,
Benefit-Cost Analysis of Crime Prevention Programs Brandon C. Welsh, David P. Farrington, and B. Raffan Gowar,
Prisoner Reentry Programs Cheryl Lero Jonson and Francis T. Cullen,
Juvenile Justice Policy and Practice: A Developmental Perspective Kathryn Monahan, Laurence Steinberg, and Alex R. Piquero,