Ethnicity, Crime, And Immigration Research Paper

1. Identifying And Measuring The Problem

All Western democracies collect data on immigrants and more generally on noncitizens living within their respective boundaries, although these data cannot record the significant number of illegal immigrants. It is thus possible for these countries to collect justice statistics on the very general basis of who is a national citizen and who is not when having a brush with the penal system. However, these statistics are not further broken down according to racial and ethnic origin. Even if state immigration departments keep tabs on where immigrants are coming from, this kind of information is not recorded by other departments. Consequently, justice statistics are generally not discriminant with respect to ethnicity and race. In continental Europe, such discriminant statistics would seem a throwback to pre-Second World War racism and bring back the yellow stars nightmare. In other countries such as Canada, ethno-racially discriminant statistics are believed to violate basic civil rights, with the exception of data on Aboriginal people, which have traditionally been collected because First Nations are endowed with a special legal status. However, there are two countries where justice statistics sensitive to race and ethnicity are collected. The first is the US, where such data have been collected for a long period of time, and the other is the UK, where a 1995 Home Office letter to Chief Constables required them to introduce a system of ethnic monitoring of suspects and offenders. The UK also conducts victimization surveys that discriminate between ethno-racial groups either as victims or offenders.

It is then crucial to stress that despite its intensity, the debate on crime, race, ethnicity, and immigration does not in most countries rely on facts, but on spotty data generated by academic research and biased media impressions. In continental Europe or Canada this situation is not about to change.

2. Basic Distinctions: Race, Ethnicity, And Related Categories

Several distinctions must be made in order to discuss the issues properly. First, ethnicity must be distinguished from race. Race refers to outward physical attributes such as the color of the skin, whereas ethnicity is comprised of cultural traits, and is a factor of identity for those who share these traits. Second, the status of being an immigrant is a legal construct and differs in this regard from race and ethnicity which are cultural constructs. The fact that being an immigrant is primarily a legal status in Western societies implies that there are forms of immigration which are illegal. In contradiction, asking whether one belongs legally or not to a racial or an ethnic group is generally a spurious question. However, race and ethnicity can be construed as a legal status, as it was in Nazi Germany, in South Africa during the period of Apartheid, and in Rwanda, where one’s identification papers indicate whether one is a Hutu or a Tutsi. As is shown by these examples, attempts to enshrine in law differences with regard to race or ethnicity have often resulted in human tragedies. One exception to this assertion is granting a specific legal status to Aboriginal peoples in countries such as Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the US, and in South America. The purpose of this measure—which was very imperfectly achieved—was to recognize that the Aboriginal peoples were the first nations that populated these countries and that they were entitled as such to certain privileges.

The importance of making the preceding distinctions is embodied in one cardinal rule for addressing the issues raised in this research paper: the wider are the categories used—e.g., being white or black-skinned— and the lesser the probability to shed light on an issue (Georges-Abeyie 1989).

3. Further Basic Distinctions: Disparity And Discrimination

There is one last distinction that does not refer to groups of persons but that defines the most important issue discussed in relation to these groups. Disparity should not be confused with discrimination. Disparity is a descriptive notion and refers to a difference, which reveals itself through disproportion or over-representation. For instance, it is well known that African Americans are disproportionately represented in the US prison population with regard to their number in the total population. Discrimination refers to the differential treatment of groups without respect to the behavior or qualifications of individuals belonging to such groups (Walker et al. 1996, p. 16). Discrimination can be used to explain disparity. It varies in scope from cases of individual prejudice to differential treatment which is applied systematically at all thresholds within a system. Systemic, as opposed to systematical discrimination, occurs when disparity is unintendedly generated by features integrated within a system of rules. For instance, very few Asian immigrants were hired in Western police forces because of obsolete height requirements that they could not meet.

4. The Main Issues

Until the 1990s, the issues most debated concerned racial and ethnic minorities in their relation to crime. In recent years, immigration also became an issue through the problem of illegal immigrants. Because the US and the UK are the only countries collecting data that are sensitive to ethnic and racial differences, this research paper will focus mostly on US and UK data.

4.1 Disparity Or Discrimination?

The evidence of disparity is overwhelming, particularly with respect to the most repressive component of the penal system, that is, incarceration.

(a) Although African Americans comprise 12 percent of the US population, they account for 31 percent of the federal and for 51 percent of the state prison population (Walker et al. 1996, p. 205).

(b) In 1992, Black people constituted 5 percent of the population of the UK but made up 18 percent of the prison population (Dhokalia and Sumner 1993, p. 28).

(c) In 1988, nearly one in three inmates in the Canadian western provinces were of Aboriginal ancestry. Aboriginal people make up almost 10 percent of the federal inmate population, although they make up less than 2 percent of the Canadian population (Law Reform Commission of Canada 1991, p. 67, note 166).

These figures on the over-representation of racial or ethnic minorities are the same with respect to the operation of other components of the criminal justice system, most noticeably the police. In a 1975 experiment conducted in two precincts of San Diego, nearly half of all people stopped and questioned by police were African Americans, even if they respectively represented only 17.5 percent and 4.8 percent of the population of the two precincts in the study (Walker et al. 1996, p. 101). The evidence is similar for the UK (W. Skogan 1990, The Police and Public in England and Wales: A British Crime Survey Report. Home Office Research Study No. 117, HMSO, London). Racial profiling still is a persistent feature of policing.

Such being the evidence for disparity, what of its explanation by ethnic or racial discrimination? Two quotes from the work of Robert Reiner epitomize the present predicament of research in this respect. Reiner wrote in 1989 that despite methodological caveats, ‘the quantity and quality of (the) evidence is such as to render any doubts about discrimination fanciful’ (Reiner 1989, p. 8). He also wrote in 1992 that it was ‘inconceivable that the (statistical) approach could ever conclusively establish racial discrimination’ (R. Reiner, quoted in D. Cook and B. Hudson (eds.), Racism and Criminology, Sage, London, 1993, p. 8). Therein lies the paradox. On the one hand, the evidence of disparity is so overwhelming that it seemingly does not allow for explanations other than intended discrimination. On the other hand, most statistical attempts to demonstrate the presence of discrimination are inconclusive, when all variables are duly controlled. For instance, African Americans and Hispanics were respectively found to be six and four times more likely to be shot by police in Chicago between 1974 and 1978. However, when the research controlled for the risk status, defined in terms of arrests in the context of the perpetration of a serious violent crime, the racial disparity vanished, and it was white perpetrators that were more likely—but not by much—to be shot by police (A. Geller and K. J. Karales 1981 Split Second Decisions: Shootings of and by Chicago Police. Chicago Law Enforcement Study Group, Chicago, p. 119). Such erosion of the discrimination factor in controlled statistical research occurs most of the time (Hagan 1988).

What then is the explanation of racial and ethnic disparity in criminal justice?

(a) There is no question that discrimination plays a role. However, it is difficult to assess its extent, which is revealed only by complex statistical analysis highly dependent on data quality (Blumstein et al. 1983, Hood 1992).

(b) Factors which are in themselves racially and ethnically neutral also account for disparity. Judges tend to incarcerate youths when their family cannot provide any support for their rehabilitation. The number of broken African American homes being high, more young African Americans are consequently put in jail. There are many of these neutral factors, ranging from the way in which an immigrant community tries to integrate (Smith 1997, p. 759), to special forms of drug addiction (crack vs. powder cocaine) that are repressed with disproportionate severity (Tonry 1995, p. 188).

(c) Nevertheless, the most thorough and methodological research generally concludes that it is the differential involvement of minorities in the perpetration of crime that mainly explains disparity (Smith 1997). This conclusion is frustrating because it only pushes the problem one step further: why are some ethnic and racial minorities more involved in crime?

4.2 Intra- Or Intervictimization

Another volatile issue is whether perpetrators victimize members of their own racial or ethnic community or whether they cross the ethno-racial divide. The answer to this question varies from one country to the other.

(a) In the US, white offenders victimize the white community in more than 90 percent of cases. However, the percentage of white victims from African American offenders ranges between 40 percent for all violent crime and 60 percent for robbery (Walker et al. 1996, p. 49).

(b) In the UK, white offenders cross the ethno-racial divide much more frequently, 68 percent of Asian and 50 percent of Afro-Caribbean victims having identified their aggressor as white in recent British crime surveys (1988 and 1992; Smith 1997, p. 715). Afro-Caribbeans also cross this divide, 23 percent of Asian victims having identified their aggressor as Afro-Caribbean.

The difference between the US and the UK in terms of the tendency of whites to attack other communities may in part be explained by the fact that the AfroCaribbean community is less than 1 percent of the total UK population, whereas African Americans account for 12 percent of the US population.

4.3 Issues Related To Illegal Immigration

Although illegal immigration is an old phenomenon, the issues that it raises have taken a particular urgency after 1990 but they have not been thoroughly researched yet. Three issues can be singled out. First, the criminal networks involved in smuggling illegal immigrants have grown immeasurably since the end of the Cold War and the explosion of civil strife in former Eastern bloc countries. Second, although it is directly related to the previous one, the issue of the transnational exploitation of prostitutes, often recruited in refugee camps, is a pressing one, for which the police have no immediate answer. There is finally the question of how to react to illegal immigrants who have settled for a number of years in their adopted country, where they have begun to be socially integrated, but where they have failed to meet the legal requirements to obtain legal citizenship.

5. Conclusion

This research paper has focused mainly on the overpunishment of racial and ethnic minorities and on its possible explanations. There is a concomitant phenomenon which falls outside the scope of this research paper, but that deserves to be mentioned: it is the underpunishment of members of the white majority when they victimize minorities (Radelet 1989). Finally, it ought to be stressed that in the present context of globalization, the migratory fluxes will increase, thus sharpening the edge of the issues that we have been discussing. As long as most Western countries will resist collecting data sensitive to race and ethnicity, their policies on integration will be developed in a blind vacuum.

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