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Disproportionate Crime In America

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The emergence of social justice as an opponent of systemic racism abolished sanctioned institutional racism and left individual racism as a weak, dying sign of ignorance. But, in all of its successes, social justice has failed to cure the black community of poverty—the problem to which black Americans’ disproportionate crime rate can ultimately be attributed. The statistics for black crime do not indicate that is some innate aggressiveness in blacks; rather, the statistics point to a number of significant factors that contribute to and account for the disproportionate crime rate of black Americans.
Centuries of racism have landed black Americans in a seemingly inescapable trench of poverty. This trench was dug deeply by a number of racist institutions: …show more content…
Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did. (Ehrlichman)
The upholders, the initial thought, and the rationale of the War on Drugs were corrupted by a drive to suppress and oppress.
This is also true for the institutionalized segregation that occurred from 1849-1950 in post-slavery America. The separation of blacks and whites exacerbated racial tension and caused poverty within the recently ‘freed’ black community. Free—to the extent of no longer being considered property of the white man—but no more free than that. Basic civil liberties, like the right to vote, were deprived of blacks until the Civil Rights Movement, by which these liberties were granted.
Education, a necessity in fostering success, was provided to blacks in the cheapest, most primitive way possible. Black Americans under segregation were given the inferior schoolhouses, the inferior textbooks, the inferior utilities, the inferior curriculum. This, in combination with a poverty-stricken home life, created the least conducive-to-success environment possible for struggling black …show more content…
A study completed in 2005 found that poverty in blacks was very highly correlated with crime (correlation coefficient = .81; Rubenstein, 2005). However, the correlation between poverty and crime, when not restricted to only black people, is substantially lower (.42; Feldman). Thus, poverty and crime are closely connected in the general population—but the association between poverty and crime is even stronger among black people.
This firstly suggests that poverty has a disproportionate impact on crime rates in the black community; secondly, it reveals the true complexity of the race-crime Association. The perspective developed in this paper is that race-crime disparities can be accounted for by several factors: neighborhood disorder and stress, a lack of a nuclear family structure in black families, and implicit (or explicit!) bias among police.
A study conducted in 1992 on the poverty-crime association articulates a chief problem of poverty: “The consciousness of the disadvantaged, their realization of their common economic interests, and that the inability of the disadvantaged to get a fair redistribution of resources, or more open access to wealth, generates anger and frustration, which ultimately leads to more crime (Stolzenberg, pg. 2)." Stolzenberg's explanation, supported by the aforementioned statistics, is even more relevant to the black community, where poverty appears to

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