Reducing Racial Inequality in Crime and Justice Science, Practice, and Policy (2023) / Chapter Skim
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3 Social Drivers of Racial Inequalities in Crime and Justice
3 Social Drivers of Racial Inequalities in Crime and Justice
Pages 117-138
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From page 117... ...
In this regard, Knoxville is neither an outlier nor unusual. Rather, it is typical of American cities large and small, reflect ing racial inequalities in crime, victimization, policing, and incarceration that are documented elsewhere in this report and elaborated further in this chapter.
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From page 118... ...
. While far fewer young Black men lose their lives to police shootings than from other causes, the social consequences of these deaths on families and already disadvantaged communities should not be understated.1 In Knoxville, as is the case elsewhere, the explicit racism that created racial segregation and the concentration of disadvantage alongside the structural racism that has maintained these conditions have long been connected to each other and to racial inequalities in community violence and lethal criminal justice contacts.
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From page 119... ...
. By tracing crime to racial inequalities and structural racism, this body of work set the stage for expla nations that eschewed pathologizing Black, Latino, and Native American communities as inherently or culturally disposed to violence.
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From page 120... ...
As Chapter 5 notes, the societal remedies proposed by the Kerner Commission more than 50 years ago were a road not taken. To the contrary, as we document more in the next section, racial differences in concentrated urban poverty remain large, so much so that the most deprived urban contexts in which White people resided are considerably better off than the average context of Black communities (Sharkey, 2013; Peterson and Krivo, 2010)
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From page 121... ...
Consistent with the focus of most research on racial inequality and crime, and for reasons of data availability, we focus primarily on Black/White differences. CONTEMPORARY RACIAL INEQUALITIES As with racial disparities in violent crime and criminal justice contact, racial disparities in residential and other social contexts continue to plague the United States.
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From page 122... ...
. Black people also face much greater odds than White people of experiencing compounded (i.e., simultaneous individual and neighborhood level)
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From page 123... ...
We caution that tremendous differences in disadvantage by race make it difficult to compare Black and White neighborhoods, which leaves analyses incomplete and, in some cases, makes predictions outside the bounds of everyday experiences. In addition, given that disadvantage is a hypothesized cause of crime and criminal justice contact, scholars have assessed how well it explains relative racial gaps in important outcomes, such as homicide victimization or police killings.
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From page 124... ...
Racial inequalities in spatial exposure to crime should help explain ethno-racial inequality in crime and crime change. A qualitatively different form of neighborhood inequality is forged when residents visit other neighborhoods throughout a city in their everyday routines, including neighborhoods that are not spatially proximal.
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From page 125... ...
Hispanic neighborhoods fare a bit better than Black neighborhoods, followed by mixed neighborhoods, but the patterns are similar. These racial differences reveal a previously overlooked dimension of racial inequality that plausibly explains racial disparities in the experience of crime and violence.
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From page 126... ...
Concentrated Disadvantage and Gun Violence: A Closer Look at Trends The relationship between high rates of neighborhood poverty and high rates of crime is reflected in rates of serious violence -- particularly gun violence among young people. As was shown in Chapter 2, homicide risk is not distributed equally in the United States, and Black Americans are exposed to the greatest risk.
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From page 127... ...
. Analysis of data on fatal shootings at the census tract level in the 100 largest cities, excluding accidents and suicides, shows that the rate of gun violence increased by 87 percent in predominantly Black neighborhoods compared to a 64 percent increase in White neighborhoods.
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From page 128... ...
found that racial residential segregation concentrated the negative influence of marginal employment's effects on neighborhood crime rates. Furthermore, young adult males who are marginally employed are more likely to engage in criminal behavior, both violent crime and property crime (Crutchfield and Pitchford, 1997)
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From page 129... ...
Other social mechanisms that have been hypothesized to translate macro disadvantage and racial inequalities into violence are legal cynicism and estrangement from the criminal justice system (Bell, 2020b; S ampson, 2012; Kirk and Papachristos, 2011; Sampson and Bartusch, 1998) , competition for local political power, municipal resources, and representation (Vargas, 2016)
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From page 130... ...
refer to cognitive landscapes and shared expectations about violence in highly disadvantaged communities, but in their view this sort of adapta tion has been a result of cumulative and compounded racial disadvantages and the existential realties of everyday life in communities underserved by the criminal justice system (see also Kirk and Papachristos, 2011; Sampson and Bartusch, 1998)
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From page 131... ...
examine large metropolitan areas and argue that racial residential segregation is related to higher Black homicide victimization rates but lower risk for White people. They conclude that segregation plays an important role in creating and maintaining the racial gap in victimization.
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From page 132... ...
find that home mortgage lending explains important shares of the gap in violent and property crime between Black and White neigh borhoods and between Latino and White neighborhoods as well. Applying this more concretely based on findings from the second wave of the NNCS, equalizing home mortgage dollars would reduce the gaps in violent crime levels between White and Black or Latino communities by approximately 30 percent (Krivo et al., 2021)
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From page 133... ...
suggest, "A likely explanation for this result is the fact that newcomers from abroad are not settling into traditionally Black neighborhoods in numbers that would have a meaningful impact on levels of homicide." Xie and Baumer (2018) find that immigration concentration protects against victimization risk for Latino, Black, and White people, but this protection is particularly enhanced for Latino people given that they are most likely to live in close proximity to the foreign born.
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From page 134... ...
analyzed individual, fam ily, and neighborhood factors to assess competing hypotheses regarding racial/ethnic gaps in perpetrating violence among 2,974 individuals ages eight to 25 living in 180 Chicago neighborhoods. The odds of perpetrating violence were 85 percent higher for Black people than for White people, whereas Latino-perpetrated violence was 10 percent lower.
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From page 135... ...
To achieve this, a diverse set of methodologies and theories must be engaged. First, as discussed in this chapter, there is a rich theoretical tradition for understanding racial differences in crime.
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From page 136... ...
. CONCLUSION This chapter has sought to illustrate the key social drivers of racial inequalities in violent crime and homicide, which are key sources of racial justice differences.
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From page 137... ...
These same disadvantaged contexts also contribute to racial disparities in criminal justice contacts, further compounding inequality. However, the fact that Black and White populations do not reside in comparably disadvantaged places presents deep methodologi cal challenges to the study of racial inequality and crime.
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