Assess the view that ethnic differences in crime rates are the result of the ways in which the criminal justice system operates.

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A2 Crime & Deviance

Assess the view that ethnic differences in crime rates are the result of the ways in which the criminal justice system operates.                                                             (21 marks)

Official statistics not the criminal justice process show some striking differences between ethnic groups. For example, black people make up just 2.8% of the population, but 11% of the prison population. Asians make up 4.7% of the population, however that take 6% of the prison population. By contrast, White people are under-represented at all stages of the criminal justice process. However, such statistics do not tell us whether members of one ethnic group are more likely than a member of another group to commit an offence as they simply tell us about involvement with the criminal justice system. For example, differences in stop and search or arrest rates may simply be due to policing strategies or to discrimination by individual officers, while differences in rates if imprisonment may be the result of courts handling down harsher sentences to minorities.

In addition to statistics on the ethnicity of those individuals who are involved with the criminal justice system, we can call on two other important sources of statistics than can demonstrate a more direct light on ethnicity and offending. These are victim surveys and the self-report studies. Victim surveys ask individuals to say what crimes they have been victims of, usually during the past twelve months. While victim surveys are useful in helping us to identify ethnic patterns of offending, they have several limitation. Firstly they rely on victims' memory of event. According to Ben Bowling and Coretta Philips, evidence suggests that white victims may 'over-identify' blacks, claiming the offender was black even when they were not sure.

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Self-report studies ask individuals to disclose their own dishonest and violent behaviour. Based on a sample of 2,500 people, Graham and Bowling found that blacks and whites had very similar rates of offending, while Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis had much lower rates. The findings of self-report studies challenge the stereotype of black people as being more likely than whites to offend, they support the widely held view that Asians are less likely to offend. However, self report studies have their limitations in relation to ethnicity and offending. Overall, the evidence on ethnicity and offending is somewhat inconsistent. For example, ...

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