Crime and Race

Racial Differences in Offending

Most criminologists conclude that the disproportionate involvement of African Americans in the criminal justice system as suspects, defendants, and inmates largely reflects their actual heavier involvement in serious crime. This does not mean that most African Americans commit crimes, only that the rates of criminal behavior among African Americans are higher than those among members of other races.

Several kinds of evidence support this conclusion. Arrest rates for homicide, the crime for which data are most reliable, are about six times greater for African Americans than for Whites. In self-report studies, for which respondents provide information about their own delinquent and criminal behavior, African Americans usually report heavier involvement in serious offending. Respondents in victimization surveys, who provide information about crimes they have experienced and also about the race, gender, and other characteristics of their offenders, also disproportionately identify African Americans as the offenders in crimes of personal violence. On the whole, then, African Americans do appear to be disproportionately involved in serious crime.

This conclusion comes with several important caveats. First, as noted earlier, most African Americans do not commit any crimes. Second, most crimes by African Americans are committed against [Page 339]other African Americans, as crime tends to be intrara-cial (occurring within a race). Third, Whites monopolize white-collar crime and especially crime by corporations. Fourth, the apparent heavier involvement of African Americans arises from certain social conditions, the subject of the next section, and not from any inherent tendency toward violence and other criminal behavior.

Although racial differences in serious offending appear to exist and to explain most of the disproportionate involvement of African Americans in the criminal justice system, racial discrimination in the criminal justice system may account for some of this involvement. Such discrimination is neither systematic nor overt, however, and studies of its possible presence yield inconsistent results. Some studies, for example, find no racial differences in prison sentence lengths once factors such as offense severity and the defendant's prior record are taken into account, but other studies find that African American males receive longer sentences than White males. In general, racial discrimination is more often (though not always) found regarding the decision to incarcerate (the “in/out” decision) than regarding the actual length of a sentence for those given prison terms in the first place. It is also more often found for less-serious offenses than for more-serious offenses.

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