Things Fall Apart

• Author: Darnell F. Hawkins
• DOI: 10.1177/2153368710392791
• Published date: 01 January 2011
• Date: 01 January 2011

Articles

Things Fall Apart:

Revisiting Race and Ethnic

Differences in Criminal

Violence amidst a Crime

Drop

Darnell F. Hawkins

1

Abstract

Using nearly three decades of major and sometimes abrupt change in U.S. crime rates

as a backdrop, this essay probes the perennial question of what accounts for well-

documented ethnic and racial disparities in criminal offending. The concept of internal

colonialism is offered as a conceptual framework for the study and explanation of

those enduring differences.

Keywords

colonial theory, conflict theory, drugs, race/ethnicity, street crime

The ongoing effort to account for enduring and sizable ethnic and racial disparities in

rates of criminal offending has been a mainstay of American criminology since its

inception.

1

That task has also anchored my own sociological and criminological

career. In two early, admittedly sophomoric essays, I argued that taken as a whole, the

theoretical and conceptual literatures designed to explain the comparatively higher

rates of homicide among African Americans are largely inadequate in terms of

explaining the phenomenon (Hawkins, 1983, 1985). This theme was revisited in

several subsequent writings in which the critique was applied to other forms of vio-

lence and to crime and delinquency more generally (Hawkins, 1991, 1995, 1999,

2003a; Hawkins & Kempf-Leonard, 2005; Hawkins, Laub, & Lauritsen, 1998).

In the earliest of these theoretical musings (Hawkins, 1983), I challenged the

tendency found in the criminological sciences to erect a wall between the literatures

that examine racial and ethnic differences in the administration of justice and those

which probe such differences in rates of criminal involvement. Especially in the

1

University of Illinois at Chicago, USA

Corresponding Author:

Darnell F. Hawkins, P.O. Box 8741, Pine Buff, AR 71611, USA

Email: Arkvark@aol.com

Race and Justice

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DOI: 10.1177/2153368710392791

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case of homicide, the way that race influences the legal sanctioning of the behavior

was said to be inextricably linked to racial differences in levels of offending. The

same point was made later in a discussion of racial differences in rates of family

violence (1987).

2

Toward the end of this essay, I seek to extend those earlier

arguments to examine the link between offending and punishment as it relates to

collateral damages from the criminal justice response to crime in disadvantaged

communities today.

Things Fall Apart, Phase I

Since the first of these writings, several decidedly ‘‘real world’’ developments related to

criminal violence and other crime in the United States have given some credibility to

those observations. The first was the sharp rise during the mid-1980s in rates of homicide

and serious assaults involving handguns among black and brown youths and young

adults living in America’s ghettoes and barrios. While there was also a rise in violence,

especially school-related offending, among White, non-Latino youths, rates of offending

and victimization among minority youths were much higher. The result was an even

greater widening of America’s longstanding race/ethnic gap in rates of crime and vio-

lence. That widening appeared to indicate that something qualitatively/quantitatively dif-

ferent was taking place in communities of color as compared to those inhabited by

Whites; and that the difference had become exacerbated during that period.

In response to these events, American social science/criminology responded with a

longstanding menu of theories designed to explain crime and violence in general and

also what appeared to be an ‘‘epidemic’’ of urban assaultive violence and ‘‘super-

predator’’ youths (see DiIulio, 1995). These explanatory forays marked a continuation

of the perennial effort of social scientists to account for real ethnic and racial dif-

ferences in criminal behavior, as opposed to differences that emerge simply due to

bias in justice system processing. Attempts at explanation included the traditional

macro-level sociological notions of anomie, subculture, social control, and social dis-

organization, often coupled with more economics-oriented notions such as concen-

trated poverty, relative and absolute deprivation, spatial economic distress, and so on.

In the case of African Americans, the criminogenic effects of these societal forces

were said to be compounded by both historical and contemporary patterns of insti-

tutional and interpersonal racial discrimination. In addition, most analysts continued

to see value in a social class-oriented approach to understanding race differences.

They viewed the Black poor, especially Black youths, as surplus labor and castoffs

from a less labor-intensive capitalist economy. Just as an earlier generation of Black

urban dwellers were castoffs from a race-based, rapidly mechanizing, southern rural

economy, contemporary Black urbanites were being shed from a more mechanized and

globalized manufacturing economy. Indeed, this line of thought in a more palatable,

post-political Marxism form is the core of much of the theory and empirical work on

the urban underclass (Glasgow, 1980; Wilson, 1987) and the related notion of a growing

mismatch between extant jobs and populations in need of work (Kasarda, 1989).

4Race and Justice 1(1)

Psychologists and developmentally oriented researchers also sought to explain

the sharp rise in crime during this period. They did so by attempting to link larger

structural and economic phenomena to the attributes of individuals and their

socialization. They brought to the table theories centered on social learning/values/

culture, cognitive states, psychopathology, emotional discord, and so on. Borrowing

from the work of ethnographers such as Elijah Anderson (1978, 1990, 1999), they

sought to examine and trace the interpersonal contours of inner-city street culture,

since it was viewed as the incubator of the violence epidemic. In doing so, they

also turned their attention to such factors as family functioning and upbringing,

peer influence, gangs, educational failure, and the extent to which these may be

linked to both crime and violence in general and to the known disparities that exist

across racial and ethnic lines.

With an eye toward prevention/intervention, still others took a much more

instrumentalist, less theory-constrained approach to the rise in youth violence.

Researchers in public health noted the greater use of firearms in episodes of urban

youthful aggression and concluded that these contributed much to the higher rates due

to their greater lethality potential as the weapon of choice (Fingerhut, Ingram, & Feld-

man, 1992). Many criminologists linked both the greater use of guns and escalating

youth violence to the rise of crack cocaine and the use of guns to protect valued drug

sales turfs.

Things Fall Apart, Phase II

Somewhat ironically, less than a decade after it began (and just as competing

explanations in the criminological and social science literatures for the rise in rates of

crime and youth and young adult violence were jockeying for position), the con-

ceptually unimaginable and theoretically unpredicted happened. Beginning around

1991, crime statisticians began to notice what would later be called the ‘‘crime drop’’

and the ‘‘great crime decline’’ (see Blumstein & Wallman, 2006; Zimring, 2006).

Rates of crime all across the United States, including youth violence, were dropping

and continued to decline throughout the 1990s; and by the end of that decade stood at

rates not seen since the 1960s. In less than a decade, the upturn in crime that crimin-

ologists had first noticed in the early to mid-1970s had been largely erased.

The decline wreaked havoc on popular theories/ideas about what causes crime to

rise and fall, and importantly for the present discussion, views on what accounts for

the persistent and widening racial/ethnic gap in rates of offending. Despite a slight

upturn in crime in a few areas since 2000, rates across most of America continue to be

at pre-1970s levels. And despite a troubling continuation of high rates of youth vio-

lence in some cities, serious assaults and deaths among youths of all races have

dropped substantially during this period.

In terms of criminological theory/research and its earlier predictions of crime

patterns, things fell apart, and a scramble was underway to rethink our understanding

of what drives crime trends and of what causes the race/ethnic offending differential

(hereafter referred to as the ‘‘Gap’’).

3

Clearly, the conceptualizations used to explain

Hawkins 5