Crime—Some Popular Belief s

1979 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-8 ◽  
Author(s):  
Eugene Doleschal
Keyword(s):  
Justice System ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Financial Loss ◽  
Popular Belief ◽  
Criminal Offenders ◽  
Socioeconomic Groups ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Social Balance

A careful look at several pervasive notions about crime proves them to be without base. While most Americans believe that crime has increased con siderably during the last few decades, our best evidence suggests that crime rates fluctuate somewhat but remain essentially stable over time. Most Americans believe that the criminal justice system in this country is more lenient with common criminals than are comparable systems in other countries. Yet we find, on the contrary, that the United States is the most punitive of all free nations. Another popular belief is that minority group members and the poor are responsible for most crimes. But this is not the case—crime is evenly distributed among the socioeconomic groups, and the crimes committed by the affluent cause the greatest financial loss. Finally, most Americans believe that crime serves no purpose that is use ful to law-abiding citizens. Yet we find that stable levels of crime and criminal offenders serve to reinforce group values and maintain a social balance.

scholarly journals Domestic saving mobilisation and small business creation: The case of Cameroon

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-56
Author(s):  
LC Forje
Keyword(s):  
Developing Countries ◽  
Small Business ◽  
Small Businesses ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Domestic Saving ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Business Creation ◽  
Group Members ◽  
The Creation

Promoting savings and providing a basis for lending to the poor is a growing concern in many developing countries. Cameroon has a culture of savings mobilisation known as njangi/tontine. The njangi is contributions given to members in a rotating form at the end of every sitting, and tontine is voluntary savings held by the group. This study reveals that njangi/tontine groups only lend money to group members and suggests that a micro village bank known as MC2 could be used as guarantor to ensure that group monies lent to non-group members are repaid. Encouragement and improvement in the function of such voluntary savings could promote the creation of small businesses in the country.  The Cameroonian government needs to improve fighting corruption and a functional justice system to ensure security.  

Fines and Monetary Sanctions

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexes Harris ◽  
Frank Edwards
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
The United States ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
System Involvement ◽  
Low Level ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Criminal Justice Systems

Despite the central role that fines and other fiscal penalties play in systems of criminal justice, they have received relatively little scholarly attention. Court systems impose fines and other monetary sanctions in response to minor administrative and traffic offenses as well as for more serious criminal offenses. Monetary sanctions are intended to provide a deterrent punishment to reduce lawbreaking, to provide opportunities for accountability through financial restitution, to restore harm caused to victims of crime, and to fund the operation and administration of courts and criminal justice systems. Fines, fees, and other monetary sanctions are the most common form of punishment imposed by criminal justice systems. Most criminal sentences in the United States include financial penalties, and monetary sanctions are routinely imposed for less serious, and far more common, infractions such as traffic or parking violations. For many, paying a monetary sanction for a low-level violation is an annoyance. However, for the poor and people of color who are disproportionately likely to be subject to criminal justice system involvement, monetary sanctions can become a vehicle for expanded social inequality and increasingly severe criminal justice contact. Failure to pay legal financial obligations often results in court summons or license suspensions that may have attendant additional costs and may trigger incarceration. In the United States, the criminal justice system is heavily and routinely involved in the lives of low-income people of color. These already-existing biases, coupled with the deep poverty that is common in many communities, join to widen the net of criminal justice involvement by escalating low-level infractions to far more serious offenses when people are unable to pay. Despite the routine justification of monetary sanctions as less-severe penalties, if imposed without restriction on the poor, they are likely to magnify the inequality producing effects of criminal justice system involvement.

The Issue Is Still Equality of Educational Opportunity

1981 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 490-496 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jomills Henry Braddock II
Keyword(s):  
Educational Opportunity ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
Public School System ◽  
Open Society ◽  
Occupational Success ◽  
Social Inequities ◽  
Equal Chance ◽  
Group Members

Education in the United States has traditionally been viewed as a primary stepping stone to upward social mobility. This has been especially true for the disadvantaged and minority group members. Conventional wisdom suggests that it is our free public school system that guarantees an open society in which children of all social classes and ethnic backgrounds have an equal chance to develop their talents and achieve adult success commensurate with their individual abilities. While a number of observers argue strongly that the U.S. educational system perpetuates and reinforces existing social inequities(Bowles, 1972; Rothbart, 1970), it is still the case that educational attainment is the single best predictor of adult occupational success (Sewell & Hauser, 1975).

School Busing in Britain: Policies and Perceptions

1979 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-206 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lewis Killian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Department Of Education ◽  
Neighborhood Schools ◽  
Indian Children ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
School Busing ◽  
Group Members

In 1965 the British Department of Education and Science promulgated a policy encouraging local education authorities to disperse immigrant children, by busing if necessary, from schools in which they constituted more than one third of the enrollment. This legitimized the practice by a few authorities of busing Asian and West Indian children out of neighborhood schools where there was racial imbalance. Although busing never became widely practiced, it was challenged by minority group members as being discriminatory. In 1975 the Race Relations Board issued a ruling that busing did constitute racial discrimination unless it could be shown that the children needed special language training. The major opposition to busing came from minority groups and was expressed in much the same terms as white opposition to busing in the United States. Comparing the origins of school busing in Britain and the United States, Lewis Killian concludes that busing can best be understood as a political issue rather than in terms of educational effects.

scholarly journals Mixed Evidence for Interactive Effects of Outgroup Proportions and Intergroup Contact on Racial Bias in the United States

2021 ◽  
pp. 194855062110277
Author(s):  
James R. Rae ◽  
Allison L. Skinner-Dorkenoo ◽  
Anna-Kaisa Reiman ◽  
Katharina Schmid ◽  
Miles Hewstone
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Intergroup Contact ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Interactive Effects ◽  
Ingroup Bias ◽  
Total N ◽  
Black Residents ◽  
Group Members

Dominant majority-group members living in areas with larger proportions of outgroup members tend to express more ingroup bias. However, prior research has rarely considered this in tandem with the bias-reducing effects of intergroup contact or tested whether outgroup proportions have similar effects for oppressed minority-group members. In two preregistered studies, we tested whether contact moderates the association between outgroup proportions and ingroup bias among White and Black Americans (total N > 75,000). As hypothesized, more Black residents in an area predicted greater explicit (but not implicit) ingroup bias among White respondents who reported low (but not high) contact with Black people. By contrast, more White residents in an area predicted lower explicit (but not implicit) ingroup bias among Black respondents regardless of intergroup contact with White people. We qualify previous findings by demonstrating that the association between outgroup proportions and ingroup bias depends on one’s group membership and level of intergroup contact.

scholarly journals Mixed Evidence for Interactive Effects of Outgroup Proportions and Intergroup Contact on Racial Bias in the United States

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Allison Skinner-Dorkenoo ◽  
James Richard Rae ◽  
Anna Reiman
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Racial Bias ◽  
Intergroup Contact ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Interactive Effects ◽  
Ingroup Bias ◽  
Total N ◽  
Black Residents ◽  
Group Members

Dominant majority-group members living in areas with larger proportions of outgroup members tend to express more ingroup bias. However, prior research has rarely considered this in tandem with the bias-reducing effects of intergroup contact or tested whether outgroup proportions have similar effects for oppressed minority-group members. In two preregistered studies, we tested whether contact moderates the association between outgroup proportions and ingroup bias among White and Black Americans (total N>75,000). As hypothesized, more Black residents in an area predicted greater explicit (but not implicit) ingroup bias among White respondents who reported low (but not high) contact with Black people. By contrast, more White residents in an area predicted lower explicit (but not implicit) ingroup bias among Black respondents regardless of intergroup contact with White people. We qualify previous findings by demonstrating that the association between outgroup proportions and ingroup bias depends on one’s group membership and level of intergroup contact.

Home Service Health Aide Careers for the Handicapped

1973 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 248-253
Author(s):  
Joav Gozali ◽  
John Clark
Keyword(s):  
Vocational Rehabilitation ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
Rehabilitation Program ◽  
The Poor ◽  
Home Service ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Vocational Rehabilitation Act ◽  
And Training ◽  
Manpower Shortage

In the past decade, many manpower programs have been designed and implemented in response to the needs and aspirations of the poor and minority groups in our society. One of the most innovative programs has been the New Careers Program. As articulated by A. Pearl and F. Riessman (1965), the New Careers Program was designed to respond to the critical manpower shortage in the field of human services, and, also, to enable disenfranchised groups to gain occupational and social mobility through simultaneous education and training programs.The New Careers Program had its fair share of labor pains, and, subsequently, its successes and failures. While New Careers was designed to serve the poor and minority group members, it tended to bypass the handicapped, who are, for the most part, both poor and members of a minority group—the handicapped. The 1968 Vocational Rehabilitation Act corrected that problem through Section 4(a) (2) (C), New Careers in Rehabilitation, and through Section 4(a) (2) (D), New Careers for the Handicapped. Only in June, 1970, however, was the New Careers Program in Vocational Rehabilitation begun. The purpose of this paper is to describe one such rehabilitation program.

Sentencing for Multiple Crimes

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Criminal Justice ◽  
Criminal Justice System ◽  
Justice System ◽  
Legal Theory ◽  
The United States ◽  
Criminal Offenders ◽  
Serious Crime ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Multiple Offenders

Most people assume that criminal offenders have only been convicted of a single crime. However, in reality almost half of offenders stand to be sentenced for more than one crime. The high proportion of multiple-crime offenders poses a number of practical and theoretical challenges for the criminal justice system. For instance, how should courts punish multiple offenders relative to individuals who have been sentenced for a single crime? Should a court simply determine a specific sentence for each individual crime and then impose the total sentences on the offender? If this happens, an offender convicted of a large number of crimes of low seriousness will receive a sentence comparable to that which would be appropriate to a single very serious crime. Such an outcome would violate the principle of ordinal proportionality in sentencing. This book discusses a range of questions relating to multiple crime cases from the perspective of several legal theories. It considers questions such as the overall proportionality of the crimes committed, the temporal span between the crimes, and the relationship between theories about the punitive treatment of recidivists and multiple offenders. Contributors representing six different countries and the fields of legal theory, philosophy, and psychology offer their perspectives to the volume, broadening the scope beyond that of the United States. The chapters in this volume therefore contribute to international and domestic efforts to promote a more principled approach to sentencing offenders convicted of multiple offences.

Backlash

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nour Kteily ◽  
Emile Bruneau
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Collective Action ◽  
Mexican Immigrants ◽  
Minority Group ◽  
The United States ◽  
Donald Trump ◽  
Group Members

Research suggests that members of advantaged groups who feel dehumanized by other groups respond aggressively. But little is known about how meta-dehumanization affects disadvantaged minority group members, historically the primary targets of dehumanization. We examine this important question in the context of the 2016 U.S. Republican Primaries, which have witnessed the widespread derogation and dehumanization of Mexican immigrants and Muslims. Two initial studies document that Americans blatantly dehumanize Mexican immigrants and Muslims; this dehumanization uniquely predicts support for aggressive policies proposed by Republican nominees, and dehumanization is highly associated with supporting Republican candidates (especially Donald Trump). Two further studies show that, in this climate, Latinos and Muslims in the United States feel heavily dehumanized, which predicts hostile responses including support for violent versus non-violent collective action and unwillingness to assist counterterrorism efforts. Our results extend theorizing on dehumanization, and suggest that it may have cyclical and self-fulfilling consequences.

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