Black & Asians are overrepresented in O/S, whites are underrepresented.
Black people make up 3% of Britain's population but 13% of prisons.
7x more likely to be stopped & searched than white people, 3x more likely to be arrested & 5x more likely to be put in prison.
Asians make up 6% of the population yet 8% of prisons.
They are more likely to be charged & go to court instead of a caution & recieve longer prison sentences if found guilty.
White people make up 87% of the British population and only 7% of prisons.
Victim surveys are invalid because white victims may 'over-identify' blacks, relying on unreliable memories even when they don't know the real culprit.
However they only tell us the ethnicity of a small proportion of offenders.
Self report studies (Graham & Bowling) found that blacks (43%) & whites (44%) had similar rates of offending, Asians were lower.
Yet people of white/mixed ethnic groups are more likely to admit to crime.
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The Criminal Justice System
Policing - Phillips & Bowling note that there are many allegations of the opressive over-policing yet underprotecting of MEG communities; police violence, armed raids & deaths in custody.
Stop & Search - Police can use this power if they have 'reasonable suspicion' of wrongdoing, particularly against blacks & Asians. More Asians were stopped under the Terrorism Act (search persons or vehicles even without reasonable suspicion) than any other group.
Hoyle - Black people are 3x more likely than white people to be tazed; 18 in 10,000.
The Macpherson Report found that there was institutional racism within MET Police as they treated the Stephen Lawrence case with a lack of urgency & made professional mistakes.
However Ethnic minorities are more likely to be unemployed/live in urban areas & police often use stereotypes to stop & search people, which suggests why they are overrepresented.
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Explaining the differences in offending
New Left Realists(Lea & Young)- Crime is a product of relative deprivation, subculture and marginilisation, they don't believe that explaining the differences in offending through racism, or discriminatory policing they instead they believe that they are true indicators of the rates.
They have been criticised because Asians were once seen as passive but are now stereotyped by the police as being dangerous particularly after events like 9/11, there is a rise in the criminalisation of Black & Asian groups.
Neo-Marxism - Gilroy (the myth of black criminality) argues that crime committed by black people, particularly in the 1970's was a form of political action; resistance against social inequality and police racism. Blacks are no more criminal than other groups & the myth was created by negative stereotyping by the police & the media.
Policing the Crisis - Stuart Hall found that the moral panic of the 'black mugger' (folk devil) was created as a diversion/scapegoat away from the real problems that hegemony was under threat due to economic crisis; Northern Ireland conflict & oil crisis in the Middle East.
New Right Realists - Charles Murray believes that matrifocal families are more common in Afro-Caribbean communities & single mothers can not raise black boys or provide male role models, therefore they turn to deliquent gang culture as an authority/father figure.
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