The analysis highlights administrative criminology's preoccupations with criminal justice processes and its lack of adequate attention to racially just outcomes; radical realism's contribution to understanding the relationship between crime and social inequality, of which race is an important dimension; and critical criminology's insight into processes of criminalization. The analysis argues that administrative criminology has raised questions and more than anything else represents the government's willingness to take seriously the issues of racism and criminal justice. However, its findings remain contradictory and controversial; it must turn to the other perspectives for explanations, and that choice between radical realist and critical paradigms must depend primarily on the questions being asked. Radical realism subsumes race under the more general division of class, whereas critical criminology points out the power of the concept of race in ideologies of division and of blame of the enemy within and also notes the specific forms of oppression experienced by black people as black people rather than as working class, unemployed, criminal, or even female black people.