NCJ Number
79448
Date Published
1981
Length
0 pages
Annotation
Hubert Locke, Vice President of Academic Affairs at the University of Washington, discusses research as it pertains to race, emphasizing that university researchers work with assumptions that are biased.
Abstract
Criminal justice research is characterized by a peculiar selectivity to subject and to scientific inquiry when it pertains to race. Although numbers of blacks are highly disproportionate in the criminal justice system, these crime statistics are unreliable in that they reflect arrest rates, not crime rates. Concentrating on blacks even though crime statistics are unreliable is scientifically invalid. Whenever race is injected in an analysis of crime the analysis proceeds in predictable ways that are not in the interest of justice. Universities have particularly perverted research priorities as exemplified by James Q. Wilson's works relating the number of blacks in society to the crime rate. However, researchers outside the American university environment emphasize white-collar and other types of crime that are perhaps more pertinent than racial characteristics.