Race and Crime

Your Virginia Tech Politics and Religion source
Forum rules
Be Civil. Go Hokies.
Post Reply
User avatar
USN_Hokie
Posts: 30831
Joined: Wed Aug 21, 2013 9:58 pm
Party: Draintheswamp

Race and Crime

Post by USN_Hokie »

In a thread the other week (which I now can't find) this topic came up. While it was noted, and I think we can all agree, that blacks are disproportionately arrested for more crime - someone asked the legitimate question of whether this was the result institutional racism, or blacks did in fact commit more crime. To stimulate the conversation, here's a study which addressed this very question.

Beaver, Kevin M.; DeLisi, Matt; Wright, John Paul; Boutwell, Brian B.; Barnes, J. C.; & Vaughn, Michael G. (2013). No evidence of racial discrimination in criminal justice processing: Results from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health. Personality and Individual Differences, 55(1), 29-34.

...

4. Discussion
The goal of the current study was to answer a single question:
Whether the criminal justice system acts in a way that is biased
against African American males. Without including control variables
for potential alternative explanations, the results were consistent
with previous research indicating that African American
males are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated compared
to their White counterparts. After introducing control variables
for self-reported lifetime violence and verbal IQ (to rule out alternative
explanations), the association between race and being processed
through the criminal justice system was reduced to nonsignificance.
Taken together, analysis of data from the Add Health
strongly suggest that research examining racial disparities in the
criminal justice system must include covariates for self-reported
criminal involvement and perhaps even for verbal IQ or they are
likely misspecified. The most likely result of this misspecification
is an upwardly biased race effect that purportedly indicates that
African American males are treated more harshly than White
males due to a biased criminal justice system.
These findings should be viewed with caution given that there
are a number of limitations that need to be addressed in future research.
To begin with, there is likely to be concern over whether
self-reports of serious criminal involvement are an appropriate
way to gauge the extent of criminal behavior. While there are certainly
some issues with self-reports, the available evidence tends
to suggest that they are a useful way to assess criminal involvement
(Roberts & Wells, 2010). Moreover, there is some evidence
of racial differences in self-report surveys, but the existing
literature tends to suggest that African Americans are likely to
underreport their involvement in acts of crime and delinquency
(Hindelang, Hirschi, & Weis, 1979, 1981; Kirk, 2006; Kleck,
1982). If this were the case, our analysis would have been less
likely to show any effect of race on crime. In other words, the baseline
model would have failed to identify an effect of race on arrest
or on incarceration. Moreover, the multivariate models would have
been less sensitive to the inclusion of the lifetime violence variable
because it would not have correlated with race (i.e., there would
have been no racial differences in reports of lifetime violence).
In addition, the Add Health data did not contain any official
measures of crime, but rather relied on self-reports to determine
whether the respondent was arrested and incarcerated. As noted
earlier, these questions were administered to each respondent
using CAPI techniques, thereby limiting the influence of social
desirability bias. With that said, the pattern of results tends to mirror
those found in other studies that use official crime data (Farrington,
Loeber, Stouthamer-Loeber, Van Kammen, & Schmidt,
1996; Krohn, Thornberry, Gibson, & Baldwin, 2010). Furthermore,
the data are not necessarily used prospectively as the lifetime violence
and composite IQ measures used data collected across all
four waves while the criminal justice outcome measures asked
about arrests and incarceration that occurred throughout the subject’s
lifetime. As a result, the temporal ordering is not firmly
established in this study. Last, although the Add Health data were
originally collected to be nationally representative, we used only a
subset of participants—that is African American and white males
who had complete data available across all four waves of data—
which might limit the generalizability of the findings. Future research
is needed to address these concerns to determine whether
the findings are robust.

http://www.soc.iastate.edu/staff/delisi ... 202013.pdf
Post Reply