Social Disharmony and Racial Injustice: W. E. B. Du Bois’s Theories on Crime

Abstract

Although W. E. B. Du Bois addresses crime in Black communities in many of his writings, he is rarely recognized as having a cohesive theory on crime, and his work is often conflated with Shaw and McKay’s social disorganization theory. While both social disorganization and Du Bois’s theories pushed sociology and criminology away from pseudo-biological explanations of crime to the social environment, the Chicago School analyzed how social control broke down within neighborhoods, while Du Bois analyzed how racist social and economic exclusion of Black communities led to crime. Du Bois’s criminological theories of social disharmony and racial injustice also consider the social construction of crime and the criminalization of Blackness where social disorganization does not. Focusing on the relations of racial exclusion led Du Bois to propose solutions to crime that focus on mechanisms of oppression and economic injustice across various levels of society. This approach differs widely from community-level interventions driven by social disorganization theory, which focus on improving informal social control within neighborhoods. Du Bois's theories on crime and the social environment provide an analytic lens for sociologists to link the social organization within communities to the social organization across communities.

Democracy for whom? How criminal punishment marginalizes the political voices of Black and Brown Americans

“…Calls to engage in Du Boisian emancipatory scholarship are now common in sociology (e.g., Loughran, 2015;Morris, 2022;Reyes, 2022;Werth, 2022;Wright, 2012Wright, , 2020. Scholars also recently introduced critical race theorywhich originated in law schools-to better theorize how racism perpetuates and persists, especially via [at first glance] race-neutral forms of punishment, and to critique assumptions about the state, space, and empirical scholarship more broadly (Bracey, 2015;Christian et al, 2019Christian et al, , 2021Embrick & Moore, 2020).…”

“…Building on Clair's (2021) Du Boisian criminalized subjectivities argument and Bell's (2017) concept of legal estrangement, we argue that social science must not only study the systematic political marginalization of a large swath of Americans via criminal punishment, but also their lived experiences of and ways of understanding that marginalization (Prowse et al., 2020). We do so by taking heed of the lessons from recent Du Boisian scholarship across subfields such as urban sociology (Loughran, 2015), economic sociology (Reyes, 2022), and criminology (Werth, 2022). As an emancipatory sociology, Du Boisian sociology centers on how scholarship can and must be targeted toward improving society (see Morris, 2021; Romero, 2020; Wright, 2012, 2020).…”

“…To illuminate these more hidden marginalization mechanisms and identify how racism warps American democracy via the criminal punishment system, we take a Du Boisian approach (Du Bois, 1898Bois, , 1935. Though Du Bois's tenets are often implicit in this third line of research (Itzigsohn & Brown, 2020;Werth, 2022), we argue that explicitly connecting Du Boisian emancipatory sociology with scholarship on hidden marginalizations and democracy strengthens the potential importance and impact of that research. We focus on two distinct but related marginalizations identified by recent work to demonstrate the macro-level impacts of the carceral state on electoral politics: disenfranchisement for a felony conviction and prison gerrymandering.…”

“This Unfortunate Development”: Incarceration and Democracy in W. E. B. Du Bois

“… 11. For a compelling recent analysis of Du Bois’s criminology, written in a different vein than Gabbidon, see S. Rose Werth (2022, especially 4–9). …”