Crime & Deviance

• STATISTICS:

  • Afro-Caribbean adults are 4 times more likely to be in prison than White adults
  • Ethnic minorities are more likely to be sentenced to immediate custody (held in a cell) than white people
  • Black people are 8 times more likely to be stopped and searched
  • there were 27.2 stop and searches for every 1,000 black people, compared with 5.6 for every 1,000 white people in 2023
  • Only 7% of police officers are non-white
• Bowling

  • concludes there was a stage of “black criminality” where the media stereotyped black people as criminals leading to them being seen as folk devils by society. Newspapers in particular were accused of focusing on ethnic background criminals if they were black but not white criminals. — interactions argue that this could lead to negative levelling by the police and eventually self-fulfilling prophecies.
• Who argued that there was a stage of "black criminality" where the media stereotyped black people?

  Bowling
• McPherson Report

  • concludes that the London Met is institutionally racist. The police were accused of being institutional racist because of the failure to bring effective prosecutions and because of the high numbers of arrests of specific ethnic groups.
• Reiners

  • study into the “canteen culture” has been used to describe the racist nature of the police force, people also believe this culture leads to “offender profiling” and SFP.
• Hall and Gilroy

  • argue the fundamental reason for disproportionate crime rates amongst Afro-Caribbean men is due to structural factors such as poverty and unemployment and therefore social class plays a major role.
• What are the 4 reasons ethnic inequalities exist within crime & deviance?

  1. Bowling --> "black criminality"
  2. McPherson Report --> "institutionally racist"
  3. Reiners --> "canteen culture"
  4. Hall & Gilroy --> structural factors like poverty & unemployment lead to crime