Crime Patterns: Race, Age, and Socioeconomic Factors
Race, Ethnicity, and Crime Patterns
While most crimes are committed by whites, racial/ethnic minorities (particularly African Americans) are disproportionately represented in crime data.
The question of why blacks and other minorities are overrepresented in crime data has been widely debated.
Is it due to disproportionate crime among racial/ethnic minorities or racial/ethnic biases in the justice system (e.g., racial profiling)?
Despite some possible biases, it seems African-Americans, in particular, do commit a disproportionate amount of violent crime according to available data (including robbery and homicide). Why?
What is Race?
Up until the early 20th century, race was assumed to be a biological category that determined behavioral tendencies (e.g., ability, potential, temperament, etc.).
Most contemporary scientists agree that race, as a biological category, lacks scientific validity.
Today, a majority of social scientists (particularly sociologists) agree that race is a “social construction.”
Race = a group of people that shares common physical traits that a given society defines as socially significant.
Race is not the same as “ethnicity.”
Explaining Disproportionate Rates of Crime Among African Americans
- Biological/evolutionary reasons (e.g., social Darwinism—popular up until the late 19th/early 20th century)
- Cultural reasons (i.e., “subculture of crime and violence” popular from the 1960s onward)
- Structural reasons:
- Lack of access to opportunity structures (e.g., education)
- Economic deprivation, family dissolution
Immigrants and Crime Rates
While the number of illegal immigrants in the U.S. doubled between 1996 and 2005, violent crime declined by nearly 35% and property crimes by 26% over the same period.
According to a widely cited study by Harvard sociologist Robert Sampson: new Mexican immigrants are 45% less likely to engage in violence than third-generation Americans.
Age and Crime Rates
Crime rates are highly correlated with age.
People are less likely to commit crimes as they age.
The most likely age to commit crimes is adolescence (for various reasons).
Some criminologists have explained the decline in crime rates from the 1980s to the mid-1990s in terms of an “aging population” (crime rates declined as the proportion of teenagers in the population declined).
Crime and Victimization
Crime victim = person who has suffered physical, sexual, financial, or emotional harm as a result of a crime.
This definition is inevitably problematic – who is a crime victim depends on what is and is not considered a crime.
Victimization Patterns
According to the NCVS, roughly 1.1 percent of Americans experience being a victim of violent crime, and 8 percent of U.S. households experience property crime.
Despite an overall decline in the rates of both violent and property crimes since the early 1990s, criminal victimization is patterned around geographical location, race, gender, family income, and age.
Family Income/Social Class and Victimization
According to NCVS data, for violent crimes such as rape, robbery, and assault, the lower the family income, the greater the chance of victimization. The poor also tend to be the most likely victims of white-collar crime. The most frequent victims of such crimes were those with an annual family income of less than $15,000.