Ethnicity, Crime & Justice

3 main sources of statistics on ethnicity & criminalisation:

Official Statistics

• Show the likelihood of being involved in the CJS

Victim Surveys

• Ask individuals what crimes they have been victims of
• May ask the respondent to identify the ethnicity of the person who committed the crime

Self-report Studies

• They ask individuals to disclose what crimes they have committed

Overall, the evidence on ethnicity & offending is inconsistent. Official statistics & victim surveys indicate higher rates of offending by black people, but self-report studies do not.

Policing

• Stop & search, excessive surveillance, armed raids, police violence & deaths in custody
• Minorities are more likely to think that they are over-policed & under-protected

Stop & search

• Black people are 7x more likely to be stopped & searched than whites
• Asians are 3x more likely to be stopped & searched than other people
• Patterns as a result in ethnic differences in offending; police racism & demographic factors

Arrests & cautions

• The arrest rate for black people is over 3x the rate for whites
• Blacks & Asians are less likely than white people to receive a caution

Prosecution & Trial

• CPS is more likely to drop cases against minorities than against whites. Black & Asian defendants are less likely to be found guilty than whites

Sentencing & Prison

• Black men 5x more likely to be jailed, even when the seriousness of the offence & previous convictions are taken into account
• Ethnic minorities are less likely to be granted bail

Lea & Young: Crime Statistics

• Crime is a result of relative deprivation, subculture & marginalisation
• Racism has led to the marginalisation & economic exclusion of ethnic minorities
• Media emphasis on consumerism promotes relative deprivation by setting goals that some members of society cannot reach
• Police racism has an impact on the unjustified criminalisation of some ethnic groups, but this cannot have a large enough impac to suggest statistical differences, nor the difference is conviction rates between blacks and Asians

Lea & Young thus conclude that:

• The statistics represent real differences in offending between ethnic groups
• These are caused by differences in levels of relative deprivation & marginalisation

Gillroy: The Myth of Black Criminality

• The CJS acts of racist stereotypes, so minoritis are criminalised & therefore appear in greater numbers in the official crime statistics
• Ethnic minority crime is a form of political resistance against a racist society, and this resistance has its roots in the struggle against British imperialism

Hall et al: Policing the Crisis

• The 1970s moral panaic over black "muggers" that served the interests of capitalism in dealing with the crisis
• In times of crisis, rule by consent becomes more difficult (e.g. 1970s economic crisis - high unemployment, inflation & strikes)
• Media-driven moral panic about the supposed growth of mugging
• The myth about the young black mugger served as a scapegoat to distract society from the economic crisis
• The moral panic served to divide the w/c on racial grounds & weaken opposition to capitalism, as well as providing popular consent for more authoritarian rule
• However, black people were also marginalised through unemployment, and ths drove some into petty crime to survive