SCLY4 Ethnicity and crime.

Ethnicity and crime - 2 view points =

1 - questions statistics, police bias/ institutional racism?

2 - Accepts statistics - attempts to explain WHY Afro caribbeans commit more crime.

Afrocaribbean males are over represented in the official statistics. Asians are also likely than whites to be stopped and searched & face court proceedings.

Despite the fact that Ethnic minorities make up about 9 percent of the general population, in 2007 26% of male prisoners and 29% of females were from black and ethnic minority groups.

This information taken into account, it appears that there is a higher level of criminality among some minority ethnic groups, particularly the black population.

Other links between ethnicity & crime - Minority ethnic groups tend to have higher portions of young people, those suffering from relative deprivation and living in deprived urban communities rather than greater criminality arising from ethnicity itself, age could also be the issue.

VIEW POINT ONE:

Interactionists (labelling) - There is racism at varying levels of the Criminal Justice system. Official statistics are a social construction and do not present an accurate image of the social distribution of criminality. There are social processes that lead to ethnic minority groups being over represented in the stats such as; labelling, self fulfillng prophecy and deviancy amplification.

New Criminologists reject the official statistics and believe this over representation in the statistics is due to police bias and stereotyping.                                       HALL - MARXIST (Policing the crisis) - Studied the moral panic over mugging in the 70s. Stereotypical reporting represented young black males as 'muggers' making that group a folk devil. Over represented in the statistics as they are more likely to be targetted.

Hall explained that this moral panic was strategically used as a scapegoat for the opression caused by Capitalism . They used a 'cracking down' (zero tolerance policing & stop and searching) approach to this particular group to tackle future unrest of the country. Young black males were…