Race and Crime

Abstract

This entry provides an overview of the racial disparities in both crime and criminal justice outcomes often documented in the race crime literature since the seminal publication of William Julius Wilson's book, The Truly Disadvantaged . Criminologists have linked these disparities to enduring inequalities and stratification in the United States, where blacks find themselves more often in disadvantaged communities, facing racism and differential enforcement of the law. While the causal forces are both structural and individual in nature, we conclude with new avenues for exploration of the crime–race relationship that incorporate nuances in how race is conceptualized, the history of black suffering and oppression, and efforts of blacks to mobilize politically against racialized violence by way of the Black Lives Matter movement.