Racial Beliefs Location And The Causes Of Crime

This book argues that a theory of crime specific to the African American experience is justified by qualitative and quantitative data, not just because of the disproportionately higher percentage of African Americans (in the U.S. population) who are offenders, but also because of the vastly higher percentage of Black Americans who are non-offenders.

Barack Obama's election as the forty-fourth president of the United States reinvigorated discussions of race, ideology and inequality in America. This debate occurs in an era when scholarly attention on the intersections in these key areas has been growing in tandem with the expanding racial and ethnic diversity of American society. To broaden our understanding of these complex convergences, this volume of the ANNALS continues the discussion by showcasing a set of cutting-edge papers by leading scholars of race and inequality, with special focus on racial attitudes and stratification beliefs research. Utilizing a mix of methodological and theoretical approaches, the contributors highlight four primary themes: (1) intersections of race, inequality, and ideology in specific institutional domains (e.g., crime, religion, work, immigration/national inclusion); (2) the meaning, measurement, and implications of "racial resentment"; (3) the role of social context and stereotypes in shaping racial (and non-racial) policy support; and (4) the operation of racial prejudice and stratification ideology in the context of Obama's presidency. This volume will appeal to a multidisciplinary scholarly audience, including policy-makers interested in current public opinion regarding the American occupational structure and its associated inequalities.

The Oxford Handbook of the Economics of Networks represents the frontier of research into how and why networks they form, how they influence behavior, how they help govern outcomes in an interactive world, and how they shape collective decision making, opinion formation, and diffusion dynamics. From a methodological perspective, the contributors to this volume devote attention to theory, field experiments, laboratory experiments, and econometrics. Theoretical work in network formation, games played on networks, repeated games, and the interaction between linking and behavior is synthesized. A number of chapters are devoted to studying social process mediated by networks. Topics here include opinion formation, diffusion of information and disease, and learning. There are also chapters devoted to financial contagion and systemic risk, motivated in part by the recent financial crises. Another section discusses communities, with applications including social trust, favor exchange, and social collateral; the importance of communities for migration patterns; and the role that networks and communities play in the labor market. A prominent role of networks, from an economic perspective, is that they mediate trade. Several chapters cover bilateral trade in networks, strategic intermediation, and the role of networks in international trade. Contributions discuss as well the role of networks for organizations. On the one hand, one chapter discusses the role of networks for the performance of organizations, while two other chapters discuss managing networks of consumers and pricing in the presence of network-based spillovers. Finally, the authors discuss the internet as a network with attention to the issue of net neutrality.

In the United States, some populations suffer from far greater disparities in health than others. Those disparities are caused not only by fundamental differences in health status across segments of the population, but also because of inequities in factors that impact health status, so-called determinants of health. Only part of an individual's health status depends on his or her behavior and choice; community-wide problems like poverty, unemployment, poor education, inadequate housing, poor public transportation, interpersonal violence, and decaying neighborhoods also contribute to health inequities, as well as the historic and ongoing interplay of structures, policies, and norms that shape lives. When these factors are not optimal in a community, it does not mean they are intractable: such inequities can be mitigated by social policies that can shape health in powerful ways. Communities in Action: Pathways to Health Equity seeks to delineate the causes of and the solutions to health inequities in the United States. This report focuses on what communities can do to promote health equity, what actions are needed by the many and varied stakeholders that are part of communities or support them, as well as the root causes and structural barriers that need to be overcome.

Why are some ethnic minorities associated with higher levels of offending? How can racist violence be explained? Are the police and criminal justice system racist? Are the reasons for offending and victimization among ethnic minorities different from those among ethnic majorities? Understanding Race and Crime provides a comprehensive and critical introduction to the debates and controversies about race, crime and criminal justice. While focusing on Britain and America, it also takes a broader international perspective, with case studies including the historical legacy of lynching in the United States and racist state crime in the Nazi and Rwandan genocides. The book provides a conceptual framework in which racism, race and crime might be better understood. It traces the historical origins of how thinking about crime came to be associated with racism and how fears and anxieties about race and crime become rooted in places destabilized by rapid social change. The book questions whether race and ethnicity alone are significant enough factors to explain differing offending and victimization patterns between ethnic groups. Issues examined include: Contact/conflict with the police Public disorder Involvement with the criminal justice system Understanding Race and Crime is essential reading for students from a range of social science disciplines and for a variety of crime-related courses. It is also useful to practitioners in the criminal justice field and those interested in understanding the issues behind debates on ‘race’ and crime.

Many racial and ethnic groups in the United States, including blacks, Hispanics, Asians, American Indians, and others, have historically faced severe discriminationâ€"pervasive and open denial of civil, social, political, educational, and economic opportunities. Today, large differences among racial and ethnic groups continue to exist in employment, income and wealth, housing, education, criminal justice, health, and other areas. While many factors may contribute to such differences, their size and extent suggest that various forms of discriminatory treatment persist in U.S. society and serve to undercut the achievement of equal opportunity. Measuring Racial Discrimination considers the definition of race and racial discrimination, reviews the existing techniques used to measure racial discrimination, and identifies new tools and areas for future research. The book conducts a thorough evaluation of current methodologies for a wide range of circumstances in which racial discrimination may occur, and makes recommendations on how to better assess the presence and effects of discrimination.

Race and Crime: A Text Reader includes a collection of recent articles on race and crime published in a number of leading criminal justice journals, along with original textual material that serves to explain and unify the readings. Through discussion of selected articles, numerous topics are explored, including the historical, social, economic and political contexts of race and crime, such as class, gender, comparative perspectives, justice issues, theories and statistics.