Policing the Ghetto Underclass: The Politics of Law and Law Enforcement

Chambliss, William J.

doi:10.2307/3096929

Cited by 175 publications

(52 citation statements)

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“…However, budget allocation and lethal sentencing, which are commonly the topic of political campaigning, may be subjected to greater public influence. Notwithstanding this argument, all punishment is political [50,51], and given prior findings about the hydraulic effect of punishment practices [52], understanding where racialized threat may be more directly operating is crucial to elucidating the causes of differential treatment. Consequently, despite the significant amount of research on racial threat theory, additional research is needed to explain how racialized threat influences state-sanctioned control practices.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Racial Threat Theory: Assessing the Evidence, Requesting Redesign

Dollar

2014

Journal of Criminology

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Racial threat theory was developed as a way to explain how population composition influences discriminatory social control practices and has become one of the most acknowledged frameworks for explaining racial disparity in criminal justice outcomes. This paper provides a thorough review of racial threat theory and empirical assessments of the theory and demonstrates that while scholars often cite inconsistent support for the theory, empirical discrepancies may be due to insufficient attention to the conceptual complexity of racial threat. I organize and present the following review around 4 forms of state-sanctioned control mechanisms: police expenditures, arrests, sentencing, and capital punishment. Arguing that the pervasiveness of racialization in state controls warrants continued inquiry, I provide suggestions for future scholarship that will help us develop enhanced understanding of how racial threat may be operating.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Racial Threat Theory: Assessing the Evidence, Requesting Redesign

Dollar

2014

Journal of Criminology

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“…The first, referred to here as the “differential involvement hypothesis,” is that Blacks simply commit more crime and more of the types of crime (e.g., violence) that lead to official criminal justice system processing (Blumstein, 1982, 1993; Wilbanks, 1987), and Blacks also continue to commit crime (especially that of violence) into adulthood when White rates appear to decrease (Elliott, 1994). 2 The second hypothesis, referred to here as the “differential criminal justice system selection hypothesis,” asserts that differential police presence, patrolling, and profiling, combined with discrimination in the courts and correctional systems, leads to more Blacks being arrested, convicted, and incarcerated (Chambliss, 1994, 1995; Hindelang, 1978; Tonry, 1995; Zimring & Hawkins, 1997). It is also the case that this hypothesis is more likely to apply to the sorts of (victimless) crimes in which there is more discretion available to agents of formal social control (e.g., drug use, “public order” crimes, etc.).…”

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confidence: 99%

Assessing the Race–Crime and Ethnicity–Crime Relationship in a Sample of Serious Adolescent Delinquents

Piquero

Brame

2008

Crime & Delinquency

110

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Official record studies consistently show that Blacks exhibit higher levels of involvement in criminal offending than Whites do. Although self-report studies suggest somewhat lower levels of Black overrepresentation in criminal offending activity (especially with less serious forms of crime), there appears to be considerable evidence that Blacks are disproportionately involved in serious crime. Yet most of this evidence is based on data from broad cross-sections of the general population. To date, there is little evidence on which to base inferences about the relationship between race and criminal involvement within serious offender populations. In this article, the authors use both official record and self-report data on samples of serious adolescent offenders in Philadelphia and Phoenix to reach a better understanding of the relationship between race and criminal activity. The analysis suggests that consistent race differences of the kind normally seen in the criminological literature are not evident in our sample of serious offenders.

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“…As one might expect in light of the recent theoretical emphasis on the political nature of legal punishments (Chambliss 1994;Foucault 1977;Garland 1990Garland , 2001) and the Republican party's tactical use of law and order appeals to covertly enhance voters' racial fears (see the quotes in note 4), these results show that executions increased after states awarded additional votes to Republican candidates. Yet increased electoral support for law and order Republicans who enthusiastically embrace the death penalty may be based on preexisting conservative values.…”

Section: Wider Implicationsmentioning

confidence: 71%

Who Survives on Death Row? An Individual and Contextual Analysis

et al. 2007

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What are the relationships between death row offender attributes, social arrangements, and executions? Partly because public officials control executions, theorists view this sanction as intrinsically political. Although the literature has focused on offender attributes that lead to death sentences, the post-sentencing stage is at least as important. States differ sharply in their willingness to execute and less than 10 percent of those given a death sentence are executed. To correct the resulting problems with censored data, this study uses a discrete-time event history analysis to detect the individual and state-level contextual factors that shape execution probabilities. The findings show that minority death row inmates convicted of killing whites face higher execution probabilities than other capital offenders. Theoretically relevant contextual factors with explanatory power include minority presence in nonlinear form, political ideology, and votes for Republican presidential candidates. Inasmuch as there is little or no systematic research on the individual and contextual factors that influence execution probabilities, these findings fill important gaps in the literature.

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Policing the Ghetto Underclass: The Politics of Law and Law Enforcement

Cited by 175 publications

References 1 publication

Racial Threat Theory: Assessing the Evidence, Requesting Redesign

Racial Threat Theory: Assessing the Evidence, Requesting Redesign

Assessing the Race–Crime and Ethnicity–Crime Relationship in a Sample of Serious Adolescent Delinquents

Who Survives on Death Row? An Individual and Contextual Analysis

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