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Examine some of the reasons for ethnic differences in experiences of the criminal justice system - page 1
Keywords: Ethnicity Crime Institutional Racism Ethnic Difference Criminal Justice System
By roshooo on 10/06/2010
Level: A Level (Year 13)
Page Number: 1 of 3 pages: 1 2 3Rates of criminality differ greatly in between ethnic groups; however whether or not these differing rates are accurate is debatable. Official statistics suggest that black people and (to a lesser extent) Asians are more likely to commit crime than other ethnic groups. In fact, they are over-represented in the official statistics with Asians making up only 4.7% of the general population of Britain but 6% of the prison populace and black people making up a mere 2.8% of the British population, but account for a massive 11% of prisoners. Dissimilarly, white people are under-represented in statistics. However, the indication of these statistics cannot be taken at face value. Official statistics present ethnic differences in their involvement with the criminal justice system; this does not explicitly mean that, for example, blacks or Asians are actually more likely to offend. Official statistics do not represent all crime or its effects and so they do not appropriately show the experiences of ethnic groups and the criminal justice system.
A more apt approach to finding out about these distorted statistics is to use alternative sources such as victim surveys and self-report studies. These kinds of studies ask individuals to divulge information about crimes they have been a victim of or have committed, respectively. A combination of these allows us to get a better insight into the actual criminal habits of ethnic groups as ethnicity will be revealed within the studies. Victims will be able to reveal what ethnicity an individual is, to whom they became a victim and self-reports from individuals will expose the trends between ethnic groups’ crimes. Victim surveys tend to depict black people as the most prominent ethnic group for offending, particularly in the case of mugging, however self-report studies show otherwise. Graham and Bowling found that blacks (43%) and whites (44%) have similar rates of offending and Sharp and Budd found that whites and individuals of ‘mixed’ ethnic origin are in fact most likely to offend.
Experiences amongst different ethnic groups who interact with the criminal justice system are still very diverse. Whilst self-report studies show that whites are more likely to offend than blacks and Asians even less likely (Indians 30%, Pakistanis 28% and Bangladeshis 13% according to Graham and Bowling) this does not represent the experiences of said ethnic groups. The criminal justice system consists of a number of steps which include policing, stop and search, arrests/cautions, prosecutions, trials,
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