Race and Criminology

• Blackness, Race, and Criminology
• Lecture topics

  • Introduction: Race and Criminology
  • Racialization of Crime
  • War on Drugs
  • Racialized Police Violence
  • Racism in the Justice System and within Prisons
• Race


  • Human differences historically recognized - role of differentiating and identifying groups
  • Physical and cultural traits indicating someone's place of origin or national affiliation
• Modern understanding of race

  • Racial discourses emphasized differences and categorized human groups according into a social hierarchy - racism
  • Biology, inherited characteristics, people from different "nature"
  • Colonialism justified the dominance over "primitive" groups
• Race was associated with mental characteristics: intellect, habits, morality
• Theory of subspecies: different human "breeds" - proven false because the genetic differences (gene mapping) between races is not significant
• • Racial studies in the mid-20th century: biological understanding of race is false
  • Race does not provide an accurate representation of human biological variation (...) Humans are not divided biologically into distinct continental types or racial genetic clusters. Instead, the Western concept of race must be understood as a classification system that emerged from, and in support of, European colonialism, oppression, and discrimination (American Association of Physical Anthropologists, 2019)
• Criminology


  • Emerged as a scientific discipline in the 19th century
  • Positivist criminology: attempts to study the biological and physical differences between humans and associate them with behaviors
  • Promise of scientific explanations of crime and effective policies of crime control
• Criminology


  Auxiliary science to colonialism: social control of the racialized other
• Criminology, whiteness and the study of crime


  • Eurocentrism, white supremacy
  • Whiteness upholding the values of civilization, civility, humanism, cordiality, peace, control of impulses
  • Whites who committed crimes deviated from their "Whiteness"
• • Many theories defend the biological behavioral differences between races
  • Justified the differential treatment of non-white groups
  • Treated non-white races as "objects of study"
  • Rejected the knowledge and perspective of non-white groups
  • Valued the Western criminological knowledge as the scientific truth
• • Critical race studies and critical criminology challenged the racist assumptions of mainstream criminology
  • Raised attention to racial inequalities in the social construction of crime (labeling)
  • Challenged the collaboration between criminology, colonialism, and the White dominance in the political system - knowledge as power, construction of reality
• Context: Civil rights movement (1960s and 70s), social movements demanding racial justice, decolonization wave and independence of former colonized nations in Africa and Asia, critical studies about imperialism
• Race and criminology in the North America: slavery, segregation, modern "color-blind" racism
• Slave Regime: criminalization punished those who resisted, revolted or escaped
• Segregation: criminalization upheld exclusion
• • "Color-blind racism": criminalization allegedly equal, but over-policing, surveillance, and punishment
  • Restriction of civil rights and socioeconomic opportunities for convicts
• Criminal Justice System as the rearticulation of the State-enforced control over Black people after slavery
• • Discriminatory treatment: over-surveillance, more likely to be stopped and questioned, charged, more severely sentenced and disproportionately incarcerated
  • Vulnerability to harm and death
  • Demonization and association of Blackness and criminality
• Officer Darren Wilson: 'The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon, that's how angry he looked. He comes back towards me again with his hands up'
• Popular justification for racial disparities in the CJS: Blacks commit more crimes
• • Historical association between Blackness and criminality and its social function
  • Slavery, the presence of Black people in public spaces raised suspicion of "runaway"
  • Maintenance of the "racial order" - subalternization of Black communities
  • Criminalization of migration from non-white nations
• • Criminal behavior is distributed across race and class
  • Filtering of crime: most people commit crime, but few are caught, arrested, charged, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned
  • Labeling and race: Blacks are disproportionately policed and more likely to be considered guilty of a crime
• Racial Profiling


  • Police officers have discretion to decide how and where to seek out crime based on ideas about who is suspicious
  • Stereotypes and popular beliefs about race
  • Profiling as a self-fulfilling prophecy: "The more a group is targeted, the greater the likelihood that criminality will be discovered" (Tanovich in Maynard, p. 87)
• • Over-policing as a form of violence: state of constant fear and anxiety, feeling unsafe to walk in public spaces
  • Surveillance vs. privacy: collection of personal information for a police database
  • Carding: identity checks, searches, seizures, car stops
  • Young Black males are "carded at a rate of 3.4 times that of their population in the city [Toronto], and these rates are were even higher for Black people stopped in predominantly white neighborhoods" (p. 89)
  • 2013, public outrage, reduction of carding in 75% - however, the proportion of Black individuals carded increased
• • Police profiling targeting Black youth, despite youth not being representative in violent crimes and public danger
  • Justification: the public perception, "fabricated profile of young Black people as possible dangerous gang members" (p. 91)
  • Militarization and over-surveillance of Black neighborhoods
  • Impacts to the day-to-day lives of residents - impacts on the psychological well-being, post-traumatic stress disorder, and alienation from society
• • The criminalization of drugs was instrumental for the police control over racialized communities
  • 1970: Nixon declared war on drugs; 1987: Prime Minister Mulroney's first five-year National Drug Strategy
  • 1980s, moral panic about drugs (crack cocaine) and the Black communities
  • The use of drugs had been decreasing since the end of the 1970s
• • War: police campaign to eradicate illegal substances that were believed to be ravaging communities
  • Strengthened the powers of law enforcement officers to intervene over suspected individuals - stereotypical association between Blackness and drug crimes
• Two gangs


  • Colombian and Jamaican
  • Disputing over the control of drug traffic in Los Angeles
• Fear of racialized gangs and violence stemming from the drug business
• Violence out of control, gangs are stronger than the police
• The criminalization of drugs was instrumental for the police control over racialized communities
• Nixon declared war on drugs

  1970
• Prime Minister Mulroney's first five-year National Drug Strategy


  1987
• 1980s, moral panic about drugs (crack cocaine) and the Black communities
• The use of drugs had been decreasing since the end of the 1970s
• War on Drugs


  • Police campaign to eradicate illegal substances that were believed to be ravaging communities
• Strengthened the powers of law enforcement officers to intervene over suspected individuals – stereotypical association between Blackness and drugs
• State divestment from welfare and assistance programs to invest in the law enforcement
• Backlash against social and racial justice movements of the 1960s and 70s – Black activism seen as a threat to Canada's national security