Toward a Theory of Race, Crime, and Urban Inequality

Abstract

This chapter addresses one of the central yet difficult issues facing criminology–race and violent crime. It discusses a theoretical strategy that incorporates both structural and cultural arguments regarding race, crime, and inequality in American cities. The basic thesis is that macrosocial patterns of residential inequality give rise to the social isolation and ecological concentration of the truly disadvantaged, which in turn leads to structural barriers and cultural adaptations that undermine social organization and hence the control of crime. Unlike the dominant tradition in criminology that seeks to distinguish offenders from non-offenders, the macrosocial or community level of explanation asks what it is about community structures and cultures that produces differential rates of crime. Disentangling contextual basis for race and crime requires racial disaggregation of both crime rate and the explanatory variables of theoretical interest. This approach was used in research that examined racially disaggregated rates of homicide and robbery by juveniles and adults in over 150 US cities in 1980.