Crime, Culture and Ethnicity

Abstract

Links between ethnicity and crime are pan of the wider field of cultural influences on crime. Despite a dubious past and associations with the eugenicist movement, it remains important, partly to enable ethnic monitoring of the criminal justice system. There are many methodological problems, including the difficulty of measuring ethnicity, a euphemism for skin colour in some studies. Such a crudely measured variable may produce spurious associations, due to less obvious, confounding Variables. Offending rates differ between ethnic groups and cannot be explained by discrimination in the criminal justice system. Differences between cultures are both qualitative and quantitative; they change rapidly over time, favouring cultural or economic explanations. Crude statistical associations are merely the starting point for study and the challenge is to identify the mediating variables. For black-white differences in the United States and Britain, discrimination, unemployment and poverty are important but other factors may be more difficult to identify. Black patients are statistically over-represented in most populations of mentally disordered offenders. Existing studies do not confirm a tendency to discriminate against black patients by detaining them unnecessarily and black people may also be overrepresented among mentally disordered prisoners. Monitoring the ethnic origin of referrals and admissions to secure psychiatric facilities should be a basic pan of clinical audit.