Article by Joseph F. Sheley
The late 1960s and much of the 1970s brought considerable increases in crime rates. The 1980s generally saw a leveling out of this trend, but it was clear that crime rates, especially violent crime rates, exceeded those of any period in this century. The 1960s' focus on the social forces-primarily opportunity-related-underlying crime found less interest and still less sympathy in the late 1970s and the 1980s. Encouraged by conservative criminologists, criminal justice system policy was aimed at deterrence and custody. Law reform and prosecutorial policies sought to raise the costs of engaging in criminal activities by locking away serious, convicted offenders for the majority of their otherwise criminally active years.
As the 1980s came to a close it became apparent that the custody-deterrence approach had failed to reduce crime levels. In essence the approach was misdirected, focusing on symptoms instead of causes. Court dockets swelled, longer sentences were imposed, and prison and jail populations reached new highs. Yet, crime rates held relatively constant as new offenders replaced those taken off the streets. Research and commentary in professional journals and, to a lesser extent, popular media increasingly have called for a return to social-causation issues underlying crime.
Against this backdrop, we now appreciate that well before the Los Angeles riots of 1992, the interrelated issues of race, crime, and criminal justice were on their way to public debate. This debate has been driven by the government's failure to decrease crime levels, by the popular perception that African-American incarceration rates exceed their representation in the general population, and by the 1988 Republican presidential nominee's attention to race and crime. These concerns have invited outrage concerning the “black problem” in many sectors of the white community and, in turn, have generated counterclaims of racism, especially in the administration of justice, from African Americans.
The following pages explore elements of this debate. In this Article, I examine the extent to which African Americans are in fact more involved in criminal behavior than European Americans and the degree to which the criminal justice system discriminates against African Americans. I also explore the cultural and structural trends underlying both phenomena. By way of orientation, I assume that neither criminality nor criminal justice discrimination exist in a social vacuum, and that criminality and discrimination are not merely manifestations of individual pathologies. I also distinguish between individual and aggregate behavior in that, while we cannot claim to explain the factors governing the former's choice of an unlawful behavioral path, we can identify social factors that increase or decrease the level of the aggregate membership's involvement in the behaviors in question.
About the Author
Joseph F. Sheley. Associate Professor, Department of Sociology, Tulane University.
Citation
67 Tul. L. Rev. 2273 (1993)