NCJ Number
187795
Date Published
2000
Length
53 pages
Annotation
This chapter describes patterns of criminal victimization and offending as they are influenced by race; assesses explanations for racial patterns of offending and victimization; reviews the literature on differential treatment of offenders due to the race of the offender or victim; reviews the literature on the influence of the racial identity of the victim on the response to victims by agents of criminal justice; and discusses how agents of criminal justice might improve their response to victims by developing an approach that is sensitive to multicultural considerations.
Abstract
The chapter notes that official statistics on criminal behavior and criminal victimization use crude categories for classifying persons by race and ethnicity. The categories view the American population as if it were divided into large, homogeneous groups on the basis of skin coloration. Not only do the categories obscure important differences within racial and ethnic groups, they also may imply expectations about the propensity for criminal behavior and to criminal victimization for each group based on the group's social distance from the "normal" white state of being. In reviewing the data on race and crime presented in this chapter, it is important to remember that analysts find racial differences in criminal victimization and offending because they choose to look for them; they choose to look for them because they have already assumed that race is associated with crime. In surveying a wide variety of issues concerning race, crime, and criminal justice, this chapter finds that in each case the social distance between whites and blacks and the stereotyping of African-Americans as criminals are at the heart of the problem. 6 tables and 96 references