The House I Live In is a film that was written and produced by Eugen Jarecki. The film raises important issues about the U.S. criminal justice system, while making the “War on Drugs” a central line of focus.

The statistics presented in the film are staggering. America’s drug war has been prosecuted for more than 40 years at a cost of trillions of dollars. More than 45 million arrests have been made. Almost 2.3 million people have been incarcerated as a result (about 1% of the U.S. population). And what do we have to show for it? Not much has been achieved in the way of success, other than making the United States the number one ranked jailer in the world.

The social inequalities of the criminal justice system are staggering. African Americans comprise less than 14% of the US population but almost 40% of those in prison. Hispanic Americans comprise just over 16% of the US population but around 20% of those in prison. African American males are jailed at about six times the rate of white males and three times the rate of Hispanic males. Considering that most people are locked up for non-violent drug offenses, one would assume that these groups do more drugs right? The problem is that research has documented time and again that drug use is fairly level across all social groups, including white people. Yet people of color are disproportionately represented among the ranks of the incarcerated.

It is against this background that Jarecki wrote, produced. and directed his documentary. He personalizes the narrative by juxtaposing the national drug war narrative with the story of his childhood caregiver, as woman named “Nanny.” Along the way, he interviews a disparate cast of people, all of whose experiences transect the drug problem. There are interviews with police, drug dealers, a prison guard in Oklahoma, and different family members of people who were incarcerated for drugs. Perhaps best of all is David Simon, the former Baltimore journalist and creator of the television series “The Wire.”

The evolution of the drug war, which some scholars attribute to Reagan and others the Johnson and Nixon administrations, reveals how it went from being a primarily black and brown issue to one that now captures a large number of white working class men. In the case of the latter, the loss of manufacturing jobs led to their becoming involved in the illicit drug trade for the same reasons as others before them: once economically displaced, they become involved in prohibited economies, because there are no other jobs that can be easily obtained.

The use of aggressive enforcement means coupled with mandatory minimum sentences resulted in an explosion of the prison population. has led to a swollen ethnic prison population that, for many whites, has swept the problem off the streets and out of sight. So, at its core, the economic system no longer only targets racial and ethnic minorities; it has become an equal opportunity employer in this regard. Now the driver is poverty and a lack of economic opportunity.

To summarize, the film argues that the policies of the last four decades have failed. Economic restructuring has brutalized Americans across the spectrum, rendering the lives of many people miserable, while continuing to disproportionately impact people of color. Research has shown that when drugs are treated as a public health issue, as opposed to a law enforcement issue, problems can be solved. But the criminal justice system shows no signs of being willing to change.

Discussion Questions

How are relations of social inequality highlighted in the film? Are the people caught up in the drug war simply not working or trying hard enough to be successful?

What are some of the structural obstacles to success (birth /family dynamics) presented in the film?

What do you think your own life chances might be if you grew up in 77 Cromwell Towers in Yonkers?

What do you think might be done to solve the problems discussed in the film?

The question seems simple enough. But how you answer it actually offers quite a bit of insight into a variety of things like your family upbringing, socialization, information literacy (ability & desire to access evidence-based information), educational attainment, victimization experience, and social dominance orientation. A second and closely related question – Who is poor? – tells us more of the same.

As a social scientist, who teaches college students, I find that student “beliefs” are often at odds with evidence and fact. This is because students tend to rely on information from close associates (friends and family). This traditional source of “received wisdom” can be hard to step back from, especially if it puts one at risk of social conflict with those same close associates. In other words, some find social conformity is the better option – its’ better to stay on good terms with friends rather than stand up for what may be right and true. Given this, here are some of the common beliefs about poor people:

• Poor People Are Lazy
• Poor People Don’t Want to Work Hard
• Poor People Can’t Manage Money

While I might agree that there are some people who are poor because of these things, there is quite a bit of research that contradicts this. But before I go into this research, I want to acknowledge how tempting it is to believe that while people are sometimes errant in their beliefs for reasons like lacking access to good sources of information, there is another more insidious explanation – people become deeply invested in their beliefs because they are emotionally satisfying. Briefly put, sharing beliefs with a group of like-minded others feels good. Expressed shared beliefs help people to cement social group affiliation by demonstrating solidarity with group ideals.

How people the resolve the mental contradiction between what they believe to be true when they are confronted with contradictory facts, statistics, research, etc. tells us a lot about that person. Psychologists have a term for this internal mental contradiction – they refer to it as “cognitive dissonance.”

Cognitive Dissonance: the state of having inconsistent thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes, especially as relating to behavioral decisions and attitude change.

Research on Why People are Poor/Remain Poor

The research on this topic is wide ranging, but I will list a few studies as well as policies that aim to address the matter. In one instance, researchers at the London School of Economics undertook study to answer the question “Why Do People Stay Poor?” (2020 released paper). They found that it was the initial lack of wealth and not motivation or talent that keeps people in poverty.  To test this, the researchers randomly allocated wealth (i.e. livestock) to female villagers in Bangladesh. After doing so, they waited to see how the wealth transfer would impact their future finances.  Their paper concluded:

[We] find that, if the program pushes individuals above a threshold level of initial assets, then they escape poverty, but, if it does not, they slide back into poverty…Our findings imply that large one-off transfers that enable people to take on more productive occupations can help alleviate persistent poverty.

Put another way, many poor people stay poor not because of their talent/motivation, but because they are in low-paying jobs that they must work to survive. This is what researchers refer to as the “Poverty Trap.” Their lack of money and assets is so overwhelming that spend all of their time taking care of day-to-day survival problems; this prevents them from adopting a “future planning” mindset and investing effort in acquiring training/capital to work in higher paying jobs.

First generation college students are no doubt familiar with some of these strains. Yet there are still others who have never been in these circumstances who cannot possible relate to the idea that an individual might not be able to simply work themselves out of difficult circumstances.

Forms of Capital

Sociologists like Pierre Bourdieu use what is called the Forms of Capital Model to talk about this in more detail. Bourdieu’s contribution is that he effectively expands the notion of capital beyond its more narrow economic conception, where he emphasizes material exchanges to include “immaterial” and “non-economic” forms of capital. Bourdieu distinguished three forms of capital (economic, cultural, and symbolic). We might elaborate this a bit to think of the kinds of capital that individuals might lack as follows: financial capital (money), social capital (it’s not what you know but who you know), cultural capital (knowing the right things so you fit in; having access to cultural goods/materials; symbolic association, tastes, values and ethics), and human capital ( resources like education, emotional resilience, physical health, and self-esteem). Some of these things are conspicuously acquired whereas others are transmitted through indirect means that are less tangible. Having access to one form, all, or none can make a major difference in a given individual’s ability to be successful. In short, it’s not all about “hard work” to resolve the problem of being poor.

In another study, published in the journal Science (2013), researchers from the University of Warwick, Harvard, Princeton, and the University of British Columbia found that poor people struggling with finances were subject to cognitive strain equivalent to a 13-point loss of IQ, equivalent to a full night’s sleep lost. Theirs is one of multiple studies that suggests poverty can harm cognition and decision-making. Poor people who are stressed and living in a scarcity mind-set have a harder time processing information to inform decisions. Poor results, thus, are not caused by lack of intelligence or personal discipline. They are a consequence of being poor such that being born into poverty disposes many people to become caught up in a cycle of poverty that can span generations if significant help is not provided. 

Policy Remedies

For those who design and implement antipoverty initiatives, it’s important to recognize 1) who is poor; and 2) why people are poor. Absent an understanding of the complexity that attends to the issue of poverty, we cannot begin to undertake effective steps to resolve the problem.

Discussion Questions

What has been your traditional understanding of why people are poor? What narratives have you relied on to explain the persistent poverty and relations of social inequality?

Close you eyes and conjure a picture of someone who is poor. What does that person look like? Are they male or female? Black, white, other? Young or old?

Where do poor people live in your town? Are they visible or invisible to you as you make you daily travels?

Hang on – here we go! We are inventing new pedagogies and ways of learning and being together online. My idea for this student-focused teaching and learning space is to keep it “fluid” – kind of the way life is now in the “new normal.”

As we move forward, I want to encourage all of my students, first and foremost, to stay safe and take of their families. In the meantime, I would like to encourage you to send me pix, memes, and articles of interest that we can all read together and comment on as we try to come together as a learning community.

In the upcoming days and weeks, I will develop different sub-categories and sections that speak to the focus of the different classes we are taking together – Juvenile Delinquency, Organized Crime, and Race and Ethnic Relations. I’m going to continue to post and link you to writing and research by public health researchers as well as researchers in the social sciences in general that I think you might find interesting as well as helpful to your understanding of these rapidly unfolding events.

Italian Ground Zero – Lombardy & Bergamo

One of the reasons I have been on top of this is that I was a panel organizer for a research conference that was supposed to take place in Bergamo, Italy this summer. Dr. McLean and I, along with scholars from across Penn State, Italy, Iran, and France, were all scheduled to discuss our current research at a June meeting. The title of our panel was: “Public Health Interventions: Global Problems, Local Solutions,” where we intended to talk about local approaches to solving global public health problems – prescient indeed!

In light of these plans, I was following the reports and talking to friends on the ground in Italy as early as February. Since that time, most people in the U.S. have been enraptured with the “it’s just the flu” narrative; that was never true. But it didn’t stop people from believing what they wanted to hear (too many in the news media are continuing the trend of providing ongoing happy talk).

Here is a photo from Bergamo published during the third week of March 2020. It shows Italian military vehicles removing dead bodies that are too numerous to be handled effectively by local crematories:

While it is true that the outbreak started in China, there is no reliable data that has been released by China that we can use to evaluate or compare to judge our own response. The Italian case, however, provides us with some evidence that we can act on now.

Here are a few articles for you to check out and get you started. I’ll keep a rolling list of articles at the end of this post and build it out as time permits:

“2 Regions of Italy took Different Approaches to Fighting the Coronavirus,” by Holly Secon

“Coronavirus, Italy’s Hardest Hit City,” by Stuart Ramsay

“A Medical Worker Describes Terrifying Lung Failure from COVID-19,” by Lizzie Presser

“At War with No Ammo: Doctors Say Shortage of Protective Gear is Dire,” by Jacobs, Richtel, and Baker

Welcome to the Quarantine

What does it even mean to be quarantined? A lot of you may be asking this question and finding it surreal to discover that this means different things to different people.

Simply put, a quarantine is a type of restriction put on the movement of people and goods. The intent is to prevent the spread of disease or pests. Such a measure is often used in connection with preventing the spread of disease and illness. Quarantines are also used to prevent the movement of those who may have been exposed to a communicable disease but do not have a confirmed medical diagnosis.

Here is a link to the CDC’s website that explains quarantines and contains additional information that you might find useful.

“Social Distancing” (which is really physical distancing) has already been proven to help contain and slow the spread of the disease. Unfortunately, it does not prevent the spread of disease. Until a cure is found or a vaccine is produced, this is a practice you can engage right now to protect yourself and those with whom you live. That is to say, the best thing you can do to help is stay at home and simply do nothing.

This link to the Johns Hopkins Medical School is an excellent source of information that you can turn to in order to learn more about things like social distancing, quarantining, self-isolating, and a protective practice you might have heard of called “flattening the curve.”

And here’s a video…just because:

Epidemics of Injustice: Race, Ethnicity & COVID-19

Even as we are in the early stages of going down the road of addressing the pandemic spread of disease, the racial and ethnic contours of COVID-19 are becoming readily apparent. You may, for example, be sitting in your home now, performing your work or school work from the comfort of your desk. A challenging as this might be for some of you, there are many others who do not have the luxury of performing their work from home.

As this article notes, “just 16.2% of Hispanic workers and 19.7% of black Americans are able to work from home….whites and Asian workers have the highest rates of access to remote work.”

By way of contrast, people who work in restaurants/food service, retail, and perform care work are disproportionately black, brown, and female. They are also among the lowest-paid workers and the least likely to either: 1) have health insurance; and 2) be able to call off work for reasons of illness.

Racism is a Public Health Crisis

Systematic (structural) racism is making Coronavirus far more deadly in the Black community when compared to others. Black coronavirus victims in Chicago are dying at disproportionately high rates. This is a problem that Chicago Governor JB Pritzker said is due, in part, to “decades, frankly, maybe centuries, of inequality of application of health care to people of color.” As it stands now, seventy percent of people dying in Chicago are black, whereas 30% of the people dying state-wide are black. For more on this click here.

Black men don’t feel safe wearing masks: ” I, a Black man, cannot walk into a store with a bandana covering the greater part of my face if I also expect to walk out of that store. The situation isn’t safe and could lead to unintended attention, and ultimately a life-or-death situation for me. For me, the fear of being mistaken for an armed robber or assailant is greater than the fear of contracting COVID-19. ” for more on this click here.

Coronavirus & Finances

Hispanics are more likely than Americans overall to see coronavirus as a major threat to health and finances.

“The spread of the coronavirus has the potential to hit many of the nation’s nearly 60 million Latinos particularly hard. Although the Latino unemployment rate dipped at the end of 2019 to a near-record low, many Latinos work in the leisure, hospitality and other service industries – and they are less likely to have health insurance. Latinos were hit especially hard by the Great Recession more than a decade ago, and some workers have only recently seen their median personal incomes bounce back and exceed pre-recession levels.

Large majorities of Hispanics and the general public (both 70%) say the new coronavirus poses a major threat to the U.S. economy. But on other questions, Latinos’ concerns are more pronounced than those of the wider public.” Pew Study

Local Experts – UPMC

Since many of you might have some time on your hands, you might be wondering how you can also tune in to local sources of information. In the Pittsburgh area, UPMC has been and continues to be a leader on the infectious disease front. You can opt in to get COVID information texts from UPMC by texting “COVID” to the number “919-39.”

The good news from UPMC is that even as COVID-19 infection rates continue to rise in other parts of the region and across the country, their testing data indicates that the virus is not as widespread in the Pittsburgh communities served by UPMC. Early social distancing had a positive impact, as it helped infection control experts at UPMC track down local cases and contain clusters. People must, however, continue to be vigilant by staying at home and following social distancing guidelines, as this is crucial to ongoing virus mitigation efforts.

REMEMBER – YOU CAN BE A CARRIER AND TRANSMIT THE VIRUS EVEN IF YOU DON”T HAVE SYMPTOMS

Public health experts are learning more about the rapid spread of COVID-19 every day — and they’re warning people to stay inside even if they feel healthy. The reason: Asymptomatic transmission.

Podcast

Megan Freeman, MD, is a fellow at UPMC specializing in infectious disease. Learn more about her coronavirus research on the “That’s Pediatrics” podcast.

Vaccine

Scientists at UPMC and the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine announced a potential vaccine against SARS-CoV-2, the new coronavirus causing the COVID-19 pandemic. A paper on the vaccine appeared on April 2 in EBioMedicine. It is the first study on a potential COVID-19 vaccine to be published after peer-review from scientific experts (in other words, it is the first time the UPMC scientists’ findings were published and subject to critique from fellow scientists at outside institutions). 

When the vaccine was tested in mice, it helped produce antibodies specific to SARS-CoV-2 at quantities thought to be enough to neutralize the virus.  
The research team calls this vaccine PittCoVacc, short for Pittsburgh Coronavirus Vaccine. 
 
Scientists also use a new approach to deliver the drug, called a microneedle array, to increase potency. This array is a fingertip-sized patch of 400 tiny needles that deliver spike protein pieces into the skin, where the immune reaction is the strongest. The patch goes on like a Band-Aid^®, and the needles, which are made entirely of sugar and protein pieces, simply dissolve into the skin.

You can learn more about UPMC’s vaccine by following this link.

What To Do If You Need Help

If you believe you were exposed to the coronavirus but aren’t showing symptoms, call your doctor for advice. Practice routine precautions, such as social distancing.
  
If you have symptoms that are flu-like, including fever, cough, and shortness of breath, call your primary care doctor. If you do not have a doctor, use UPMC AnywhereCare. A video visit from home limits the spread of infection, and, if needed, UPMC can guide you safely to the next care site. 
  
UPMC Urgent Care and Primary Care walk-in locations cannot collect specimens or test for COVID-19. They are open to treat minor illnesses and injuries.
  
If you are experiencing severe symptoms, such as trouble breathing, you should visit an emergency department in your community for immediate care.
  
If you can, call ahead of time so staff may prepare for your arrival and prevent the spread of any illness. Do not delay if you have severe breathing problems.

Visit the UPMC COVID-19 Facts page for more information.

Coronavirus & the Justice System

Not surprisingly, the Coronavirus is having a major impact on the entire criminal justice system – from courts to jails & prisons, policing and beyond. In what follows, I will share with you some recent writing on issues that are affecting the U.S. criminal justice system.

Jails & Prisons

Prison-reform groups filed a federal class-action lawsuit against Allegheny County and county jail warden Orlando Harper Tuesday, warning that the facility is poised to suffer a severe outbreak of COVID-19 unless it takes more drastic measures. Hours later, the urgency of the issue was underlined when the county announced that an inmate had tested positive for COVID-19, about two weeks after a jail employee was diagnosed with the disease. For more on this click here.

Foster Care

Sadly, and not surprisingly, Coronavirus is leaving many children with no place to go. As Eli Hager of the Marshall Project reports in their article:

“The foster care system, built on frequent movements of children from one home to another and regular in-person supervision, has been especially wracked with confusion and dread by the coronavirus crisis.

In some states, investigators of child abuse…are so fearful of spreading the illness from home to home that some are trying to do their investigating from the front door, or even over videochat, instead of going inside.

Afraid of bringing the virus into their families, some foster parents are also refusing to accept new children, even if there is no indication they have the virus. Two youth advocates said in interviews that in this climate, they fear foster children are at risk of becoming “the new lepers.”

And across the nation, most visits between birth parents and their children in foster care have been suspended or switched to phone calls, at a time when youth are more in need of reassurance and love than ever. In a handful of places, face-to-face family time is still allowed—but with no touching, even when the visit is with a baby.”

For more on this, follow the link to the article.

Coronavirus and Job Loss

“As measures to slow the pandemic decimate jobs and threaten to plunge the economy into a deep recession, young adults….are disproportionately affected.” Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs. For more on this click here.

College Made Them Feel Equal. The Virus Exposed How Unequal Their Lives Are.

When they were all in the same dorms and eating the same dining hall food, the disparities in students’ backgrounds weren’t as clear as they are over video chat. Check out this free article in the New York Times.

“I’m in Highschool Again”: Virus Sends College Students Home to Parents

New York Times article explores the social dynamics of students who were suddenly uprooted from school and returned home to live with parents. Link here.

Dying of Whiteness During the Pandemic

Jonathan Metzl, author of “Dying of Whiteness: How the Politics of Racial Resentment is Killing America’s Heartland,” is a featured author in a podcast produced by the Washington Post’s Jonathan Capehart, who invited him to explain how this social dynamic “has been on steroids since this pandemic started.”

Anti-stay-at-home protests fit a historical pattern. They demonstrate how the politics of racial resentment, which Metzl discusses in his book, animate public discourse on issues of importance. Policies that would save lives and bolster public health continue to be opposed by white working-class people. This occurs even when those policies would help ensure their own health.

You can listen to the podcast for free here.

Class of 2020

Questions for Reflection – Reflect on Your Beliefs and Biases

Personal beliefs determine how an individual sees the world, other people, and oneself (Nelson & Guerra, 2014). Our beliefs and unconscious biases determine our actions and practices, and these actions inform how systems develop and operate, including our current education system (Berg, 2018). For people, including leaders, to feel comfortable addressing issues of bias, inequity, and race, they first need to have a heightened understanding of their own identities, values, assumptions and biases (Brown, 2004; Gooden & O’Doherty, 2015). As part of this self-exploration, they must cultivate and maintain a deep understanding of how privilege, power, and oppression operate, historically and currently in school and society (Galloway & Ishimaru, 2017).

Without a firm self-examination of one’s own identity and role in historically inequitable structures, people risk reproducing inequities inside and outside their schools and systems (Jones & Vagle, 2013; Brooks, Jean-Marie, Normore & Hodgins, 2007; Rigby & Tredway, 2015). For aspiring leaders of diverse communities, such critical self-reflection should be an ongoing, lifelong process (Brown, 2004). [source for this paragraph is the New York Leadership Academy].

Questions:

How are you feeling about social distancing? What’s your response to the increased need for these strict measures?

To some extent, we are all experiencing trauma, though not in the same ways. Some of us are more privileged than others. What are your privileges in this current situation? How are you using your privilege to support other family members, other students, and potentially other families?

Have you noticed or become aware of incidents of discrimination against people who identify as Asian, Black, or Hispanic in your school community? How are you responding or talking about those incidents with your team and your community?

Now that many of you are not living on the building seeing staff and professors every day, what have you done to try to keep your energy and motivation at the level it needs to be? What are you doing, or will you do, to continue to build culture and relationships with your community?

Articles

Most Brown and Black Americans are Exposing Themselves to Coronavirus for a Paycheck, by Chris Moody

Hispanics More Likely than Americans Overall to See Coronavirus as a Major Threat to Health and Finances, by Krogstad, Gonzalez-Barrera, and Hugo

Seventy Percent of People Dying from Coronavirus in Chicago are Black, by Kelly Bauer

Almost a Third of Young People Have Lost Their Jobs, by Anna Almendrala

“Allegheny County Jail Sued in Class-Action Lawsuit As First Inmate Tests Positive for COVID-19,” by An-Li Herring

In this very personal and compelling sociological narrative, Victor Rios describes the problems facing black and Latino youth as they come of age. Rios, as it turns out, is a former gang member who grew up in the Flatlands section of Oakland California. He went on to earn his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley.

The book finds Rios returning to his old Oakland neighborhood to shadow 40 young men as they dealt with poverty, violence, and institutionalized racism. Rios recounts the life stories of the boys, carefully balancing ethnographic analysis with anecdotal stories of his time spent with educators, parents, and police.

According to Rios, what happens is that from elementary school on, teachers and law enforcement mark these boys as “dangerous” or “difficult,” and harshly punish them for petty infractions. Once they accumulate “negative credentials,” the young men are subject to increased surveillance—and are consequently more likely to end up in prison.

Rios terms this criminalization “the youth control complex,” and he explains how boys who get caught up in this system are systematically deprived of their dignity and their ability to succeed at school or in the job market.

The cycle of criminality and justice operates in such a way that institutional representatives (police, teachers, social workers, probation officers), even when they mean well (and this is not always the case) engage in practices that have the effect of pushing young men into the very criminality that the punishment is meant to deter.

Rios makes a compelling argument that better financed social programs and positive reinforcement could make all the difference.

Proving Manhood

In his book, Rios goes into great depth as he describes how not only the boys but others, including the police, are together caught up in a social process, where they are all performing and enacting rituals of proving manhood.

Rios discusses what it means to be a black and Latino boy in Oakland. In doing so, he uses a lot of terms that you might be familiar with if you’ve ever taken courses in sociology, race & ethnic studies, and gender studies. So let’s break it down and discuss:

• Masculinity
• Masculine Values
• Masculinity-making Resources
• Gendered practices
• Hypermasculinity
• Toxic Masculinity

In his article “Stealing a Bag of Chips,” (based on the book), Rios talks about the boys’ experiences of looking for work and living in Oakland, California.

Looking for Work

As Rios explains, “despite their attempts to present themselves with good manners and good morals, their idea of professional behavior did not match mainstream ideas of professional behavior. This in turn created what I refer to as ‘misrecognition.’ When the boys displayed a genuine interest in “going legit,” getting a job, or doing well in school, adults often could not recognize their positive attempts and therefore criminalized them.

The boys had grown up in an environment which had deprived them of the social and cultural capital they needed to progress in school and the labor market. Therefore, they developed their own alternative social and cultural capital, which they used to survive poverty, persist in a violent and punitive social ecology, prevent violence, avoid incarceration, and attempt to fit into mainstream institutions.

Looking for Respect – Stealing a Bag of Chips

As Rios explains it, “breaking the rules” for the boys “meant resisting a system; criminality was one of the few resources the boys could use in response to criminalization.”

Critical Questions:

What parallels can you draw between the enacted practices of masculinity described by Rios, when he writes about the boys in Oakland, and your own upbringing?

Did you ever find yourself doing things that were likely to hurt you if you got caught for reasons that you wanted to assert yourself to be respected?

Theories on Juvenile Delinquency

No single theoretical orientation can adequately explain the multiple variables and factors that cause delinquent behavior, so criminologists have taken the best parts of different social theories and combined them to explain crime and delinquency.

Before we get into some of the particulars, it might be easy to think of three general theories on juvenile delinquency. The three theories are the anomie theory, the subculture theory, and the differential opportunity theory.

Anomie Theory

Anomie theory was first developed by Robert Merton in the 1940’s. Merton’s theory explains that juvenile delinquency occurs because the juveniles do not have the means to make themselves happy. Given their limited perspective, they often find that their goals are unattainable and so they often resort to unlawful means by which to attain their goals. To illustrate, a juvenile who doesn’t have money wants to get a job and purchase car to get to work…but they don’t have money. As a result, they might decide to steal a car or steal money to purchase a car.

Subculture Theory

In 1955, Albert Cohen developed the subculture theory, which is actually an amalgamation of several of his theories. Subculture theory posits that juveniles who do not “fit” and/or meet conventional social standards may seek validation from a subculture. The subculture group is formed of other juveniles who also do not meet conventional social standards. These groups then engage in behavior that is generally viewed not socially acceptable; and so, they actively rebel against socially acceptable standards.

Put another way, Cohen understands juvenile delinquency to be a product of society. Given this, when juveniles commit crimes, such as stealing, they do so because they are violating a social norm, and in doing so they signal conformity with their subculture.

Differential Opportunity Theory

Differential opportunity theory, developed by Richard Cloward and Lloyd Ohlin in 1960, believes that opportunity plays a role in juvenile delinquency. Cloward and Ohlin believe that if juveniles were presented with more opportunities to succeed, they would be less likely to turn to affiliation with subculture groups for validation.

Additionally, differential opportunity theory holds that there may be other circumstances besides social factors that contribute to a juvenile’s delinquency. For example, the theory posits that the juvenile may be successful during school but may fail to find gainful employment. The inability to find gainful employment can lead the juvenile to be delinquent (not simply social factors).

The differential opportunity theory differs from the subculture theory because there are reasons other than social factors that can lead a juvenile to be delinquent. If the juvenile has more opportunities, they will be more willing to succeed than to join a subculture.

Additional Theories

Rational Choice Theory

Classical theory, also called Rational or Choice Theory, is based on the early writings of Cesare Beccaria (1738–1794) and Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832). This explanation assumes that crime results from a rational process in which offenders make decisions and choices, often planning their criminal activity so as to maximize the benefits and avoid the risks (see Cornish & Clarke, 1986, pp. 1–2).

According to classical theory, crime and delinquency are attributed to free will & voluntary choice. People commit a crime and engage in delinquency for the simple reason that they made an individual rational decision to do so.  In light of this, it was assumed that because crime was a rational choice, offenders could be deterred by punishment.

Explanations of crime as a rational choice, while supported in some cases, is also disputed by scholars and researchers. In the latter instance, there is concern that the theory does not explain criminal behavior as much as it helps support a legal system that endeavors to justify punishments to “fit” crimes.

Interestingly enough, even though rational choice explanations do not always enjoy support across the board, they remain popular with the public. Likewise, they are widely supported by law enforcement, lawmakers, and even some academic disciplines, like economics, political science, and law (see, e.g., Cornish & Clarke, 1986; Akers, 1990).

Lawrence Cohen and Marcus Felson (1979) developed a version of rational choice theory called routine activity theory to help explain trends and cycles in the crime rate since the 1960s. They concluded that crime is related to the interaction of three variables associated with the “routine activities” of everyday life: the availability of suitable targets of crime; the absence of capable guardians; and the presence of motivated offenders.  So for example, when looking at the crime of theft, it is assumed that when more homes are unoccupied due to more persons employed (and fewer neighbors, family members, or relatives looking after them), they are more likely to be targeted by unemployed teens or young adults.

The routine activity approach links delinquency to social conditions that increase opportunities for crime; likewise, they emphasize the role that the victim’s lifestyle and behavior play in the crime process. Felson (1994) described how growth and social changes in cities, neighborhoods, and schools have increased the likelihood of crime occurring.

There is evidence that supports the idea that a lot of juvenile crime reflects rational choices are being made, as crime has a tendency to occur when youth perceive that their chances of being caught are low; even if they are caught, many are aware that the punishment for juvenile crime is often much less than for comparable crimes committed by adults.

Critics of RC Theory

Critics of Rational Choice theory question the degree to which criminal behavior is always a rational, free will process. Ronald Akers (1990) questioned whether offenders really make rational decisions to commit a crime based on knowledge of the law and possible punishments. His research tried to establish whether or not decisions to engage in crime and delinquency were made in the absence of other situational factors that may have influenced them being committed.

Rational choice proponents, I should point out, do not always hold to a strict definition of rationality. Rather, they acknowledge that situational factors do affect individuals’ choices. Given this, efforts have been made to integrate rational choice theory with other theoretical explanations (see, e.g., Felson, 1986; Hirschi, 1986).

Doubtless, there are many crimes that reflect the rational choices of persons. This may especially hold true in cases of white-collar crime, which are committed by persons in the workplace and pose relatively little risk of detection, conviction, or punishment.

Strain Theories

Strain theories of delinquency explain the delinquency of youths as a response to a lack of socially approved opportunities. Simply put, it is a theory that explains delinquency as caused by the “strain” or frustration of not having an equal opportunity or means to achieve commonly idealized goals such as economic or social success. In this manner, we might also think of strain theories as structural theories, given how opportunities are not always evenly distributed and available to everyone, based on how they are situated within social structure.

Strain theorists regard juvenile antisocial behavior as caused by the frustrations of lower class youth when they find themselves unable to achieve the material success expected of the middle class.

Robert Merton (1957) was an eminent social theorist who elaborated  strain theory from Emile Durkheim’s concept of “anomie” or “normlessness.” Merton applied Durkheim’s anomie theory as a means to explain how crime might result from the rapidly changing conditions in society; especially in societies where competition for success, wealth, and material goods are highly valued. Social disorganization leads to uncertainty, confusion, and shifting moral values, referred to as anomie or normlessness. Conditions of anomie exist when the rule of law is weakened and becomes powerless to maintain social control.

Given these social conditions, a conflict may result when persons with little formal education and access to economic resources are denied in their efforts to achieve the common goals esteemed in American society. This causes an individual-level conflict and may, furthermore, produce a sense of alienation, hopelessness, and frustration.

Merton claimed this experience of frustration may incentivize persons to engage in alternative/delinquent/criminal means in order that they may attain their socially desired goals.

Strain Theory emphasizes that most people share similar values, goals, and aspirations; but many people do not have equal ability or means to achieve goals, such as economic or social success. The discrepancy between what persons want and their limited opportunities to achieve them produces frustration, or “strain.”

Thus, under conditions of anomie, crime may be considered a “normal” response to the strain of existing social conditions.

Because opportunities for success are more open for the middle and upper classes, strain is experienced most by those in the lower socioeconomic classes, where quality education and employment opportunities are more limited. The strain and frustration resulting from blocked opportunities increase the likelihood that some individuals will use deviant and illegitimate means to achieve their goals.

Strain theory explains why many lower-class youth resort to theft, drug dealing, and other delinquent behavior when they perceive fewer legitimate means and opportunities to achieve their goals. Strain and social disorganization are similar because they emphasize the relationship between social variables such as poverty, economic opportunity, and available goods and services to crime and delinquency. Strain is more common among lower-class poor people, who live in rural as well as inner-city urban areas characterized by increased social problems and crime. Strain theory has been expanded and further developed by other criminologists. The

These opportunity–structure theories (Cloward & Ohlin, 1960) were instrumental to promoting government-funded policies such as “Head Start,” pre-K education, and jobs programs for lower-class youths as a way to enhance educational and employment opportunities and reduce crime and delinquency.

Robert Agnew (1992) extended Merton’s theory of strain and anomie to better explain varieties of delinquent behavior through the general strain theory. Agnew identified three sources of strain:

1. 1. Strain caused by the failure to achieve positively valued goals, basically the same as Merton’s theory of anomie.
   2. Strain caused by the removal of positively valued stimuli from the individual. Examples include the loss of a girl/boy friend, death of a loved one, divorce or separation of parents, or leaving friends and moving to a new neighborhood or school.
   3. Strain as the presentation of negative stimuli, such as child abuse and neglect, physical punishment, family and peer conflict, stressful life conditions, school failure, and criminal victimization (see Agnew, 1992, p. 57).

Agnew’s general strain theory in this regard has made an important contribution to explaining delinquency. Likewise, there is evidence that youth who report being “hassled” by peers, who have bad peer relationships, or experience victimization or similar “negative life events” are also more likely to engage in delinquency (Agnew & White, 1992).

Additional research supports this which finds that strains such as a family breakup, unemployment, moving, feelings of dissatisfaction with friends and school are positively related to delinquency (Paternoster & Mazerolle, 1994).

Simply put, strain theory helps to explain how stressful incidents and sources of strain in the life course influence patterns of offending.

Sociological Theories

Social structure theories

These theories claim that forces such as social disorganization, status frustration, and cultural deviance lead lower-class youths to become involved in delinquent behavior.

Social reaction theories

These theories focus more on how society, social institutions, and government officials react to crime and delinquency than on why offenders commit crime.

Social process (control) theories

Social process explanations of delinquency focus not on societal structures but on social interactions between individuals and environmental influences that may lead to delinquent behavior. These theories argue that all individuals have the potential and opportunity to perpetrate delinquent or criminal offenses, but most refrain from such behavior because of fear and social constraints.

Among social-control theories are social disorganization theory, which relates to the inability of social institutions and communities to adequately socialize and control its youth; social-bonding theory, which holds that a youth’s behavior is significantly related to a social bond that ties a youth to the social order; and containment theory, which focuses on the quality and number of inner and outer containment mechanisms for controlling juveniles’ behavior.

According to control theory, delinquency is more likely among youth who lack social bonds and positive social interactions among parents and peers.

Social process (learning) theories

These theories generally emphasize explanations that explain delinquency on the basis of social interactions between individuals and social group influences that lead to delinquency.

Differential association theory was developed by Edwin Sutherland, who believed that delinquency is learned behavior as youths interact with each other. The theory is founded on a number of propositions (Sutherland & Cressey, 1970, pp. 75–77). Differential association theory holds that delinquency is a learned behavior as youth interact closely with other deviant youth:

1. 1. Criminal behavior is learned.
   2. Criminal behavior is a process of communication, learned in interaction with other persons.
   3. The principal part of the learning of criminal behavior occurs within intimate personal groups.
   4. When criminal behavior is learned, the learning includes (a) techniques of committing the crime; and (b) the specific direction of motives, drives, rationalizations, and attitudes.
   5. The specific direction of the motives and drives is learned from definitions of the legal codes as favorable or unfavorable.
   6. A person becomes delinquent because of an excess of definitions favorable to violation of law over definitions unfavorable to violation of law – this is the principle of differential association. 
   7. Differential association may vary in frequency, duration, priority, and intensity.
   8. The process of learning criminal behavior by association with criminal and anti-criminal patterns involves all of the mechanisms that are involved in any other type of learning.
   9. While criminal behavior is an expression of general needs and values, it is not explained by those general needs and values since noncriminal behavior is an expression of the same needs and values.              

      Sutherland’s differential association theory stimulated considerable research on explaining delinquent behavior; it remains an important explanation for juvenile delinquency, as it is difficult to dispute the idea that crime is learned like other behaviors.

      This explanation also has a positive appeal as it holds that youth are changeable and can be taught prosocial behavior. Delinquency prevention efforts have proven to be most effective when they are directed at reducing the criminal influence among groups of antisocial youths.

      Burgess and Akers (1966) reformulated differential association theory according to operant conditioning principles; Akers (1985) further developed an explanation of deviant behavior according to a social learning approach.                                                                                

Developmental or life-course theories

explanations attempt to account for differences between offenders who begin offending at an early age and continue offending, and those who begin in adolescence and grow out of it.

Intersectional theories take into account different interpenetrating social dynamics, such as those that involve race, class, and gender.

Ultimately, for juvenile justice researchers and practitioners, the best theory is one that recommends policies, programs, and strategies for effective crime reduction and delinquency prevention.

Discussion Questions

What might Social Learning theories tell us about what happens when juveniles exposed to different social problems (drugs, violence, poverty) are put into a containment facility together?

How might we use Routine Activity Theory to explain a convenience store robbery (remember the 3 variables – available target, the absence of surveillance, and a motivated perpetrator)?

Think of similar situations that you were in, where you decided to commit a crime or not (small or otherwise) for example, maybe you decided to steal something. Why or why not? What made the difference in your decision? What was missing from the three requirements for crime as a “routine activity”?

How might the fact that we live in a violent society that is perpetually at war contribute to the decision-making of youth, who make choices to engage in criminality, delinquency, and violence?

BALTIMORE, MD – APRIL 27: A Baltimore Police officer aims his taser at a demonstrator outside the Mondawmin Mall following the funeral of Freddie Gray April 27, 2015, in Baltimore, Maryland. Gray, 25, who was arrested for possessing a switchblade knife April 12 outside the Gilmor Homes housing project on Baltimore’s west side. According to his attorney, Gray died a week later in the hospital from a severe spinal cord injury he received while in police custody. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

Every time police officers are accused of killing a civilian — whether an officer shoots an unarmed man, as in the cases of Michael Brown, or an officer’s actions cause someone to die, as in the cases of Eric Garner or Freddie Gray — there are two questions that arise: Was it legal? and Was it appropriate? Often, what the public sees as appropriate force differs greatly from what police actually do in these situations (Lind, 2015).

The law gives police incredibly wide latitude to use force against civilians if they feel they’re under threat. In theory, it’s the job of police departments to come up with policies that hold cops to a higher standard for using force. And departments do give officers general instructions about using no more force than is necessary to resolve a situation, and trying to de-escalate situations before they turn into crises (Lind, 2015).

But when it comes to specifics — the training that officers are given and the policies they’re held to — departments don’t give clear instructions for what officers ought to do. Instead, for a variety of reasons, instructions focus on what cops can do. That creates a divide between police actions and the public’s perception of what is necessary or appropriate. And police officers themselves tend to feel that they should have even more flexibility in deciding when to use force, and how much force they can use, on civilians (Lind, 2015).

New Study on Police Use of Force

A new study has found that police kill twice as many people as reported in official statistics, and that black men are 3 1/2 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. The study, carried out by the University of Washington and Cornell University, used a variety of data sources and found that police officers are responsible for about 8 percent of all homicides of adult males in the United States – or about 2.8 homicides every day on average. However, official statistics released by the police departments themselves show a rate of less than 4 percent.

The study, published in the American Journal of Public Health, also shows that the risk of being killed by police is 3.2 to 3.5 times higher for black men than white men, and between 1.4 and 1.7 times higher for Latino men.

Researchers determined these probabilities with six years’ worth of data from a source that collects information from journalists, activists and researchers through public records and media coverage. This method is more reliable than police departments’ own reports, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics. The study was led by Frank Edwards, a postdoctoral associate with Cornell’s Bronfenbrenner Center for Translational Research and co-authored by Michael Esposito, who did this work as a graduate student in sociology at the University of Washington. Hedy Lee, a former faculty member in the UW Department of Sociology who is now at Washington University in St. Louis, also contributed to the study.

Past research on police killings has been limited by the absence of systematic data, Edwards said. Such data, primarily collected through the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ Arrest-Related Deaths program or the FBI’s Supplementary Homicide Report, are widely acknowledged as unreliable due to the limited scope and voluntary data reporting.

“Police departments are not required by law to report deaths that occur due to officer action and may have strong incentives to be sensitive with data due to public affairs and community relations,” he said. “Effectively, we don’t know what’s happening if all we look at is the official data.”

Esposito, who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan, points to a 2014 article in ProPublica, which showed how some communities had not reported fatal shootings by police since 1997.

“Our ability to speak about police-involved deaths in the U.S. has really been hampered by shortcomings of official data sources,” he said. “We thought we could make a contribution here by just describing what police-involved homicides look like in our country.”

Eric Casebolt, a police officer from McKinney, Texas, wrestles a 14-year-old girl to the ground at pool party.

Research Methods & Findings

For the study, the researchers used public records and media reports to identify 6,295 adult male victims of police homicide over a six-year period between Jan. 1, 2012, and Feb. 12, 2018 — averaging about 1,028 deaths per year, or 2.8 deaths per day.

Of those 6,295 victims, 2,993 were white, 1,779 were black, 1,145 were Latino, 114 were Asian-Pacific Islander and 94 were American Indian-Alaska Native.

During the six-year period of the study, black men were killed at the highest rate: at least 2.1 per 100,000 men. Latino and white men had lower rates: 1 and 0.6, respectively.

In the Pacific region, which includes Alaska, California, Hawaii, Oregon, and Washington, black men in large metro areas were killed by police at a rate of 3.4 per 100,000, Latino men at 1.1 per 100,000, and white men at 0.9 per 100,000.

In Washington state, an average of a little more than three black men per 100,000 people are killed by police each year, compared to an average of about one per 100,000 among Latino men and fewer than one per 100,000 among white men.

Another surprising finding of the study was that the majority of police killings occur in less-populated regions outside large urban metro areas.

“I think that there’s an idea that these events are constrained to large urban areas, but the data suggest that’s not the case,” Esposito said.

Policy Brutality is Good for Wall Street

When police use of force crosses the line into outright brutality, it is not only the victim who suffers – taxpayers are also paying a price. As the costs of police misconduct rise, cities and counties across the United States are going into debt to pay for it. Often this debt is in the form of bond borrowing. When cities, municipalities, or counties issue bonds to pay these costs, banks and other firms collect fees for the services they provide, and investors collect interest.

In light of this, the use of bonds to pay for settlements and judgments greatly increases the burden of policing costs on taxpayers, while producing a profit for banks and investors. Using bonds to pay for settlements or judgments can nearly double the costs of the original settlement. All of this is paid for by taxpayers.

These police brutality bonds quite literally allow banks and wealthy investors to profit from police violence. This is a transfer of wealth from communities–especially over-policed communities of color–to Wall Street and wealthy investors. This is not a good public policy; it’s not good for citizens and it’s not good for cops, who lose respect in their communities and find their jobs are made more difficult and dangerous. Aside from it being morally wrong, these violent practices need to stop because they hurt everyone.

Sources

KOMO News, Staff Report

“How Do Police Departments Train Cops How to Use Force?” Vox Media article by Dara Lind, 2015.

“How Wall Street Profits From Police Violence,” ACRE Report, by Alyxandra Goodwin, Whitney Shepard, and Carrie Sloan

Discussion Questions

What do you think about the statistics cited here?

Do you think that the police should be required to report use of force against the civilians (especially killings) to the UCR the same way that they report incidents of violence against police officers?

What do you think about taxpayers footing the bill for police violence? What might be done to change this?

Why Should I Care About Racial Social Inequality in the Criminal Justice System?

Race and racism are deeply entrenched in American society. To be more specific, systemic racism in America is a serious problem. Sadly, not everyone thinks its a problem. Others are more concerned about anti-white discrimination and problems that relate to the illegal immigration of people of color into the United States, which they associate with crime (pro tip: illegal immigration derives more from visa overstays than it does people running across desert borders – and the majority of those people arrive on airplanes; also, Americans commit more crime than immigrants). 

At any rate, this is not a topic that a lot of people feel comfortable talking about – even college students, in my experience, find it difficult to engage in conversations about social “structures” that they can’t see, as opposed to individual people and their decisions, which they feel they can see and have a better handle to grasp.

To be sure, social inequality in the criminal justice system might not be a problem that you believe affects you as an individual. But its a problem that ultimately affects everyone.

What is Mass Incarceration?

Mass incarceration has become so normalized in the American criminal justice system that unless you know someone who has been incarcerated, you probably don’t think much about it. Which is to say, it is not likely that you’ve paused long enough to think critically about how locking up so many people has become effectively normalized in the U.S., to the extent that it shapes almost everything about how you and many others perceive “what is a crime,”  “who is criminal,” “who is a citizen,” “who deserves rights,” and so on down the line.

What does it mean to think critically about corrections? The term “mass incarceration” only scratches the surface. On the one hand, prisons are structures, like warehouses. More to the point, as critics have pointed out, they constitute a massive system of social control that is highly racialized, given how it primarily incarcerates disproportionate numbers of people of color.

To engage in critical thinking on this topic, you must step outside of your personal beliefs and experiences. Instead, you must engage your powers of abstract reasoning – which is to say you must think in terms of structures and institutions and how they function – not just individuals alone, the decisions they make, and the crime they do. This includes understanding how different policies, practices, and social processes are bound up together and produce what we have traditionally come to think of as “prison.”

Mass incarceration refers to the process by which people are swept into the criminal justice system and branded criminals and felons; they are effectively removed from society. Put another way, mass incarceration occurs because of “mass arrests.” In the United States, we lock up more people for small crimes and for longer periods of time than most all of the other countries in the world who incarcerate people. The crimes of the wealthy and powerful are not treated the same way as the crimes of poor people – not even close.

Prison barge, New York City, 2018

The consequences of this unfair system of justice are far-reaching and profound. When we remove people from their communities, warehouse them, and later release them, we consign them to permanent second-class/”underclass” status. Often, they are stripped of basic civil and human rights, like the right to vote, the right to serve on juries, and the right to be free of legal discrimination in employment, housing, and access to public benefits.

Probation officers, who are trusted to monitor previous offenders, too often are incentivized to play “catch and release” games, which have the effect of recycling people right back into the system they came from.

British prison ship, circa 1700’s

This systematized activity calls into question the purpose of a system that aims to assert control over people from early ages so that virtually all aspects of their lives are put under scrutiny and surveillance, such that they are viewed as perpetual suspects for some kind of crime (Childress, 2014).

Check out the statistics that were recently published by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). OECD is an intergovernmental economic organization with 38 member countries, founded in 1961 to stimulate economic progress and world trade.

The US has the highest incarceration rate out of any OECD country, as it clocks in at about 700 inmates per 100,000 residents (Glaze and Herberman, 2013; World Prison Population List). This rate is about five times the OECD average. Notably, the primary reason for this is the War on Drugs. What is not shown here is an additional statistic that also weighs heavily: the U.S. also has the largest population of formerly incarcerated people in the world.

But why does the OECD, an international organization focused on promoting international commerce, care about incarceration? Because incarceration policies interact with labor-force participation and commerce. High incarceration rates have likely contributed to the US’s decline in prime-age labor-force participation rates relative to other countries. According to a 2007 paper by Georgetown University’s Harry J. Holzer, even if there are not administrative and legal restrictions barring employment, employers are less likely to hire someone with a criminal record.

Obviously, putting someone in prison has an immediate impact on short-term labor force participation. But it also affects long-term labor force participation, due to the stigma of incarceration, which impacts the ongoing demand for the labor services among the formerly incarcerated. This appears as a lagging effect that goes on for years after they reenter society. 

And if that’s not enough, it is further likely that due to both employment discrimination and the degeneration of employment social networks, the formerly incarcerated face long-term employment difficulties as well as earnings losses.

A Sociological Perspective

Sociology is not only an intellectual discipline. It provides us with a conceptual “tool kit” that we can use to think about larger social issues, where they come from, and how we can connect them public policy and real-world solutions.

As it was briefly mentioned, it’s hard to get people to think beyond their immediate personal situation and to further think critically about how events and problems are structured within not only the criminal justice system but also the larger social system. To make sense of this, as well as out individual role in it, we need to take stock of the larger social context and the influence it exerts on us, including how wealth and power are distributed, and how this interacts with our cultural beliefs and practices.

In other words, you must use you “sociological imagination” to some degree – you can’t simply limit yourself to thinking about policing and incarceration in simplistic terms, where  the cops are simply engaged in a value-free “colorblind” endeavor to lock up the people who break the laws – the “bad people.” While some might do this, when we begin to study social patterns, it becomes obvious that there’s more to the story of what is happening here. This will open the door to a more enriched understanding of the social world. Even better, it helps us to become more informed knowing participants within it. 

One of the things that gets in the way that I explore in other posts on this website is the U.S. cultural emphasis on individualism. For more on this, refer to posts on The American Dream and From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime.

Americans are culturally indoctrinated to think about the world in terms of decisions that individuals make and nothing else. Crime is framed as a problem of “bad decisions made by bad people.” But thinking about crime in solely individualistic terms is not only a logical fallacy; its flat out dangerous for reasons that it precludes an understanding of larger systemic social forces that are at work.

Developing a more balanced understanding that incorporates a way to see how individual decisions may be impacted by larger social forces can add much needed nuance and complexity to the study of crime. Yet people remain entrenched in their simple beliefs and world views, which I suspect are just more satisfying in the long run – because they’d rather go with their “gut” instinct and the views that they were taught by their communities. They get to be “right”…or so they think.

If the focus remains fixed on the question of “What’s wrong with those people?” Then emphasis in crime solving will remain fixated on individual solutions that try to change people’s behavior, instead working toward solutions that resolve the social conditions that actually foster crime. 

In stating this, it should be made clear that this is not the same as saying there are no individual, psychological, or biological perspectives that contribute explanation to our understanding of crime. Far from it. A sociological perspective serves to help balance these approaches, because it helps us to look beyond individuals.

If one can  accept that social factors are implicated in crime, then the question we are left with is: how do we, as a society, mobilize solutions for problems with structural roots? This question is both essential and crucial for crime prevention.

If we were to look at the problems related to crime that impact local area residents, we would find that they are enormous: persistent poverty, drug use/abuse, and gun violence. Yet if we were to look into the statistics, we would find that average and middle class white folks use illicit drugs as much as any other group.  Note that when other people (non whites) do this it is considered a “moral failing” for which they should be severely punished (or left to die from overdose). Yet when they do it, it’s considered a “health crisis” that calls for sympathy and attention.

Let’s look at another example. Blacks involved in shootings or gang violence are singled out for attention and sanction, even though most of the guns (and most of the high-profile shootings) are claimed by white people. In the case of the latter, incidents of mass shootings combined with gun suicides (statistically the biggest killer) are perpetrated overwhelmingly by whites as compared to other groups. Politicians, however, remain overwhelmingly focused on “inner-city” crime, gangs, and guns, and ignore the larger problem as it relates to guns. Venture a guess why? What are we to make of these contradictions?

Absent a  sociological analysis, many of us will never realize the different ways we too are participating in systems of oppression that produce consequences in other people’s lives, despite the fact that we may not have conscious intent when we do so.

A person may not feel like they are a racist, because they don’t speak or act like a racist. They may even go so far as to profess a hatred for racism. Despite this, if they vote for social policies that help organize society in racist ways, where privileges for some are achieved by subjugating others, then that person is participating in systemic racism. 

The Carceral State

The term “carceral state,” as a concept, is one that might also be used to understand racial, social, political, and economic relations in the United States. It can help us to think about the control dynamics of prisons and how they have come to exist within our current nation-state system. Think about the “carceral state” as a state built on the model of a prison.

In this conceptual model, the nation-state itself is understood to operate like/exist like a prison; it polices physical boundaries in order to gain control of the distribution of people across urban and suburban space.

According to this model, public space is not neutral ground. Rather, urban public space has become transformed into defendable space. That space features the installation of walls, gates, fences, surveillance cameras, and security checkpoints. It is a space where people are continuously monitored, actively as well as passively. Under this model, police are often equipped and act like military soldiers, only the targets are U.S. citizens.

Consequently, we have events today taking place across the country today which are virtually identical to the historic riots that took place in Chicago, Harlem, Detroit, Newark, and Los Angeles – for the same reasons. Despite this, people still question why people are rioting. They overlook the fact that policing in many places continues to look and act like a military occupying force, especially in communities of color. The murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis in 2020 is only the most recent event to shine a light on what we keep getting wrong.

Is Prison Slavery?

To call prison “slavery” doesn’t require a stretch of the imagination. Nevertheless, because the problem of mass incarceration is both enormous and far beyond the individual experiences of many people in society, there is a tendency to oversimplify. For example, people believe and say things like: if you commit a crime you have to deal with the consequences/do the time. If people would simply stop committing crimes the prisons wouldn’t be filled. Or, to put it in the words of one PSU student: 

“Prison is for the world to feel safe. Prison is the place where criminals go when they commit a crime.” – PSU student

This is an example of overly simplified non-critical thinking. Alternatively, when we start to think about prison as not merely a place where we warehouse lawbreakers, but rather as a structural system of social control, this is where things start to get interesting. In making this conceptual shift, you’ll begin to get a better understanding of what prisons are, how they function, and how they are essentially “made” in our contemporary moment.

Slavery in the U.S. context was, among other things, a system of racialized social control that was predicated on the notion of providing free labor for wealthy white landowners, who were, for the most part, located in the American South.

When you look at the maps below, look at the patterns of slave ownership mapped onto land and how they correspond to our current system of incarceration. What do you see? If mass incarceration were a simple function of bad people doing bad things, you wouldn’t see the spatial geographic patterns reflected as shown here. 

Just about every entry-level criminal justice textbook talks about the history of the founding of police forces in the United States. While the London metropolitan police forces of Sir Robert Peel certainly helped serve as a model for many U.S. cities, including Boston and New York, those textbooks tend to overlook another far less benign influence that was exerted on American policing by the former “Slave patrols” of the American South.

Although first established in South Carolina in 1704, the idea spread throughout the colonies. Slave patrols came about from a combination of colonial and/or state government legislation. They consisted of mostly white citizens and, in some southern states, the militia and army provided the manpower that served as slave patrols. These people were specifically hired to enforce discipline upon black slaves in the antebellum southern states. 

In addition to being white, most people who worked with the slave patrols came from working and middle-class conditions. Slave patrols typically rode on horseback in groups of four or five and sometimes even in family groups. Patrollers were often equipped with guns and whips. They worked from sun-up to sun-down and varied their times as well as locations of patrol in order to reduce the chances of slaves escaping.

The purpose of slave patrols was to intimidate and police the behavior of slaves and former slaves, where the primary aim was to “catch” the runaways and defiant slaves.  Initially, slave patrollers focused on breaking up slave meetings, mostly on holidays, when slaves would gather together to plot their escape. Eventually, patrols expanded to be year-round, not just on holidays. Slowly, new duties and rights of patrollers were permitted, including: “apprehending runaways, monitoring the rigid pass requirements for blacks traversing the countryside, breaking up large gatherings and assemblies of blacks, visiting and searching slave quarters randomly, inflicting impromptu punishments, and as occasion arose, suppressing insurrections” (Hadden, 2001).

Despite all of this, blacks developed effective methods of challenging slave patrolling, occasionally fighting back violently. The American Civil War itself would later create opportunities for resistance against slave patrols because the war made it easier for enslaved people to escape.

Even though slavery and patrols were legally ended, the patrol system still survived. Almost immediately in the aftermath of the war, informal patrols sprang into action. Later, city and rural police squads, along with the help of Union army officers, revived patrolling practices among free men.

During the post-Civil War Reconstruction period of 1865–1877, old-style patrol methods resurfaced and were enforced by postwar Southern police officers and also by organizations such as the Ku Klux Klan (Hadden, 2001).

Do African Americans Suffer From Systemic Discrimination?

Michelle Alexander’s work among others demands that we move beyond the confines of personal experience to think critically, deliberately, and methodically about the roots of mass incarceration, race, crime, and discrimination in American society. She traces a thread that goes all the way back to the Civil War and in the process illustrates how we have arrived at a point today, where there are more black men behind bars or under the control of the criminal justice system than there were enslaved in 1850.

Certainly, some might argue “slavery is over” or “Jim Crow laws were wiped off the books decades ago.” Nonetheless, there is an extraordinarily large percentage of African Americans in the United States who are being warehoused in community jails and prisons.  As prisoners, many find they are trapped in a parallel social universe, where they are denied basic civil/human rights, chief among them the right to vote. Similarly, even if they manage to escape confinement, they face a life of discrimination when it comes to employment, housing, access to education and eligibility for public benefits like student loans.

As Alexander argues in her 2010 book, “The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” that it remains legal to discriminate against convicted criminals in nearly all the ways in which it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans. Once labeled a felon, even for a minor drug crime, the old forms of discrimination are suddenly legal again. In her words, “we have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.”

Alexander shows that, by targeting black men through the War on Drugs and decimating communities of color, the U.S. criminal justice system functions as a contemporary system of racial control, even as it formally adheres to the principle of colorblindness.

Why Are So Many People Incarcerated?

For a long period of time in the United States, about 100 of 100,000 people, on average, were incarcerated. That rate remained constant up until into the early 1970s. After this time, there was a dramatic increase in incarceration rates in the United States – a near 600% increase over rates demonstrated from the mid-1960s until the year 2000. Paradoxically, the research shows that incarceration rates increased even as crime rates decreased. During this time, the number of African American men who are behind bars has increased, mainly due to a single law enforcement policy.

“Most of that increase,” Alexander argues, “is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color.” That crime-fighting measure “is a big part of the reason that a black child born today is less likely to be raised by both parents than a black child born during slavery” (Alexander, 2010).

U.S. Rate of Incarceration, Eastern Penitentiary, Philadelphia, Pa (photo credit: S. Trappen)

Where Are They Incarcerated?

State policy, more than federal policy, drives the current rate of mass incarceration. Additionally, federal mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines further add gasoline onto a fire that fuels the process.

The War on Drugs was declared in the 1970’s by President Richard Nixon, who ironically was himself a reformer until his re-election poll numbers started to plummet. The “War,” as such, has been carried out and increased under every president since Nixon. Who does this war target? For the most part, it targets nonviolent drug offenders.

Ironically, at the time that the war on drugs was declared, drug crime was not on the rise. Furthermore, even though President Nixon was the first to coin the term a “War on Drugs.” Later, it was President Ronald Reagan who turned that rhetorical war into a literal one (Childress, 2014).

The Law & Order Movement (reblog from Childress)

Our system of mass incarceration can be traced back to the law-and-order movement that began in the 1950s and continued throughout the 1960s. Keep in mind now that the 1960s was a time when violent crime in America increased. Before that time, federal government-level initiatives had not achieved any substantive widespread impact. Crime was thought to be a matter better handled by the states.

During the 60’s, segregationists like George Wallace started to worry there was going to be no way to stem the tide of public opinion that was increasingly registering opposition to the system of segregation. In light of this, they started labeling people engaged in nonviolent civil disobedience and public protest as criminals and lawbreakers. They warned that people who violated segregation laws were engaging in reckless behavior that threatened the social order. To this end, they demanded an immediate crackdown on these “lawbreakers” and civil rights protesters. “Y’all know about law and order,” one Wallace supporter said. “It’s spelled n-i-g-g-e-r-s.”

Note that it was the 1968 election, where Wallace effectively split the Democratic vote against Hubert Humphrey, allowing Republican nominee Richard Nixon to win the presidency despite carrying only 43% of the popular vote.

Former activist and later Georgia Representative John Lewis crossing the Edmund Pettus bridge between Selma and Montgomery Alabama, in the 1960’s 

This rhetoric of law and order evolved as time went on, even though the old Jim Crow system fell and segregation was officially declared unconstitutional. Segregationists used the get-tough rhetoric as a way to appeal to poor and working-class whites in particular, who were resentful of and fearful of what they interpreted were “gangs” of African Americans stirring trouble in the civil rights movement.

At the apex of this movement, White voters were concerned about what they saw as the familiar social order coming under attack. Conservative politicians strategized to come up with a way to tap into these voters’ fears without appearing to talk about race.  Talking about “Law and order” was determined to be an effective strategy for reaching suburban white voters. Best of all, it precluded saying the ugly part out loud. This was a seen as a necessary development , considering how it was no longer socially permissible for polite White people to say they opposed equal rights for Blacks. Instead, they complained about “the urban uprisings” (today’s equivalent is “Crime in Chicago”).

Pollsters and political strategists found that thinly veiled promises to get tough on “them,” a group easily recognizable by their race, were enormously successful in persuading poor and working-class whites in the South to defect from the Democratic New Deal coalition and join the ranks of the Republican Party, which they did in droves.

Unfortunately, this backlash against the civil rights movement occurred at precisely the same moment that
there was economic collapse in communities of color in many inner-city locations across America.

Note (image above) how the 1984 Sentencing Reform Act, which led Congress to enact mandatory minimum sentence guidelines for certain crimes, drastically increased punishments for repeat offenders and fueled the upward climb of the number of people behind bars.

Later in the 1980’s, Lee Atwater took the strategy even further, while working as an advisor to Ronald Reagan. Reagan aimed to consolidate political power by continuing with a revised version of Nixon’s Southern Strategy. The original Southern strategy required converting of conservative Southern Democrats, who harbored racial antipathy, to become members of the Republican party. While Nixon’s strategy was focused on the South, Reagan’s reboot was intended to be more broadly successful in areas outside the South (i.e. Pittsburgh); places where people might identify themselves as  Wallace voters who could be “Reagan Democrats.”

It was during this time that Atwater gave an anonymous (and now famous) interview to political scientist Alexander P. Lamis. On November 13, 2012, The Nation magazine released a 42-minute audio recording of the interview about how the strategy was intended to work:

Questioner: But the fact is, isn’t it, that Reagan does get to the Wallace voter and to the racist side of the Wallace voter by doing away with legal services, by cutting down on food stamps?

Atwater: Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger”. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger”—that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states rights, and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites. And subconsciously maybe that is part of it. I’m not saying that. But I’m saying that if it is getting that abstract, and that coded, that we are doing away with the racial problem one way or the other. You follow me—because obviously sitting around saying, “We want to cut this”, is much more abstract than even the busing thing, and a hell of a lot more abstract than “Nigger, nigger”.

Atwater thus advised Reagan that he no longer needed to make overt racial appeals. He suggested more “colorblind” subtle language that was less obviously racist.

To make things a bit more complicated, Harvard scholar, Elizabeth Hinton, challenges the belief that America’s prison problem simply originated with the Reagan administration’s War on Drugs. Hinton leans toward an understanding there may be bipartisan Federal roots for mass incarceration in the United States.

Kennedy & Johnson

In order to understand what went wrong, she argues that we have to go further back to the administrations of Johnson and Kennedy to learn about early programs: the era of liberal reform and the social welfare programs of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, that declared a “War on Poverty.” 

Before you lapse into thinking “Of course, welfare programs are a waste of money and they make people lazy/criminal” you should note that this is not Hinton’s position. She’s making a far more nuanced argument than is typically refracted through the lens of partisan politics by directing us to follow policy and law changes over time. The seeming need people have, which is to reduce understanding of important issues to mere partisan politics (left vs. right or liberal vs. conservative) gets in the way of attaining a full understanding of what went wrong and what continues to go wrong; consequently, this makes it difficult to fix the problems and achieve any sort of progress.

Hinton is not saying that social welfare programs and poor people themselves are the cause of poverty and mass incarceration. Nor is she reducing what are massive social problems to a technical debate over a narrow set of economic issues. The story she is telling is more complicated.

Hinton says that the expansion of the welfare state under Johnson coincided with a new era of law enforcement. The social welfare programs that Johnson intended to use to fight future poverty – the “War on Poverty” – was combined with a “War on Crime” – surveillance and policing patrol programs designed to deal with the immediate effects of racial social inequality (they conveyed the added benefit of monitoring future criminals). Unfortunately, the War on Poverty lost its momentum as Johnson was forced to divert funds to another war – the War in Vietnam.

Put another way, the War on Poverty was never fully realized, but the policing and crime control approach that characterized the War on Crime became deeply entrenched and led to the “War on Drugs” in the years that followed. These “Wars” constituted a major job creation program for policing and corrections that continues to this day. Social problems and inequities, however, continued unchecked. Individual people alone were blamed for their own problems.

When Work Disappeared

In an excellent book by William Julius Wilson, entitled When Work Disappears, the author describes how in the ’60s and the ’70s, work literally vanished in many communities. Hundreds of thousands of black people, especially black men, suddenly found themselves jobless (Childress, 2014)

His main argument is that job-flight (or what others have called “economic structural adjustment” and “deindustrialization“) produces a culture of poverty as an adaptive response to work disappearing. Once economic factors set everything into motion, this culture then takes on a life of its own and becomes self-sustaining, creating more deeply entrenched poverty.

In other words, where previously we would identify the economic factors to be the independent variable associated with poverty, once the culture of poverty became entrenched, “culture” became an independent variable on its own. Most people only look at the tail end of this process. They blame individual people for their problems, which they attribute to bad culture, as they fail to recognize that failed economic systems are the original root cause. 

Consequently, as factories closed and jobs were shipped overseas, deindustrialization and globalization led to depression and a “culture of poverty” in many communities, especially those in urban areas. Nationwide, crime rates began to rise. And as they rose, the backlash against the civil rights movement reached a fever pitch. The get-tough movement exploded into a zeal for incarceration, and a war on drugs was declared (Childress, 2014).

Isn’t Increased Incarceration the Result of Increased Crime? (reblog Childress)

Many people imagine that our explosion in incarceration was simply driven by crime and crime rates, but that’s just not true. That is sheer myth, although there was a spike in crime rates in the 1960s and 1970s.

During the period of time that our prison population quintupled, crime rates fluctuated….[such that] today, as bad as crime rates are in some parts of the country, crime rates nationally are at historical lows, but incarceration rates have historically soared.

In fact, most criminologists and sociologists today will acknowledge that crime rates and incarceration rates in the United States have moved independently [of] each other. Incarceration rates, especially black incarceration rates, have soared regardless of whether crime is going up or down in any given community or the nation as a whole

Surprisingly, the United States actually has a crime rate that is lower than the international norm, yet our incarceration rate is six to 10 times higher than other countries’ around the world.

Crack is Wack (reblog Childress)

Many people assumed that the war on drugs was declared in response to the emergence of crack cocaine and the related violence, but that’s not true. The drug war had already been declared, but the emergence of crack cocaine in inner-city communities actually provided the Reagan administration precisely the fuel they needed to build greater public support for the war they had already declared.

So the Reagan administration actually launched a media campaign to publicize the crack epidemic in inner-city communities, hiring staff whose job it was to publicize inner-city crack babies, crack dealers or so-called crack whores and crack-related violence, in an effort to boost public support for this war they had already declared [and to inspire] Congress to devote millions more dollars to waging it.

The plan worked like a charm. Millions more dollars flowed to law enforcement. There was a militarization of law enforcement of the drug war as the Pentagon began giving tanks and military equipment to local law enforcement to wage this war. And Congress began giving harsh mandatory minimum sentences for minor drug offenses, sentences harsher than murderers receive, more than [other] Western democracies.

#MeToo Democrats Get Tough on Crime (reblog Childress)

Soon Democrats began competing with Republicans to prove they could be even tougher on them than their
Republican counterparts, and so it was President Bill Clinton who actually escalated the drug war far beyond
what his Republican predecessors even dreamed possible.

It was the Clinton administration that supported many of the laws and practices that now serve millions into a
permanent underclass, for example. It was the Clinton administration that supported federal legislation denying
financial aid to college students who had once been caught with drugs. It was the Clinton administration that
passed laws discriminating against people with criminal records, making it nearly impossible for them to have
access to public housing. And it was the Clinton administration that championed a federal law denying even food
stamps, food support to people convicted of drug felonies.

So we see, in the height of the war on drugs, a Democratic administration desperate to prove they could be as
tough as their Republican counterparts and helping to give birth to this penal system that would leave millions
of people, overwhelmingly people of color, permanently locked up or locked out.

Who Pays For & Who Benefits From Mass Incarceration?

Mass incarceration costs a lot of money. Instead of paying for college, roads, and other things that benefit the public, we are paying enormous sums of money to keep people locked in cages. The cost of imprisonment — including who benefits and who pays — is a major part of the national discussion around criminal justice policy. Yet it is important to distinguish here that prisons and jails constitute one piece of the puzzle that is the criminal justice system.

Infographic from the Prison Policy Initiative

From Slave Patrols to Ferguson

In the case of Ferguson, most of the police there were engaged in targeting the behavior of the town’s people because operating revenue had been cut at the state level for municipalities (tax cuts = no revenue). Given that there were limits placed on the amount of revenue that could be generated by property taxes, the Ferguson police department had to figure out another way to produce revenue for itself. As a result, the cash-starved municipality relied on its cops and courts to extract millions of dollars in fines and fees from its poorest residents, issuing thousands of citations each year. They penalized the smallest infractions and targeted the least powerful citizens because 1) the town was flat busted broke and 2) it was the easiest thing to do (raising taxes is far harder and plenty of voters won’t let you do it). Put another way, the Ferguson police were “catching” poor blacks to help pay for their for their own operating expenses. Now think about the towns that you know. Do you think that happens there?

The systematic effort to target poor black people led to the deteriorated state of affairs in Ferguson, which led to the killing of Michael Brown, and set off public rioting. (whereupon people castigated the rioters). The police harassment intended to enhance revenue led to the death of a young person, who was executed for the crime of public disobedience. And as morally repugnant as all of this is, don’t forget there are “many Fergusons” in the United States.

Now that you have shifted your thought process to begin thinking structurally about prisons and police and, furthermore, now that you have been given some background in some important history, is there anything that has shifted in your thinking? Do you still find it is hard to think critically about the role of police violence in the the justice system and the way it systematically targets black people, even though experts agree this has become a defining aspect of policing in our contemporary political moment?

Clearly, the violence perpetrated by slave patrols is of a different era. But do you not see any points of resonance with how contemporary police forces, who may on one level working to reduce crime in black communities, are still a root cause of the problem?

The outcomes in Ferguson are the direct result of social inequalities in the town, further exacerbated by the unequal application of the law and unequal police policies and practices. This is what you get when a town becomes so revenue starved that they provide a monetary incentive for police to arrest poor black people; you get fines, bench warrants, and imprisonment for the poor and powerless. You get statistics that feed into the current imbalances that characterize the criminal justice system.

Does Locking People Up for Drugs Work?

In a word – no. After almost 50 years of waging war, drugs are cheaper and more readily available than ever. Yet in spite of the enormous expenditure and evidence of the policy failure, you will be hard pressed to find a politician that doesn’t advocate for defending the war on drugs and, in some cases, continuing to escalate [former President Trump proposed executing people for drug offenses].

John Ehrlichman, Nixon’s former domestic-policy adviser (who went to prison for his role in the Watergate affair) once  admitted to the journalist Dan Baum that Nixon’s criminalization of the Black community was a nakedly political tactic. “By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities,” Ehrlichman said in 2016. “We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings and vilify them night after night on the evening news.” And the rest is history.

All of the research (and let’s face it, our eye balls confirm it too) arresting people simply doesn’t work. Alternatively, there is substantial evidence  to demonstrate that money spent on drug rehabilitation programs is effective. Likewise, by strengthening employment markets and increasing pay and wages for the poor, we can help mitigate the despair and despondency that often underlies drug abuse and addiction, as many people have essentially “given up” and shifted to placating their misery with drugs and alcohol.

“Law & Order” and the Trump Administration

Contemporary examples of politicians who use the “law and order” rhetoric coined in the previous era aren’t exactly in short supply these days. Trump’s speeches and Tweets document heavy use of the language employed by Goldwater and Nixon before him, as he has deftly woven the themes of “lawlessness,” “BLM” and race together to make claims that black people protesting and black criminality are cut from the same cloth. In one example, without ever making explicit reference to Blacks and the Black community, Trump Tweeted “America’s Suburbs will be OVERRUN with Low Income Projects, Anarchists, Agitators, Looters and, of course, ‘Friendly Protesters.’”

The former President has become notorious for the use of racist “dog whistles,” has failed to denounce white supremacy, even referring to white supremacists as “good people,” and has sometimes been explicitly and unapologetically racist, such as when he referred to Mexicans as rapists.

To be sure, Trump didn’t create racist politics in the United States. However, he has contributed to heightening divisions and tensions around race, to the extent that contemporary U.S. politics has become saturated in hate speech that will linger for years after he exits the center stage of politics. 

What is the Solution?

As we have seen here, the history of policing in the United States has been organized, that is, “structured” to produce the results we see before us. Nothing has changed fundamentally in that structure, which is producing what it was designed to produce.

Over and over, government commissions as well as other expert panels convened in cities and states across the country have examined mass incarceration, police brutality, and racial profiling; all of them have arrived at the same conclusion: in order to fix the problems associated with the criminal justice system and mass incarceration, we must simultaneously address the poverty and systemic racism that go hand in hand with policing communities of color. Progress is essential yet it remains slow and uneven.

Many have suggested a renewed focus on police professionalization, which includes additional training on implicit bias, mindfulness, de-escalation, and crisis intervention.  Further redouble efforts to diversify police departments and correction facilities management.  Likewise, adopt more rigorous use-of-force standards as well as standards for the use of body cameras, enhanced by added measures to foster police-community dialogues. Finally, implement enhanced early-warning systems to identify problem officers and expressly prohibit the “recycling/re-hiring” of problem officers. Sounds good right? The problem, unfortunately, is that all of these programs were in place in Minneapolis before George Floyd was killed. None of it worked.

This is why activists are increasingly calling for a top to bottom overhaul of policing organizations. We can’t simply intellectualize the problem and write up official findings and reports that are never implemented. Calls to divest funds from the police and direct them to other organizations better suited to address community social problems would eliminate the current one-size-fits all approach to combating social problems. As part of this process, there should be a recognition of the economic structural roots of many problems, accompanied by decriminalization and  reinvestment in communities of color. Additionally, you could incentivize the police to solve actual crimes, which could potentially result in the police actually accomplishing what we all hope for them to do: to serve and protect the interests of all citizens. For more on this, see Alex Vitale.

One of the major roadblocks to finding and implementing solutions to structural problems is one of recognition. For if you go so far as to recognize that structures are among the root of causes of social problems and crimes, then at some point have to allocate public money to fix/change those structures. Those structures are not only inclusive of police forces; they include judges, probation officers, Mayors. as well as County Executives. Opposition occurs naturally, because there are many people who are invested in the current structure staying the way it is (because they and others like them benefit from this arrangement). This needs to change.

Finally, it is only by taking a comprehensive look at history of racism in policing and incarceration that we can better understand why it’s not only  reform that is necessary, but a full transformation of the criminal justice system, which includes a substantial re-allocating of public resources. Nothing short of this will suffice. The problems discussed here are vast but they are fully known to anyone who has been paying attention. The solutions are also not a secret. What is required now is the political will to act. It is long past the time to do this.

Sources:

“Michele Alexander: A System of Racial and Social Control,” by Sarah Childress, 2014

Slave Patrols: Law and Violence in Virginia and the Carolinas. Harvard University Press, by Hadden, Sally E. (2001).

Learn More:

Here are some texts you can refer to in order to learn more on some of the subjects discussed here:

“The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness,” by Michelle Alexander (2010).

“When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor,”  by William Julius Wilson (1996).

Discussion Questions:

Do you think that prison is a modern day form of slavery?

What do you see in policing that has changed from the past? What appears to be the same?

Do you think current problems with regard to mass incarceration, police racism, and police violence are different from the previous times in our history? If so, how so?

Do you think we have to choose between “law and order” and racial justice in America? Can we achieve both or are they necessarily opposed? 

What does this history contribute to our understanding of contemporary problems with regard to the use of force and violence in the modern police force?

What do you think about the concept of “profit” as it applies to prison? Should private companies be able to profit from locking people up in prison? 

Note: if your answer is yes to this, please explain what you think happens when they can’t fill the prisons with the typical sorts of criminals (violent, theft, drug dealing and using). Who will be next? Because the profit model demands (by contract) that the prisons stay full. Are you okay with creating a mechanism that operates to keep prisons full rather than working to find ways to reform criminals and empty prisons? Does this make moral sense? Does this make financial sense, considering that it costs more to keep someone in prison than it does to send them to college (or any training program)?

What does it mean to live in a democracy, where there are large financial incentives to lock people up? Who do you think will be the natural targets of such a system? What social groups do think might be structurally positioned to escape it?

What is the School-to-Prison Pipeline?

In the United States, the term “School-to-Prison Pipeline”  is a metaphor used to describe the ways that schools have become an entry point into the justice system for minors, many of whom disproportionately come from disadvantaged backgrounds. One of the reasons for this, of course, are the increasingly harsh school policies and practices (approved by parents and teachers) that effectively label students (remember labeling theory?) as troublemakers, which results in them being excluded from school and school-related activities, thereby increasing the probability that they will become involved at some point in the juvenile justice system.

Harsh Discipline

School discipline is a big part of the problem, but so are other policies and practices, which work hand in hand with discipline to produce negative outcomes for juveniles. This includes things like high-stakes testing, the increased hiring of school resource officers (to do what administrators used to do) and federal laws that promote the referral of certain  offenses to law enforcement.

What Does the Research Say?

Empirical research confirms there are predictable pathways that can deliver students from school into the juvenile justice system and even prison. One area of study looks at out-of-school suspensions and the impact it has on school dropout. Other areas look and justice system involvement and how this may leas to adult incarceration. School based arrests, court referrals after drop out, and bullying are also factors that can predict dropout and subsequent involvement with the justice system.

Despite there being gaps in the research literature, the term STPP has managed to achieve widespread acceptance in academic, political circles, and among members of the public. Acceptance is not the same as achieving absolute consensus. Some social scientists and activists argue that the actions taken by non-criminal justice institutions can have an impact on over-incarceration, even as others have been critical of the concept. To this end, some scholars find the pipeline metaphor is too narrow; that it assumes there is a deterministic link between schools and prisons.

Critical scholars, critical criminologists among them, argue that social factors like poverty, unemployment, and failures within child welfare and mental health systems are bound up with school factors, which have tended to criminalize youth who suffer from problems that cannot be attributed solely their individual accountability. In other words “it’s complicated,” when actually sit down and look at the different social circumstances that influence the harmful choices some youth make that can result in them becoming involved in the justice system.

Questions abound in regards to what reforms might be undertaken to disrupt the STPP and so more research is needed. What practices are most harmful? Which ones are effective?

Profile of a Juvenile Delinquent

The youth who are statistically getting caught up in the pipeline tend to fit the following profile:

• They have disabilities
• They may identify as LGBTQ
• They suffer from a history of poverty, abuse, or neglect.
• They lack access to education and counseling services.
• They act out in ways that cause them to be isolated, punished, and removed from school.

Researchers have identified three major contributors that help fuel the school-to-prison pipeline:

• Zero Tolerance Policies
• Implicit Bias
• Police in Schools

Less Than Zero Tolerance 

“Zero-tolerance” policies criminalize minor infractions of school rules, while cops in schools lead to students being criminalized for behavior that should be handled inside the school. Suspensions throughout the country have surged over the past two decades, largely because schools have relied on these policies. When students are kicked out of classrooms, either by suspension or expulsion, the result is they are often referred to law enforcement for formal processing.

The Making of a “Superpredator”

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as juvenile crime rates and fear of adolescent “superpredators” grew, state legislatures and school districts buckled to pressure to incorporate the no-excuses rhetoric of “tough on crime” laws into their approach to school discipline (Hager, 2015)

By 1997, 79 percent of schools around the country had implemented zero-tolerance policies, and by 2000, schools were suspending more than 3 million children per year. (By way of comparison, that’s the same number of students who will graduate from public high schools this year) (Hager, 2015)

But a growing body of research shows that students who miss many school days will return to the classroom behind on their work, confused about what they’ve missed, and all the more likely to act out. Left unsupervised during the day, without anything constructive to do, they are more likely to get arrested, go to jail, or ultimately drop out of school.

According to a 2011 report from the Council of State Governments, students who have been suspended or expelled are twice as likely to repeat their grade and three times as likely to end up in the juvenile justice system—within a year—compared to similar students at similar schools (Hager, 2015).

Research also shows that punishments like suspensions and expulsions are disproportionately meted out to black students. They are three times more likely than their white peers to be suspended and even more likely to be expelled or referred to law enforcement for the same infractions, according to civil rights data from the U.S. Department of Education (Hager, ).

Acknowledging the problem, in 2010, public schools in Boston began discouraging suspensions and expulsions, which then dropped from 743 to 120 in only two years. In 2013, Los Angeles banned the practice of kicking students out of school for subjective infractions like “willful defiance.” Suspensions there have also plummeted by more than 50 percent. And Bill de Blasio, mayor of New York City, told schools earlier this year that from now on, all suspensions must be approved by his administration (Hager, 2015).

In January 2014, the Obama administration issued new federal guidelines under which schools must reduce their reliance on out-of-school suspensions and expulsions. The Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights has since been investigating school districts across the country that use suspensions to unfairly “push out” students of color and students with disabilities. Mississippi, which suspends a higher ratio of black to white students than any other Southern state, received the message loud and clear (Hager, 2015).

In the southeast part of the state, schools in the town of Meridian—which were investigated by the Department of Justice for routinely suspending, arresting, and sending students to jail for minor in-school infractions like using profanity, flatulence, and “disrespect”—have been ordered by their superintendent to stop calling the police unless a student commits a felony. Toni Kersh, director of school attendance for the state’s Department of Education, says, “We’re encouraging schools to start handling discipline in-house” (Hager, 2015).

That in-house discipline includes policing the hallways, having students walk through metal detectors daily, patting them down, relying even more heavily on corporal punishment and in-school detention, sending more students to alternative schools, and surveilling them with cameras. The Tupelo Public School District, in eastern Mississippi, for instance, recently promised the Office for Civil Rights that it would “ensure to the maximum extent possible that misbehavior is addressed in a manner that does not require removal from school.” In June, the school board authorized security guards to start carrying pepper spray in classrooms and hallways (Hager, 2015).

National experts on school discipline point out that these measures are not unique to the South. “You see it at charter schools a lot,” says Kathleen Nolan, a professor of teacher preparation at Princeton University and an expert on zero-tolerance policies in schools. “Straight from the model of order-maintenance policing—dress code, silence, walk in straight lines, metal detectors—except now it’s in the schools and being done by teachers with less training in this than the actual police have” (Hager, 2015).

“Broken Windows” Education (reblog Hager)

“You have to stop the small stuff to prevent the big stuff,” says Julius Lucas, principal of West Bolivar High School in Rosedale, a town in the western part of the [Mississippi] delta.

“I agree suspending so many kids raised the chances of their dropping out, getting involved with the police,” says Lynn Schneider, a 14-year veteran high school English teacher in the school district. “But we’ve gone the opposite direction—discipline has fallen apart.”

In a recent survey by the Jackson teachers’ union, two-thirds of respondents said their classroom feels “out of control” on a daily or weekly basis, 60 percent said they have been physically assaulted, and 46 percent said they are considering leaving their job or even profession because of the mayhem. Crucially, 62 percent said they saw no good alternatives to suspension, expulsion, and police involvement for students who act out.

Tardiness is a paddle-worthy offense. Behavior labeled by teachers as “defiance,” “disrespect,” “horseplay,” or “disorderly conduct” gets the same punishment. If a student wears the wrong uniform—the wrong color shirt or pants, an untucked shirt, shoes that aren’t plain black or plain white, or, in some schools, jackets with a zipper—same punishment again.

“They been coming up with all kinds of new stuff. But it’s the same thing—trying to catch us being bad,” says Keshaun, a student at D.M. Smith Middle School in Cleveland, Mississippi, 20 miles from Rosedale. Keshaun says he recently forgot his gym shorts and was taken into a back room to get paddled. “It’s called getting ‘cookies,’” he says. “They do it harder the worse they think you are.”

Chicago Police patrol the neighborhood as children arrive at Gresham Elementary School on the first day of classes Monday, Aug. 26. 2013 in Chicago (AP Photos/M. Spencer Green).

Three-strikes rules are also prevalent. In the South Delta School District, students caught twice in possession of “distracting articles” like cell phones are sent to the alternative school the third time. In the north Delta, at the DeSoto County Alternative Center, female students must “shake out” and “pop” their bras during daily searches, and boys must remove their socks, according to a report by the American Civil Liberties Union of Mississippi.

In rare, particularly extreme cases, teachers and administrators even use restraint and seclusion tactics, locking them in rooms, closets, or “boxes”—small, enclosed areas where teachers send kids to “cool down”—when they misbehave. In a survey by the ACLU, more than 13 percent of parents in Mississippi said their children had been restrained by staff, and about 12 percent said their children’s school had a seclusion room.

South of the delta, at the Capital City Alternative School in Jackson, dozens of kids were handcuffed to metal poles, chairs, even bus seats; uncuffed when it was time to go home; and then re-cuffed each morning—all for wearing the wrong-color belt or not completing their work. Jackson Public Schools ultimately agreed to stop using the handcuffs and hire an independent monitor.
Sabrina Mitchell’s sixth-grade daughter has a mood disorder and was whipped with a belt by the janitor at Lexington Elementary School in Holmes County, in the eastern delta. (Lexington Elementary has since been consolidated with another school and changed its name.) When she was eight years old, she was also put in a closet in the school basement.

As Tamaria, one of Stukes’s students, puts it, “My classmates, they always want attention. They always be playing while the teacher is talking. I feel like part of the reason everyone is so behind is because we waste so much time.”

Many administrators throughout the state agree but have little money to throw at the problem—to hire counselors, psychologists, tutors, special education teachers, or teachers qualified to do more than “guard” the students during detention. The state legislature regularly votes against full funding for the public schools, and in early November, voters narrowly rejected a ballot initiative to force lawmakers to do so.

And because so few qualified teachers want to take low-paying, nonunionized jobs in rural towns, many classrooms are staffed by noncertified, retired, or beginner teachers who are in basic survival mode.

“Paddling and in-school detention, it’s a short-term, low-energy solution to all of that,” says Jeremiah Smith, who helps run the Sunflower County Freedom Project, which offers after-school classes to kids in the central delta.

Who Is Most Represented?

Students from two groups—racial minorities and children with disabilities—are disproportionately represented in the school-to-prison pipeline. African-American students, for instance, are 3.8 times more likely than their white classmates to be suspended or expelled, according to a nationwide study by the U.S. Department of Education Office for Civil Rights (Elias, 2013).

For students with disabilities, the numbers are equally troubling. One report found that they are 25% more likely to be referred to law enforcement. Moreover, while 8.6 percent of public school children have been identified as having disabilities that affect their ability to learn, these students make up 32 percent of youth in juvenile detention centers (Elias, 2013).

The racial disparities are even starker for students with disabilities. About 1 in 4 black children with disabilities were suspended at least once, versus 1 in 11 white students, according to an analysis of the government report by Daniel J. Losen, director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA (Elias, 2013).

Policing High School

How does school policing impact students? Does it help or harm? The answers don’t come easy. In the wake of high-profile school shootings, many Americans think the answer is to hire more school-based police officers.

The U.S. Department of Justice reports that the number of school resource officers rose 38 percent between 1997 and 2007. Jerri Katzerman, SPLC deputy legal director, said this surge in police on campus has helped to criminalize many students and fill the pipeline (Elias, 2013).

But less policing is precisely what many researchers are recommending. Research shows that the more students are suspended, the more likely they are to earn poor grades and drop out of school. They are also more likely to get involved in the criminal justice system. Moreover, suspension has not been shown to be effective in reducing incidents or increasing school safety. Students who experience the highest rates of suspensions and expulsions are, more often than not, black and Latino. Students with disabilities are also disproportionately expelled and suspended. All of these groups are more likely to receive harsh student discipline in segregated school settings where most students are black and Latino (Quinlan, 2016).

Indiana school police officers Gary Stanley, left, and Jessey Walley talk in the New Palestine High School library (Tom Russo | Daily Reporter).

Additional research out of Stanford University has shown that school resource officers are more likely to be involved in the discipline of a student if that student is black. This information suggests that although officers need training to recognize their own biases, so do teachers. For the research also showed that teachers may use harsher discipline on a black student when they misbehave a second time than they would for a white student (Quinlan, 2016).

An ACLU white paper, “Bullies in Blue: Origins and Consequences of School Policing,” explores the beginnings of school policing in the United States and sheds light on the negative consequences of the increasing role of police and links it to both the drivers of punitive criminal justice policies and mass incarceration nationwide. The report traces a line back to the struggle to end Jim Crow segregation during the civil rights movement, and challenges assumptions that the function of police in schools is to protect children. It posits that police are police, and in schools, they will act as police, and in those actions bring the criminal justice system into our schools and criminalize kids.

School Resource Officers (reblog Quinlan)

There are as many as 17,000 school resource officers in schools across the country, the most recent data shows. The number of these officers has increased throughout the past 15 years. Although officers may be an asset in some circumstances, the way many schools are using them now — to control students who misbehave — is pushing more students out of school and into the criminal justice system, U.S. Department of Education officials say (Quinlan, 2016).

In a report put out by the federal government, officials published guidelines on how to use school resource officers in a way that doesn’t endanger students’ civil rights.

“If students are to learn to their maximum potential, they must be safe in their schools and on their college campuses, but with that safety must come the safeguarding of students’ civil rights,” said John King, secretary of the Education Department, in a call with reporters. “We must better equip educators to address misbehavior and allow students to learn and grow from their mistakes”(Quinlan, 2016).

Instead of simply turning over misbehaving students to school resource officers, the department says officers need to have a positive relationship with students and focus on safety concerns.

Only 12 states require student-specific training for officers in schools, according to The Atlantic’s reporting last fall. Law enforcement officers are more likely to see a classroom disruption as criminal conduct even though no one’s safety is at risk, a 2009 study from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville found. Some of these situations involved incidents such as a student refusing to sit down. The study also found that students in schools with officers were almost three times more likely to be arrested (Quinlan, 2016).

As King pointed out, schools’ priorities are often out of whack. Although schools continue to hire school resource officers, they aren’t hiring enough school counselors. “We have 1.6 million students with sworn law enforcement officers and no school counselor and we have said that is a mistake. It is a reflection of mistaken choices about the allocation of resources,” King said (Quinlan, 2016).

Baltimore City Schools says video of officer slapping student happened late today. "Vigorously" under investigation pic.twitter.com/GW5OKeOPF2

— Christian Schaffer (@schafferwmar) March 2, 2016

Restorative Justice – Community Involvement

How can school districts divert the school-to-prison pipeline? The education department report cited that there is an important role that might be played by community stakeholders. It went so far as to recommend that the community should be part of the process of recruiting school resource officers, to the extent that community stakeholders might participate in the interview process.

In what have been termed “restorative justice” reforms (opposite of punishment approaches) the following solutions have been suggested:

1. Increase the use of positive behavior interventions and supports.
2. Compile annual reports on the total number of disciplinary actions that push students out of the classroom based on gender, race and ability.
3. Create agreements with police departments and court systems to limit arrests at school and the use of restraints, such as mace and handcuffs.
4. Provide simple explanations of infractions and prescribed responses in the student code of conduct to ensure fairness.
5. Create appropriate limits on the use of law enforcement in public schools.
6. Train teachers on the use of positive behavior supports for at-risk students.

Sources

“When School Feels Like Jail,” by Eli Hager, 2015.

“What’s Wrong With the Way Schools Use Police Officers?” by Casey Quinlan, 2016

“Bullies in Blue: Origins and Consequences of School Policing,” ACLU Report, 2017.

“A Generation Later: What We’ve Learned About Zero Tolerance in Schools.” (Vera Institute Policy Brief, 2013)

“The School-to-Prison Pipeline,” by Marylyn Elias, 2013.

The Marshall Project curated a list of articles on policing in high schools. You can access it here.

Discussion Questions

Think about the research reflected here in terms of how it may/may not resonate with your own experiences in school. What do you recall from your own school experiences?

Did your school have armed police officers? What changes (if any noteworthy) did you observe over time?

In spite of the abundance of research, which shows the irreparable harm that is being done by these policies, why do people continue to support incarceration over education?

Why are there almost always limitless public dollars available to support jails, prisons, and the hiring of police?

Why are education expenditures held up to far more scrutiny?

Why are teachers paid so little?

Why do people think the answer to every social problem is always more police and more jail?

Social Class & Crime

Social class divisions in the United States are not always clear to many people. Not only do they change over time, they may also change from place to place. How do you define your social class? Is it simply a matter of your individual or household income? Do you define it based on your profession or level of education? How might your residence explain your social class? Or, to borrow from Marx, how does your relationship to the means of production (worker or owner) determine your social class?

When we look at the effect social class divisions have on crime, the results are similarly not always clear. Annual reports of people arrested in the United offer many compelling insights when it comes to demographic characteristics like gender, age, race, and ethnicity; however, they don’t tell us much about social class characteristics such as income, occupation, or residence.

Some of the best information that we might consult regarding the social class characteristics of people in jails and prisons is derived from surveys of inmates. Unfortunately, the last detailed survey of prisoners serving felony sentences in state penitentiaries, who make up the majority of those incarcerated in the United States, was conducted in 1993.

Locking Up the Lower Classes

Members of the lower classes are overrepresented in U.S. prisons. Why? Is it because they commit more crime? Or are they more likely to be targeted?

Research on the U.S. correctional population leaves little doubt that most of the people serving time for criminal offenses come from the lower end of society’s socioeconomic continuum. Statistics from government reports reveal that those in prison tend to be less well educated and are more likely to be unemployed and earn far lower incomes than the general population.

In one 2002 survey conducted on inmates incarcerated in local jails revealed a similar pattern, the following finding was reported: only about half of jail inmates were employed full-time at the time of their arrest (even though the national unemployment rate was below 5%). Likewise, more than half of jail inmates earned less than $15,000 a year (Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), U.S. Department of Justice, 2004). Although statistics may be skewed by the fact that better-off offenders who are charged with street crimes are more likely to avoid imprisonment, there is little reason to believe the degree of error is substantial. All one has to do is observe any urban police station or city court to know that very few middle- or upper-class citizens are arrested and prosecuted for common street crimes.

Briefly put, the U.S. Criminal Justice System effectively incarcerates the poorest of the poor. Although wealth and power do not preclude arrest and sentencing, they certainly make it statistically more likely that the person will not see the inside of a prison cell.

Police Discretion, Arrest, and Incarceration

The police officers’ decision-making process, where they decide whether or not to approach and arrest someone plays a big role in who shows up in our jails and prisons. The term for this is “police discretion.” And the research shows us that the perceived social class of a potential offender has a major impact on how the officer ultimately responds (i.e., when to file an official police report, whom to approach, whom to arrest, whom to charge, and whom to send to prison). This impact is without a doubt reflected in arrest as well as incarceration statistics.

Self-reports from police document that the police are more likely to arrest low-class offenders and offer leniency to higher class offenders. In this instance, it is not so much the specific criminal behavior that drives arrest statistics so much as it is the impact of social class on policing practices, which produces a “classed” outcome.

Debates & Perspectives

Despite the fact that our prisons and jails are full of poor people, the link between social class and criminal behavior remains controversial. To explain the high rates of incarceration among the poor, some scholars argue that the disproportionate representation of poor people in jails and prisons is indicative of their overinvolvement in crime. Alternatively, others suggest this disparity is the result of a criminal justice system that unfairly targets the poor. Take a moment to reflect on your own thoughts here. How have you typically come to resolve the notion of social inequality as it relates to arrest and incarceration?

The contradictory perceptions about the relationship between social class and criminality are, in part, the product of disparate research findings. There is no shortage of research studies that have examined this relationship; however, there is little consensus because of inconsistent findings and inclusive results.

For example, some scholars argue that crime is more likely among people in higher social classes, yet others argue criminality is more prevalent among the lower classes. Some of the inconsistencies here can be traced to the different research methods used to study the relationship between social class and crime, including different data collection methods; different conceptual categories, ways of measuring social class and crime, different population samples; and different analyses.

Some critical criminologists have argued that ALL categories of crime and social class are ideological constructs, which is to say, the categories themselves are biased/ideological from the outset, so no true quantitative measure is possible (see the work of Jock Young).

An examination of the past research reveals that the earliest of these studies (those conducted before the 1950s) tended to find more criminality among the lower classes than the upper classes. These findings, in turn, provided the foundation for numerous theories of crime and delinquency that attempted to explain why poverty was criminogenic.

Factors singled out for study included: individual and cultural deficiencies, lack of opportunity, and differential (harsher) treatment of individuals in poorer communities by the criminal justice system. Many of these early studies and theories, however, were only tenuously rooted in empirical research. That is to say, they didn’t follow the rigorous standards set for research that are in effect today.

Critique 

Although the social class–crime link was widely accepted, there are criminologists who took issue with the research methods that produced the correlation between social class and criminality. Most commonly, they argue that measuring crime through the use of official data (i.e., arrest data, prison statistics) represents a biased picture of crime. This measure of crime did not take into account the reality that many crimes go unnoticed or unreported, or simply that recorded statistics reflect the whims and intentions of those who wish to count some but not others.

This unknown and uncounted crime is referred to as the dark figure of crime. The problem, as these criminologists see it, is  that there is no way to determine whether accurately measuring the dark figure of crime would or would not show crime to be more broadly distributed.

Some criminologists also argued that official measures of crime may actually better measure police practices than actual levels of crime; that is, in reality, they may simply reflect, at least in part, the discretionary practices of police officers concerning whom to arrest and whom not to arrest, or a judge’s propensity for sending particular offenders to prison while reserving alternative, community-based sanctions for others.

The development of self-reported data in the 1950s intensified the debate. Researchers administered surveys to individuals randomly selected from the population and asked them to report their criminal behaviors. Although many of the earliest of these studies did not support the belief that lower social classes were more criminal, there was  enough research that found contradictory results to ensure that the issue would not be resolved. In short, the results were mixed and inconclusive on the question of social class.

Many sociologists and criminologists attacked the validity of self-reported data. Others took issue with the validity of official measures of crime (i.e. FBI statistics/UCR). Their argument was that there is no way to determine whether people in self-report studies are telling the truth about their criminal behavior. Doubters suggested that self-report surveys were better measures of a participant’s willingness to tell the truth about his or her criminality. They  speculated that people from the lower classes were underreporting their deviant and criminal behavior while those in the upper classes were overreporting, thereby artificially reducing the magnitude of the correlation between lower-class status and criminality.

Tittle, Villemez, and Smith (1978) reviewed 35 research studies that examined the social class–crime link and concluded that there was an extremely small relationship, with the members of the lower classes exhibiting slightly more criminality. They also noted that this relationship had become smaller over the past four decades. This research, however, by no means settled the debate.

The inconclusive results became the impetus for even more extensive and complicated empirical research efforts. Much of these later efforts attempted to discover the conditions under which social class influences criminality. One set of studies attempted to determine whether the manner in which social class and crime were measured impacted the likelihood of discovering a link between social class and crime. In terms of social class, several studies suggested that this relationship may exist only among people in the lowest economic strata, the group sometimes referred to as the underclass. These studies measured social class by dividing populations into dichotomous categories such as welfare recipients and nonrecipients or, for school-age children, those who receive free lunches and those who do not.

Other studies used a composite measure of social class, which often included education, occupation, and income. Still, other studies used Marxian classifications of social class, conceptualizing social class in terms of an individual’s (or his or her parents’) relationship to the means of production— specifically, whether they owned some means of production or sold their labor for a wage. And still, others expanded the Marxist framework to include other variables, such as whether one has control over the means of production and/or control over the labor of others. The emphasis on control helped to distinguish between wage workers who have managerial positions and those who do not, which is an increasingly prevalent distinction in modern society.

Crime was also measured as part of an effort to determine whether it conditions the social class–criminality relationship. For example, studies have examined whether the negative relationship between social class and delinquency existed only for the most serious criminal offenses or the most frequent offenders.

The source of crime data was thought to have an effect on whether a relationship between social class and crime was uncovered. Some criminologists held that crime would be shown to be more prevalent among the lower class if official police data or court records are used to determine criminality. As previously mentioned, they argued that people from lower classes are more likely to underreport their criminal behavior on self-report surveys.

A number of other studies sought to determine whether demographic and environmental variables had important conditioning effects on the class-crime relationship. For example, some studies examined whether the effect of social class on criminality was greater among blacks than it was for whites or among males than among females. Given the contradictory results of these research efforts, it would be difficult to suggest that the social class– criminality relationship was specific to a certain race or gender. Still another set of studies has examined whether this relationship was more likely in areas that were characterized as being more heterogeneous, more urban, or in higher status areas, and again produced mixed results.

Tittle and Meier (1990) reviewed the research literature that examined the relationship between socioeconomic status and delinquency and that attempted to specify whether any of the aforementioned conditions mattered. They concluded that there was little evidence that the link between social class and criminality existed under any of the conditions examined. The most recent and more sophisticated studies have generally arrived at similar conclusions, although some studies did help clarify the relationship. For example, Wright and his colleagues found that people in lower social classes experienced lower educational and occupational goals and more financial strain, aggression, and alienation, which in turn increased delinquency (B. R. E. Wright, Caspi, Moffitt, Miech, & Silva, 1999) .

Alternatively, delinquency in the higher social classes was thought to be the result of high socioeconomic status causing increased risk-taking. Lack of economic and social power, on the other hand, diminished the commitment to conventional values, which then predisposed many youth to delinquency.

Dunaway, Cullen, Burton, and Evans (2000) examined the relationship between social class (measured in a variety of ways) and criminality (based on self-report surveys) and found that, among adults, the correlation was weak for less serious offenses. They did, however, find a class effect for violent offenses and among non-whites. This study was distinctive in that it measured adult criminality, a surprisingly under-researched population.

Conclusion

In the end, the best conclusion that can be drawn about the relationship between social class and the commission of street crimes is that it tends to be weak and present only under certain specified conditions. In light of this, criminology researchers must continue to attempt to specify other circumstances that may influence this relationship.

What many of these studies do have in common is that most approached the definition of crime as being nonproblematic instead of acknowledging crime as a multifaceted concept that includes crimes of the disadvantaged as well as crimes of the powerful.

Unfortunately, the latter (studies of the powerful) were, and still are, less apt to be considered. This is important, because if studies included offenses that powerful individuals are more likely to commit (e.g., insider trading) and that those in lower classes are in no position to commit, then there would be little question as to whether criminality would appear more evenly distributed across social classes than has traditionally been thought. Moreover, it is only by including a wider variety of offenses that we can consider the social class–crime link as having been more completely and fairly tested.

So, although there has been little advancement toward settling the social class–street crime questions, the introduction of self-report studies has generally confirmed that criminality is more broadly and equally distributed across social classes than previously suspected.

We’re All Criminals

Studies have consistently shown that nearly 90% of Americans have committed at least one crime for which they could have been sentenced to jail or prison.

Research findings confirm the use of official statistics does not provide a full accounting of who is/is not committing crimes. A lot of crime is never reported (dark figure of crime). Consequently, we are not always measuring and accounting for the true level of crime.

Instead, we are merely measuring the decision-making practices of the criminal justice system.