From Slavery to Social Class to Disadvantage: An Intellectual History of the Use of Class to Explain Racial Differences in Criminal Involvement

Abstract

Social class differences have been invoked to explain perceived racial differences in criminal involvement in the United States since the middle of the nineteenth century. Scholars have joined with the public and the media to make such arguments with mixed success. Despite criticism of the theories and research methods used and contradictory evidence, social class arguments have persisted. Among the most enduring are subculture of violence and subculture of poverty theories, which purportedly explain instrumental crimes such as property crime, drug sales, and robbery, but also violence including homicide and assault. Proponents argue that African Americans are carriers of pro-crime norms and values. Criminologists and sociologists have recently advanced more parsimonious theories that posit that structured social and economic disadvantage account for racial and ethnic patterns of crime. Good data and analysis provide compelling supporting evidence. Ethnographic evidence has compellingly shown that observable cultural differences are consequences of disadvantage and not causes of the conditions in which the impoverished poor live.