Over the last few weeks, you’ve heard me say many
times that deviance isn't necessarily criminal.
But of course, sometimes it is.
Understanding crime sociologically means
we need to answer some basic questions:
Like, what is the nature of crime?
Who commits crimes and why?
And how does society respond to it?
You’ll see pretty quickly that these questions
are actually all tangled together.
And you can’t untangle them.
[Theme Music]
It might not surprise you to learn that the
literal definition of crime is the violation
of criminal laws.
And the FBI's Uniform Crime Report, a
major source of data on crime in the U.S.,
tracks many different kinds of crime.
There are crimes against the person, which include
murder, aggravated assault, rape, and robbery,
and crimes against property, which include
burglary, larceny-theft, auto-theft, and arson.
But there's also a third kind of crime, not
generally tracked in major crime indices,
often called victimless crimes.
They include things like illegal drug use,
prostitution, and gambling.
But the name is misleading, because many of
these cases have serious negative consequences
for the people involved.
Data from the FBI show that in the US in 2015,
there were about 1.2 million violent crimes
and about 8 million property crimes.
Raw numbers aren't terribly helpful, though,
so we can turn these into crime rates –
in the case of 2015, that would be 372.6 violent
crimes per 100,000 people and 2,487 property
crimes per 100,000 people.
Those numbers are about half what they were
in 1991, when crime rates peaked after a steady
upward trend from about 1960.
These numbers allow for some useful
comparisons, but it's important to realize that
they can’t capture the whole picture.
Because, crime statistics are based on
police reports, so they only include crimes
that are reported to the police.
And not all crimes are reported.
So researchers sometimes conduct
victimization surveys,
which ask representative samples of the population
if they have had any experiences with crime.
And one such survey from 2015 suggests that fewer
than half, about 47%, of violent crimes were reported
to police, and just 35% of property crimes were.
So what can we say about who’s committing
these crimes?
Well, based on government data, sociologists
have put together a kind of demographic picture,
but it only shows us who's being arrested for
crime, not necessarily who’s committing it.
To begin with, the average arrestee is
young and male:
people between the ages of 15 and 24 make up
about 14% of the population, but accounted for
31.8% of all arrests in 2015.
And while men are about half the population,
they made up about 62% of arrests for property
crimes and 80% of arrests for violent crimes.
And, while FBI data don’t assess social class,
we know from other sources that those of lower
social class are more likely to be arrested.
But again, that's not the whole picture, because,
as we talked about last time, wealthy Americans
aren't likely to be seen as criminally deviant in the
same way that the poor are.
This brings us to race and ethnicity,
where disparities in arrests are clear:
despite making up only 13.3% of the population,
African Americans make up 26.6% of arrests.
There are a number of reasons for this.
First, race and ethnicity are closely linked to wealth
and social standing, and as we just saw, people of
lower social class are more likely to be arrested.
Second, the data don’t include many crimes
that are more commonly committed by whites,
like drunk driving, embezzlement, and tax fraud.
Finally, African Americans, and people of
color generally, are overcriminalized:
They’re more easily assumed to be criminal
and treated as such by both the police and the
public at large.
For example: A study of pedestrian stops in New
York City found that African Americans and Hispanics
are disproportionately likely to be stopped,
even when controlling for race-specific arrest rates
– that is, the rate at which those racial and ethnic
groups are arrested.
And this rate itself isn't entirely fair:
despite the fact that black people and white
people use drugs at similar rates, black people
are far more likely to be arrested for it.
A 2009 Human Rights Watch report found that
in 2007, black people were 3.7 times more likely
to be arrested for drugs than white people.
And studies have shown that the racial composition
of a neighborhood has an influence on perceptions
of crime in that neighborhood.
Larger African American populations, for example,
have been found to be associated with increased
perception of crime,
even when controlling
for the actual crime rate.
And this brings us to our third question:
how society responds to crime.
Overcriminalization, after all, isn't a matter
of who commits crimes, but of how society
imagines who criminals are.
Society’s main institutional response to
crime comes from the criminal justice system,
which is composed of three parts in the US:
the police, the courts, and the system of
punishment and corrections.
The police are the main point of contact between
the criminal justice system and the rest of society.
There are about 750,000 police officers in the
United States, and it’s their personal judgement that
makes for the actual application of the law.
And, in exercising this judgement, police
officers size up a situation according to
a number of factors.
The severity of the situation, the suspect's level
of uncooperativeness, and whether the suspect has
previously been arrested all make an arrest more likely.
Officers also take the wishes of the victim
into account.
Likewise, the presence of observers makes
an arrest more likely,
because making an arrest moves the
encounter to the police station, where the
officer is in control.
Finally, the suspect's race plays a role, as officers are more likely to arrest non-white suspects because of a long-standing association of non-whiteness with criminality – which is the cultural basis for overcriminalization.
And the effects of this can be clearly seen not only in
the data on overcriminalization that I mentioned before,
but in studies of race and perceptions of threat.
And race shouldn't be understood as an
independent factor here; the other factors
are also all seen through race.
So when a police officer assesses how threatening or uncooperative a suspect is, non-white suspects are viewed as more threatening and more uncooperative, even given the same behavior.
The point here is that policing has a lot
of aspects to it that are surprisingly subjective.
Given this problem, we might expect the courts
to help correct them by accurately adjudicating
guilt and innocence.
And sometimes they do.
But in practice, how well they do their job
is often a matter of who the defendant is and the
economic resources that they have access to.
Let’s go to the Thought Bubble to see how
people with less money are affected differently
by the criminal justice system:
The first problem is bail.
Bail allows people to be released from jail after an
arrest by guaranteeing, usually with a deposited sum
of money, that they’ll show up for their day in court.
But in practice, it just keeps defendants without
money behind bars until their court date.
A date which may be a long time in coming.
The Sixth Amendment guarantees the right
to a speedy trial, but many jurisdictions in the
US are heavily overburdened.
There are just too many cases.
So those who can’t afford bail may wait
months, even years, before their case is heard.
And defendants who can’t afford to hire
lawyers are represented by public defenders,
who are, to varying degrees, underpaid and
overworked.
They often simply can't give their clients
adequate representation, frequently leading
to harsher sentences for the poor.
Together these make the last issue, plea bargaining,
much worse.
Plea bargaining is basically a negotiation in which the
prosecution offers concessions on the legal punishment
in exchange for the defendant's guilty plea.
In theory, this is a useful tool for quickly
resolving simple cases and easing the burden
on the courts.
But while plea bargaining may be a negotiation,
the parties aren't on even footing.
A poor defendant, stuck in jail because
they can’t make bail,
represented by a public defender without the
resources to adequately defend them, and facing
the threat of a long jail sentence,
is strongly incentivized to take a plea bargain,
regardless of their actual guilt or innocence.
Thanks Thought Bubble.
Those convicted of criminal deviance are then
moved through the last part of the criminal justice
system, the system of punishment and corrections.
And this brings us, unavoidably, to mass incarceration.
Mass incarceration refers to the growth of the
incarcerated population over the past several decades,
and the social, political, and economic conditions
that caused it.
Here’s what that looks like in terms of
the numbers:
Today there are over 2.3 million people imprisoned
in the United States.
For some context, while the US has about four
and a half percent of the world's population,
it has nearly a quarter of the world's incarcerated
population.
And the US has the highest incarceration
rate in the world, with 693 people out of every
100,000 behind bars.
This is more than 5 times higher than the
rate in most other countries.
But it hasn't always been like this:
the incarcerated population has increased
by 500% over the past 40 years.
And this increase has only a limited relationship
to actual crime rates.
Like I mentioned, crime rates dropped dramatically
in the 90s, but prison populations continued to rise.
Mass incarceration is a consequence of
political choices, namely "tough-on-crime" policies,
like mandatory minimum sentences.
And mass incarceration falls hardest on
the poor, and on people of color:
Despite making up only 37% of the US population,
non-whites make up 67% of the prison population.
In 2015, the incarceration rate for white
men was 457 per 100,000.
The rate for hispanic men was more than
twice as high – 1,043 per 100,000 –
and the rate for black men was nearly six
times higher (2,613 per 100,000).
So, are these “tough-on-crime” policies
effective?
Well, there are a couple ways to think about
the purpose of punishment.
One approach to punishment is retribution,
which is about making the offender suffer as the
victim suffered, as a kind of moral vengeance.
In the U.S., a more favored approach is deterrence,
which tries to reduce crime by making the prospect
of getting caught sufficiently awful.
Yet another approach is societal protection, designed to render an offender incapable of further criminal offense, usually through long prison sentences or capital punishment.
And finally, rehabilitation views punishment as
an opportunity to reform offenders and return
them to society as productive citizens.
In practice, rehabilitation is hard to accomplish, because the prison system has limited resources and because severe limitations are placed on convicted felons that go beyond the criminal justice system.
Felons are often barred from social welfare
programs, for example, and face extensive
legal discrimination in hiring and housing.
The fact that reintegration into society is
so difficult leads to high rates of recidivism,
or re-offense that leads to incarceration.
A study by the National Institute on Justice of prisoners from 30 states estimated that within three years of release, two-thirds (67.8%) of them were re-arrested.
Five years after release, three-fourths (76.6%)
had been re-arrested.
So these approaches to punishment don’t
appear to work as deterrence.
Now, long sentences succeed in removing
offenders from society,
but that removal itself can have
damaging effects, with communities of
color being particularly impacted.
Incarceration puts stress on families, destabilizes
neighborhoods as residents cycle in and out of prison,
and leads to increasing numbers
of people with limited employment prospects,
partly because employers can legally refuse
to hire those with criminal records.
So when we talk about crime, we can’t look
at any of these questions in isolation:
Defining crime based on FBI data misses how
these definitions are applied in the real world.
And only paying attention to the
demographics of offenders overlooks the
conditions that create those statistics.
Likewise, looking at society’s response
alone misses how that response answers
the other two questions.
It’s all tangled.
Today we learned about crime in the US.
We looked at the legal definitions of crime
and used FBI data to get an idea of the amount
and kinds of crime.
We put together a demographic picture of who
gets arrested, and we talked about why that’s
not necessarily who commits crime.
And we talked about society’s response to
crime in the criminal justice system, and how
that response ends with mass incarceration.
Crash Course Sociology is filmed in the Dr.
Cheryl C. Kinney Studio in Missoula, MT, and it’s
made with the help of all of these nice people.
Our animation team is Thought Cafe and Crash
Course is made with Adobe Creative Cloud.
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