Quote Originally Posted by ajaxfetish View Post
Yep. I'm pretty sure that's the main factor (not sure what the **** thing is all about). On the other hand, is the incarceration rate for whites and blacks the same when adjusted for poverty? My (admittedly limited) understanding is that it's still higher for blacks. A little scrounging online seems to indicate that black Americans are between two and three times as likely as whites to be poor, but are between 5 and 6 times as likely to be incarcerated. So I don't think socio-economic status can be the only explaining factor. There are clearly other variables at play, also operating along racial lines.

Ajax
Hmm but what does simply being below the poverty line or not tell you? That hardly captures socio-economic status.

There is, at present, no consensus as to the causes behind the racial disproportionality in arrests, charges and incarceration of African Americans in the United States. However, scholars agree that more research is needed. Gary LaFree gives an account of how studies correlating race and crime were discouraged from the 1960s on as sociologists developed a sensitivity to research that could be seen as placing blame on those who could be victims of racial discrimination.[50]
He further identifies an urgent need for renewed studies of race differences in crime. John Paul Wright, associate professor of criminal justice at the University of Cincinnati, opines that the connection between crime and race should be studied "honestly and courageously" precisely because it is African Americans who have suffered most from the America's collective failure to understand and control street crime. No other group, says Wright, would benefit more from a "candid examination of race and crime."[51]
Engaging in the direct study of race and crime, however, is not a straightforward matter. Wright observes that researchers who produce findings which identify race as a determining factor in criminal behavior run the risk of "public repudiation, professional exile, and even career death".[52] He writes: "If social security is the holy grail of politics, race and crime is the holy grail of criminology. Touch it and you expose yourself to wrath and fury. For this reason, many criminologists are loath to examine the connection between race and crime outside the modern sociological paradigm that holds that race is a mere social construct - that is, something defined by any given society, ... a 'social invention'."[51] Other scholars have also deplored the current climate surrounding the discussion of race and crime. Professors of sociology Robert J. Sampson and William Julius Wilson of Harvard University describe it as "mired in an unproductive mix of controversy and silence."[53]
Perhaps we'll never know