Race & Crime

Michael Rowe

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781849207270, 9781849207263
• eBook ISBN: 9781446292112
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this original and cutting-edge new textbook, Mike Rowe explores the key topics in race and crime. Examining the main issues from a historical and comparative approach, the book fully situates arguments and ideas in a global context with contemporary examples. Encouraging readers to think critically about well-worn debates, Race & Crime covers a diverse range of issues, including:

• Representation and Disproportionality
• Victimisation
• Human Rights
• Terrorism
• Popular Culture
• Governance

As with all books in the Key Approaches to Criminology series, Race & Crime features extensive learning features to help students to fully engage with topics covered. These include: chapter overviews, study questions, further reading and key terms.

 

Stylishly written yet accessible, Race & Crime will prove invigorating, vital reading for students in criminology, sociology, race and ethnic studies, and cultural studies.

 

 

 

The Key Approaches to Criminology series celebrates the removal of traditional barriers between disciplines and, specifically, reflects criminology's interdisciplinary nature and focus.  It brings together some of the leading scholars working at the intersections of criminology and related subjects.  Each book in the series helps readers to make intellectual connections between criminology and other discourses, and to understand the importance of studying crime and criminal justice within the context of broader debates. 

 

The series is intended to have appeal across the entire range of undergraduate and postgraduate studies and beyond, comprising books which offer introductions to the fields as well as advancing ideas and knowledge in their subject areas. 

1

‘Race’, ‘Crime’ and Society

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CONTENTS

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Introduction

The Social Construction of ‘Race’

The Social Construction of ‘Crime’

Race and Crime: a Critical Engagement

Structure of the Book

Summary

Study Questions

Further Reading

OVERVIEW

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This chapter provides:

• critical consideration of the ways in which ‘race’ and ‘crime’ are socially constructed concepts that have no inherent ontological validity and so do not exist as ‘natural’ phenomena with independent properties;
• an outline of the nature of the ‘critical engagement’ between ‘race’ and ‘crime’ that forms the central theme of this book;
• an overview of the structure and chapters of the book.

KEY TERMS

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• Crime
• Criminalization
• Race
• Scientific racism
• Sociological approaches to ‘race’
• Racialization

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Introduction

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So pervasive and long-standing are the associations between ‘race’ and ‘crime’ that it might seem unnecessary to begin by critically examining the fundamental terms and concepts that form the backbone of the book. It has become axiomatic that issues of ‘race’ are central to the criminological cannon. Unquantifiable intellectual effort and research grant expenditure has been focused over many decades and across many societies in a vast array of studies that have sought to measure associations between ‘race’ and ‘crime’ in terms of patterns of offending, experiences of victimization, treatment by the criminal justice system and the impact and status that these have had in terms of social and political debates and media representation. A reasonable working definition of criminology is that it is a discipline concerned with the study of crime and social responses to crime (Mannheim, 1965): as the rest of this book demonstrates, debates relating to ‘race’ have been recurrent themes in relation to both of these dimensions of the discipline of criminology since it emerged in the nineteenth century. The relationship between ‘race’ and ‘crime’ is a near ubiquitous feature of undergraduate and postgraduate degree programmes in criminology and criminal justice in many parts of the world. Official statistics relating to ‘race’ and ‘crime’ are collated, analyzed and debated in many societies. Even in those countries that do not provide apparently authoritative profiles of the ‘racial’ component of criminal justice activity, the status of minority groups, indigenous peoples, asylum-seekers and migrants is often subject to intense political and social debate. Recently, Bowling (in Gabbidon, 2007) referred to ‘criminology’s quiet obsession with race and crime’. While the implication that the concept of ‘race’ has surreptitiously informed broad swathes of the discipline is apposite, the content of this book further illustrates that criminology’s interest in ‘race’ has often not been clandestine, marginal or softly-spoken.

The Social Construction of ‘Race’

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Analysis based on sorting and classifying humanity into distinct ‘races’, and that these racial differences explained cultural, political, social and economic development, emerged in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The emergence of the concept of race during this period is associated with the development of modern scientific approaches to the natural and social world that sought to develop rational epistemological models that replaced pre-modern or classical traditions (Banton, 1987). Goldberg (1993: 3) described ‘race’ as ‘one of the central conceptual inventions of modernity’ and the methodological and philosophical approach of key progenitors of nineteenth-century scientific racism reflected intellectual currents of the period. Anthropologists, zoologists, medical scientists and biologists in learned societies and universities, at the height of European imperial dominance, developed theories of ‘racial difference’ that categorized humanity into racial types organized hierarchically in ways that served both to explain and to justify the ascendant position of the white race. The Scottish medical scientist Robert Knox was among the first to develop a general biological theory of race and racial difference, claiming in his 1850 book The Races of Men that ‘race, or hereditary descent is everything; it stamps the man’ (Banton, 1967: 29). Solomos and Back (1996: 42–43) argued that nineteenth century ‘scientific racism’ comprised of four elements: (a) that physical appearances reflected discrete and permanent biological types, (b) that these determined cultural variations between groups, (c) that biological variations were the source of group conflict, and (d) that ‘races’ were differently endowed and could be organized hierarchically. On this basis, ‘race’ explained all of human civilization and shaped the course of history. The fundamental role of ‘race’ in human affairs was expressed strongly in a book published in 1854, Types of Mankind, in which Nott and Gliddon argued (1854, cited in Banton, 1967: 31–32):

Human progress has arisen mainly from the war of the races. All the great impulses which have been given to it from time to time have been the results of conquests and colonizations … those groups of races heretofore comprehended under the generic term Caucasian, have in all ages been the rulers; and it requires no prophet’s eye to see that they are destined eventually to conquer and hold every foot of the globe … the superior races ought to be kept free from all adulterations, otherwise the world will retrograde, instead of advancing, in civilization.

Racial traits and typologies, discoverable through the application of scientific methods, formed a framework for explaining the human condition – this was reflected in early criminological studies of delinquency and offenders that also sought to identify biological bases for criminality, as is shown in Chapter Two. In relation to both ‘race’ and ‘crime’, the biological scientific certainties sought by scholars in the mid-nineteenth century were gradually eroded as anthropological, cultural and sociological perspectives focused instead on the social contexts in which the concepts developed. In relation to the notion of ‘race’, sociological approaches developed from the early twentieth century and concentrated on the social circumstances in which racial attributes came to assume significance. In the aftermath of the Second World War, UNESCO commissioned biologists and sociologists to study the scientific basis of the concept of race. Extended deliberations by panels of experts concluded that ‘race’ had no biological basis in the terms envisaged a century earlier during the zenith of scientific racism (Rex, 1970). The UNESCO studies arrived at a definition of ‘race’ that significantly departed from nineteenth-century racist orthodoxy, concluding that ‘for all practical social purposes “race” is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth’ (Montagu, 1972, cited in Malik, 1996: 15). Rex (1970: 3–4) outlined six key findings of the UNESCO study in relation to the biological status of ‘race’: (i) that human populations represent a continuum and that the genetic diversity within groups is as great as that between them; (ii) that observable human characteristics are the result of biology and environment rather than inheritance; (iii) the various characteristics grouped together as racial and said to be transmitted en bloc are in fact transmitted individually; (iv) human beings belong to a single species and are derived from common stock; (v) although different human groups may be loosely referred to as ‘races’, it is not justifiable to attribute cultural characteristics to genetic inheritance; (vi) human evolution has been greatly affected by migration and cultural evolution and the capacity to advance is shared by all homo sapiens.

After this period, sociological perspectives on race eclipsed biological and genetic approaches. As has been noted, ‘race’ became a social phenomenon worthy of study not because it had any inherent status in genetic or biological terms but because human beings so often acted upon the basis that it was meaningful: a concept real not in itself but in its consequences. This raises a fundamental problem that recurs throughout this book and is returned to in more detail in the final chapter; namely, the need to ‘take race seriously’ as a social phenomenon while at the same time not affording it spurious credibility or reinforcing its legitimacy. In Britain, the sociology of race relations often focused on social, economic and political relationships between white communities and the first generations of migrants from the Caribbean, who arrived in the ‘mother country’ during a period of labour shortages and post-war reconstruction. Studies such as those by Banton (1959), Glass (1960), and Rex and Moore (1967) examined conflicts and tensions between host and migrant communities in relation to competition for employment, housing, and various social and cultural issues. Crucially, in contrast to earlier approaches, the concept of race is not understood to be an independent causal factor such that social conflicts of these kinds are a result of innate, inevitable, determining characteristics of ‘racial’ types. Theoretically, sociological approaches to race relations focused on debates about the extent to which the concept of race was a form of ‘status’ in Weberian terms, acted to increase social solidarity in Durkheimian traditions, or represented ‘false consciousness’ that distracted from the fundamental dynamics of class struggle, as Marxist perspectives might suggest (Rex, 1986).

However, critics of these sociological approaches argue that by taking race seriously as a concept ‘real in its consequences’, such studies replicate dominant racist assumptions and fail to challenge structural and ideological relations of power that marginalize and criminalize oppressed communities. Miles (1989, 1993) offered a strong critique of the sociology of race relations on the grounds that they continue to grant the concept analytical validity, albeit in terms other than biology and genetics. For Miles, ‘race’ is an ideological construction that is intimately bound up in structural and economic foundations of capitalist society. Retaining ‘race’, even if understood in sociological terms, affords the concept a status it does not warrant and is a barrier to the development of progressive political action. On this basis, the focus ought instead to be on the ways in which the idea of ‘race’ is constructed in particular social and ideological contexts. Small (1994: 34) develops this perspective by arguing that the key challenge is not to explore the realities of race, but instead to consider processes of racialization that make the concept a powerful determinant of social relations. Small argues that (1994: 34):

When we examine the process of ‘racialisation’ we find that our beliefs about ‘races’ and ‘race relations’ have more to do with the attitudes, actions, motivations and interests of powerful groups in society; and less to do with the characteristics, attitudes and actions of those who are defined as belonging to ‘inferior’ races … we must also acknowledge that definitions, ideas and images once begun can vary and endure in ways that are complex.

As is elaborated further in the final chapter of this book, the approach adopted in this text is one that emphasizes the problematic social construction of the concept of race. The analysis of the various points of critical engagement between race and crime that is developed in the following chapters focuses attention on the particular ways in which crime, disorder, deviance, law, security, and terrorism have been racialized in different times and places. Four related features characterize the racialization approach (Murji and Solomos, 2005):

1. Race is a problematic concept that is socially constructed in particular spatial and temporal contexts;
2. Racialized debates that develop in local contexts draw upon and further contribute to historical discourse and understanding of ‘race’;
3. Racialization is an inconsistent and contradictory process that may not explicitly refer to biological, genetic or cultural themes;
4. Racialized discourse articulates with other socially constructed concepts, including those relating to gender, youth and crime.

It is to indicate recognition that the concept is fundamentally flawed and socially constructed that many authors use quotation marks, such that race becomes ‘race’. Although this book seeks to further develop a critical analysis of processes of racialization and is based on the same theoretical standpoint that problematizes the concept, it does not continue to place the term in quotation marks. Although race is used, without quotation marks, in the remainder of the book, the entire theme of the analysis is to critically examine the social, political, cultural and intellectual contexts in which the term develops and has been deployed. Given that race has no inherent validity, the task becomes to explain the circumstances in which it comes to form a compelling way of understanding and organizing social relations.

The Social Construction of ‘Crime’

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As the concept of racialization draws attention to the ways in which ‘race’ is a socially constructed phenomenon, so too the term ‘criminalization’ suggests that analysis ought to be concentrated on the circumstances in which some forms of behaviour come to be understood as problems that require some form of state-sanctioned response. Focusing on the process of criminalization recognizes that ‘crime’ is a problematic term that cannot be understood as an independent category defined by its own inherent properties. Crime, and the appropriate responses to it, has dominated political and media debate in many countries for many decades. Serious, violent and dramatic cases are given a high priority on news agendas, political parties promise ever ‘tougher’ sanctions, and citizens consume infotainment shows, movies and computer games that offer thrilling opportunities to enjoy crime vicariously. For all that crime is easy to recognize in contemporary mass-mediated society, it remains difficult to define. A traditional approach to defining crime adopts a legalistic framework: crime is that category of activity that is subject to the criminal law. Clearly this circular definition – a crime is a crime because the law defines it so – has some merit. In applied terms it provides an operational framework that shapes the actions of the agencies of the criminal justice system. As much of the criminological literature has noted over many decades though, it is an unsatisfactory basis for understanding crime for a number of reasons. In the 1930s, Michael and Adler (1933, cited in Muncie, 1996: 8) noted that a logical consequence of the ‘black letter law’ definition of crime is that no action can be considered criminal unless it is proscribed by the law, which means that the criminal law is the formal cause of crime. Relatedly, no individua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter One ‘Race’, ‘Crime’ and Society
• Chapter Two Race, Crime and the Criminological Imagination
• Chapter Three Race, Crime and Popular Culture
• Chapter Four Disproportionality in Offending
• Chapter Five Race and Victimization
• Chapter Six Race, Conflict and Human Rights
• Chapter Seven Disproportionality in the Criminal Justice System
• Chapter Eight Diversity and Representation in the Criminal Justice System
• Chapter Nine Islam, Terrorism and Security
• Chapter Ten Race and Crime: a Critical Engagement
• Glossary
• References
• Index