Race, Sport, and Crime: The Misrepresentation of African Americans in Team Sports and Crime

2000 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-197 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bonnie Berry ◽  
Earl Smith
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Social Process ◽  
Cultural Influences ◽  
The United States ◽  
African American Athletes

Criminological literature and statistics show that African Americans are comparatively overrepresented in the United States criminal justice system. This study explores whether African American athletes are similarly overrepresented as criminally involved sports figures. Data abundantly illustrate that African Americans fare worse in all phases of criminal justice compared to whites. It has been speculated that African Americans, perhaps due to cultural influences or blocked opportunities, do commit more crime than other racial categories. There is equally strong reason to believe that the representation of African Americans in the criminal justice system is largely a result of racial bias on the part of social control agencies. Crime among athletes, regardless of race, can be explained through social forces, such as collective behavior, organizational influences, and social process. We conclude that African American athletes are socially expected to be engaged in crime and suggest a new approach to this area of study.

Racial Justice and Criminal Justice

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Valls
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Racial Inequality ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
The United States ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
Racial Justice ◽  
Black Neighborhoods

The criminal justice system in the United States both reflects racial inequality in the broader society and contributes to it. The overrepresentation of African Americans among those in prison is a result of both the conditions in poor black neighborhoods and racial bias in the criminal justice system. The American system of criminal justice today is excessively punitive, when compared to previous periods and to other countries, and its harsh treatment disproportionately harms African Americans. In addition, those released from prison face a number of obstacles to housing, employment, and other prerequisites of decent life, and the concentration of prisoners and ex-prisoners in black communities does much to perpetuate racial inequality.

Constructing Race in Black and Whiteness: Media Coverage of Public Support for President Clinton

2002 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 114-156 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dwight E. Brooks ◽  
James A. Rada
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Public Support ◽  
Framing Analysis ◽  
Racial Hierarchy ◽  
The Media

This study employs a framing analysis of media explanations regarding public support for President Clinton during the 1998 coverage of the Monica Lewinsky scandal. An analysis of broadcast, newspaper, and magazine stories during the scandal reveals that media coverage of support for the President focused exclusively on African Americans. Five discursive frames were used to explain African American support: morality, political pragmatism, distrust of the criminal justice system, forgiveness/redemption, and Clinton's rapport with African Americans. Although these frames construct blackness using a variety of characteristics seldom found in the media, they also construct the concept of blackness in near universal and essentialist terms. Media explanations of Black support at the expense of explanations of White support (or lack thereof) for the President reinforce a racial hierarchy whereby whiteness serves as an invisible racial norm.

scholarly journals Mercy towards decarceration: Examining the legal constraints on early release from prison

Incarceration ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 263266632097780
Author(s):  
Alexandra Cox ◽  
Dwayne Betts
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Family Members ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early Release ◽  
The Us ◽  
Legal Constraints ◽  
Release From Prison

There are close to seven million people under correctional supervision in the United States, both in prison and in the community. The US criminal justice system is widely regarded as an inherently unmerciful institution by scholars and policymakers but also by people who have spent time in prison and their family members; it is deeply punitive, racist, expansive and damaging in its reach. In this article, we probe the meanings of mercy for the institution of parole.

Seeing Justice

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Angela Bock
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Critical Discourse Analysis ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Participant Observation ◽  
The United States ◽  
Detailed Examination ◽  
Visual Media ◽  
The Way

Seeing Justice examines the way criminal justice in the United States is presented in visual media by focusing on the grounded practices of visual journalists in relationship with law enforcement. The book extends the concept of embodied gatekeeping, the corporeal and discursive practices connected to controlling visual media production and the complex ways social actors struggle over the construction of visual messages. Based on research that includes participant observation, extended interviews, and critical discourse analysis, the book provides a detailed examination of the way these practices shape media constructions and the way digitization is altering the relationships between media, citizens, and the criminal justice system. The project looks at contemporary cases that made the headlines through a theoretical lens based on the work of Michel Foucault, Walter Fisher, Stuart Hall, Nicholas Mirzoeff, Nick Couldry, and Roland Barthes. Its cases reveal the way powerful interests are able to shape representations of justice in ways that serve their purposes, occasionally at the expense of marginalized groups. Based on cases ranging from the last US public hanging to the proliferation of “Karen-shaming” videos, this monograph offers three observations. First, visual journalism’s physicality increases its reliance on those in power, making it easy for officials in the criminal justice system to shape its image. Second, image indexicality, even while it is subject to narrative negation, remains an essential affordance in the public sphere. Finally, participation in this visual public sphere must be considered as an essential human capability if not a human right.

scholarly journals The Relevance of the Social Control Theory in Explaining Crime among African American Families

2017 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 1
Author(s):  
Ayodeji Daramola ◽  
Gbolahan S Osho
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Control Theory ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Ethnic Groups ◽  
Justice System ◽  
African American Families ◽  
Social Control Theory ◽  
The Church

Today, criminologists, especially, Black criminologists, are thoroughly perplexed by the same problem of disproportionate minority confinement (DMC) most especially of Blacks in both the juvenile and criminal justice systems. Are African Americans more criminally minded than other races or ethnic groups? Do African Americans actually commit more crimes than others? These are the questions that the different deviant theories have tried to answer. The concept of social bonding arose from social control theory, which suggests that attachment to family and school, commitment to conventional pathways of achievements and beliefs in the legitimacy of social order are primary and important elements of establishing a social bond (Hirschi, 1969). In expounding his social control theory, Hirschi listed the elements of the bond as attachment, commitment, involvement, and belief. Does it mean that African Americans commit more crimes than other racial and ethnic groups? Or are African Americans genetically wired to be criminogenic? Is the society or the environment to blame for the perceived higher rate of crime among African Americans? Or are the criminal justice system, the judicial system, and the juvenile justice system, all together racially biased against Blacks, especially, Black males? Even though Hirschi (1969) did not mention attachment to religious beliefs as part of social control, but for the African American families, the church could play a significant role in helping to cement the bond of adolescents to their families. Any study of the African American family is not complete without the church. According to Work (1900), in all social study of the Negro, the church must be considered, for it is one of the greatest factors in his social life.

Public Attitudes Toward New Prisons in New Zealand and Deficit Narratives: A Quantitative Survey

2018 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 348-360 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adele N. Norris ◽  
Kalym Lipsey
Keyword(s):  
New Zealand ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
News Media ◽  
Media Coverage ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Prison Population ◽  
Public Attitudes ◽  
The United States ◽  
Quantitative Survey

The imprisonment rate in New Zealand ranks seventh among the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Yet the imprisonment of Indigenous people is on par with the United States, which has the world’s highest incarceration rate. Almost 70% of the prison population in New Zealand is comprised of people racialized as non-White. In 2016, the National Government proposed to spend $2.5 billion over a 5-year period to build new prisons (1,500 prison beds) to accommodate a growing prison population. This study assessed public attitudes toward the need for more prisons and the equity of treatment of individuals within the criminal justice system. Findings from a 2016 and 2017 quantitative survey of 5,000 respondents each year revealed that roughly half of the respondents believed the proposed spending for new prisons to be extremely to somewhat necessary. A large proportion of respondents also believed Māori and Pākehā, if convicted of the same crime, are treated similarly within the criminal justice system. New Zealand scholars have critiqued news media coverage of contentious sociopolitical issues, such as crime and prisons, for employing tactics that have worked to construct a morally and culturally deficit “Other” while normalizing whiteness, rendering it invisible and raceless. This article concludes that this process masks racial disparities of individuals located within the criminal justice system and preserves the ideal that prisons are a normal function of the social landscape.

Hobbling a Generation: Young African American Men in Washington, D.C.'s Criminal Justice System—Five Years Later

1998 ◽  
Vol 44 (3) ◽  
pp. 355-366 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eric Lotke
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Census Data ◽  
African American Men ◽  
District Of Columbia

The number of young African American men ages 18 to 35 in the District of Columbia under criminal justice supervision—in prison or jail, probation or parole, out on bond or being sought on a warrant—was compared to U.S. census data for the district. It was found that virtually half (49.9 percent) of that population was under justice control on any given day in early 1997.

Criminal Justice in an Era of Mass Deportation

2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 12-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ingrid V. Eagly
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
State Level ◽  
Plea Bargaining ◽  
The United States ◽  
Criminal Court ◽  
Law Enforcement Agencies ◽  
Collateral Consequence

After a sustained period of hypercriminalization, the United States criminal justice system is undergoing reform. Congress has reduced federal sentencing for drug crimes, prison growth is slowing, and some states are even closing prisons. Low-level crimes have been removed from criminal law books, and attention is beginning to focus on long-neglected issues such as bail and criminal court fines. Still largely overlooked in this era of ambitious reform, however, is the treatment of immigrants in the criminal justice system. An unprecedented focus on immigration enforcement targeted at “felons, not families” has resulted in a separate system of punitive treatment reserved for noncitizens, which includes crimes of migration, longer periods of pretrial detention, harsher criminal sentences, and the almost certain collateral consequence of lifetime banishment from the United States. For examples of state-level solutions to this predicament, this Essay turns to a trio of bold criminal justice reforms from California that (1) require prosecutors to consider immigration penalties in plea bargaining; (2) change the state definition of “misdemeanor” from a maximum sentence of a year to 364 days; and (3) instruct law enforcement agencies to not hold immigrants for deportation purposes unless they are first convicted of serious crimes. Together, these new laws provide an important window into how state criminal justice systems could begin to address some of the unique concerns of noncitizen criminal defendants.

Do Americans Like to Punish?

Metamorphosis ◽  
2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert A. Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Western Europe ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Values ◽  
The People ◽  
American Prison

This chapter addresses the question of whether Americans like to punish. The United States clearly punishes more heavily and for longer periods than other countries, with comparable social and political values. One can land in an American prison for life over minor offenses—a punishment not used for serious offenses in Western Europe. The leading comparativist on criminology, James Whitman, argues that a politics of dignity has instilled mercy and mildness in European systems, while leveling impulses, distrust of authority, and too much power in the people is said to have left the United States with a criminal justice system long in degradation and short on mercy.

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