Juvenile Justice Bulletin -- June 2000 -- Race, Ethnicity, and Serious and Violent Juvenile Offending

Explaining Racial and Ethnic Differences

Researchers and criminologists have long been aware of racial and ethnic differences in serious juvenile offending. Interpreting these disparities, however, is another matter; no one theory has adequately addressed the reasons for them (Hawkins, 1993, 1995). Criminologists have not paid enough attention to the extent to which socioeconomic disparity accounts for differences in rates of violence (Hawkins, 1999; Reiss and Roth, 1993), even though they have tended to attribute high rates of crime to economic disadvantages (Tonry, 1995).

These omissions are in part due to reliance on individual-level data to identify those persons most likely to offend. However, individual-centered research is unlikely to improve understanding of the group differences discussed in this Bulletin. It does not take into consideration the larger sociostructural characteristics that distinguish groups and individuals. For example, the developmental life courses of blacks and whites in the United States are affected by their membership in historically distinct social and economic groups. Community-level research can be used to study this larger context and offer great potential in interpreting the meaning of racial and ethnic differences in offending.

The community-level approach asks what it is about community structures and community cultures that produces differential rates of crime across similar and different populations, rather than asking which attributes of individuals and groups lead to criminal involvement. The work of early researchers Shaw and McKay is insightful in this regard (Sampson and Lauritsen, 1994, 1997; Sampson and Wilson, 1995; Hawkins, 1995). Shaw and McKay (1969) found that:

High rates of delinquency persisted in certain urban areas regardless of ethnic population composition.
Rates of delinquency within racial or ethnic subgroups varied across urban communities.
Rates of delinquency did not increase in areas with less crime as ethnic subgroups migrated to such communities.

These findings led Shaw and McKay to focus on the transmission of delinquent behavior through social disorganization and weak social controls rather than individual or group cultural differences.

To examine variation in serious and violent juvenile crime based on these factors, Sampson (1987) disaggregated the 1980 rates of homicide and robbery by race, poverty, family disruption, joblessness, and other factors. The analysis showed that black male joblessness predicted variation in rates of black family disruption, which was significantly related to rates of black murder and robbery, particularly by juveniles. Sampson concluded that this analysis reveals why joblessness and poverty have had weak or inconsistent direct effects on violence rates in past research. These factors in fact exert influence on family disruption, which in turn, directly affects juvenile violence rates.

The percentage of white and black female-headed families was significantly related to white and black violence, although a higher level of family disruption was observed among blacks. In other words, both black and white juvenile violence rates are affected by the same sociostructural factors. The causes of violence appear to be similarly rooted in structural differences across communities and cities, regardless of race. Because of this, it is essential to compare the community contexts within which black and white youth are raised, and to do this, multilevel studies across all racial and ethnic groups are needed.

Blacks often live in communities very different from those of whites (Massey, 1996; Sampson and Wilson, 1995; Wilson et al., 1988). For example, family disruption characterizes the communities in which poor blacks live; relative family stability characterizes those of poor whites. Thus, the interaction between individual traits and neighborhood characteristics must be studied, not just differential rates of crime. In addition, increased urbanization, inequality, and class segregation have had a disproportionate impact on blacks in the past 30 years (Massey, 1996). In 1970, one in five poor blacks lived in high-poverty areas; by 1990, the ratio was slightly more than two out of five (Kasarda, 1993).

The magnitude of the differences under which different groups live suggests that the individual-level correlation between race and serious and violent juvenile offending is a function of ecological conditions. Peeples and Loeber (1994) found that, by controlling for community context (the juvenile's residential neighborhood), racial and ethnic differences in delinquency disappeared. This supports the idea that the association of race and juvenile violence is primarily a function of community context.

These findings also highlight the fact that researchers have not paid enough attention to within-group differences (Hawkins, 1983, 1999), such as those between communities of poor and middle-class blacks. One study that did make such a comparison found that firearm death rates from 1979 to 1989 for black youth 15 to 19 years old varied from 143.9 per 100,000 youth in core areas of large cities to 48.2 in small metropolitan areas, and to 15.5 in nonmetropolitan locations (Fingerhut, Ingram, and Feldman, 1992). Within-group differences may be as large and important to assess as the differences between groups.

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Race, Ethnicity, and Serious and Violent Juvenile Offending	Juvenile Justice Bulletin • June 2000