The majority of the Americans in prisons or any other forms of incarcerations are black or African Americans. The rates of minor offenses committed by African American youths are at a similar rate with those of the white youths. According to Mauer, (2011), one out of three black American boys born in 2001, were most likely to go to prison in their lifetime as compared to one out of every seventeen white boys. Black Americans are more likely to get arrested than their white counterparts and are more likely to be charged and more likely to face long prison sentences. Offenses associated with the youths are mostly cases of minor aggression, petty theft, and other minor offenses but the African American boys are still more likely to get arrested compared to the white boys. Crime is also high among African American boys than girls (Agnew, 2015). Drug trafficking and use is another common offense. African American youths are most likely to be arrested for possession of marijuana as compared to the whites despite the fact that African American children are just 15% of the total American children population. The white children are more than 4 times as many as the African American children and yet the total number of arrests on juveniles is 35% of the black children (UN, 2019).
The rate and likelihood of crime are quite the same across all races but the blacks and Latin Americans seem to be more in the criminal records as compared to their Caucasian counterparts (Agnew, 2015). The data and facts presented may point towards racial discrimination but there are other forces that play in this African American young people and their association with crime. This paper focuses on the association of factors outside racial discrimination and their association with the high crime rates among the African American youths while drawing insights from majorly peer-reviewed scholarly articles and other reliable sources (UN, 2019).
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Poverty and crime.
The African Americans are mostly found in shanties and the economically disadvantaged neighborhoods in the American cities. African relations to poverty traces from the past and is quite linked to several historical events from the slavery period, the mass arrest of African Americans in the late 1800s after abolition of slavery, to the Jim Crow periods when African Americans were reduced to second class citizens, the war against drugs and crime and the mass incarceration periods. Poverty and racial discrimination are examples of macro-level oppression factors that influence delinquency (Regoli, 1991). The differential oppression theory indicates that certain external oppression factors can be able to influence certain acts of crime. Most of the African Americans are poor and racially oppressed and therefore such conclusions can be drawn from their high rates of criminal activities.
Crime in the United States is also related to African Americans. It has been reported that police are most likely to perform random checks of African Americans than the other races. The labeling theory supports this idea. American police officers most often seek offenders in regions where the poor reside. High crime rates have also been associated with the residential areas of the indigent- which are mostly inhabited by African Americans. This kind of labeling by the law and order departments of different states ensures that most of the African American youths get arrested for the petty offenses they conduct while their white counterparts go unchecked because of the neighborhoods they reside in (UN, 2019).
Role of Police and Justice Systems in Youth Crime.
The Thomas theorem suggests that whatever is perceived by people to be a reality is most likely to become a reality in their own making (Oxford Reference, n.d.). Because the justice system have believed for several decades that most African Americans as delinquent, they are most likely to be arrested, most likely to be prosecuted and most likely to be given lengthy sentences, this would explain why areas of African American residences are majorly targeted by the police and why African American’s are most likely to be punished for minor offenses as compared to their white counterparts. On the same note based on Howard Becker’s theory on the role of oppression on delinquency, since African Americans have been labeled as “gangsters” most of the African American children are most likely to follow the same path due to social pressure (Campbell, 2019).
Studies have also indicated that youths who commit crimes during high school and are processed and prosecuted according to the due process of the law are most likely to drop out and continue with the criminal life. In addition, correctional services do not offer much support to the convicted youths, most of them come out of correctional services worse than they got in. This occurs especially to those convicted of minor offenses or those convicted for crimes they did not commit. They learn the traits of crime from real criminals and come out as either criminals or drug abusers. In some states, juveniles are still taken to adult prisons especially for major crimes that produce worst results (Costello, 2010).
The justice system has also been accused to be in favor of the rich who are in most cases whites. The poor black Americans who are most likely to get into trouble are assigned public lawyers who are either without experience and/or are overwhelmed by several case files and thus unable to offer quality defense services. This has taken a majority of the African American young people to correctional services. According to Cole, (2001), article on no equal justice, the American justice system is skewed to support the rich at the expense of the poor and this is based on the perception of the poor that is already built upon the entire system.
Family history, Neighborhood, and Crime.
Most crimes committed by youths are as a result of aggression and other forms of psychological disorders that are rarely picked by parents and even teachers at school without taking keen notice on the child’s behavior. Do family members have a role to play in developing a child’s behavior and what does the upbringing of a child have to do with the family environment? For example, according to So, Voisin, Burnside & Gaylord-Harden, (2016), African American girls who had risky sexual behavior during childhood or who were sexually abused, are most likely not to engage in sexual activities, such have also been related to victims of violence at home. Acts of aggression are mostly associated with early childhood behavior. Based on the theories of conformity, and since aggressive behaviors are intertwined with personal behavior, children seem to learn most of their behavior from their daily observations in the family and outside in society. Coming from a criminal background, neighborhood and even family predisposes children more to criminal behavior (Costello, 2010) .
Growing up from a violent background with aggressive parents advances the chances of a child developing aggressive traits. Oppositional Defiant Disorder candidates also have a history of violence and/or defiant backgrounds where there are no standing rules and rules are defied . In neighborhoods where people are often against the law and defying the law is considered heroic, young people from such seem to get more in trouble than where law-abiding citizens live. This formulates the case of most African American children. Conduct disorders are also a major predisposing factor to crime that is associated with crimes (Giordano, Seffrin, Manning & Longmore, 2011) .
Psychopathy tends to contribute significantly to crimes committed both by adults and youths. Sociopaths are individuals with psychopathic behavior whose condition was sparked by certain traumatic social events . Such events can include torture, rape, violence, witnessing violent crime against other individuals like battering of parents. Most African Americans live in hoods shrouded with poverty where violence is rampant. Such young people witness shootouts among police and gangs or even gangs and fellow gangs sometimes these involve their own parents (Hemphill, Temple man, Wong & Hare, 1998) . When such an occurrence happens over and over, these individuals tend to conform to such occurrences and develop a lack of empathy and hard to certain forms of acts that are considered humane . In addition, individuals whose family members are involved in crime are most likely to become criminals (Lopez-Tamayo, LaVome Robinson, Lambert, Jason & Ialongo, 2016) .
Conclusion.
The association of African Americans and crime is a situation that has gone far beyond the traditional racism factors and several factors have sprung up that ensure that the condition persists. The United States' inability to face poverty and rampant crime out of the African American neighborhoods is a major contributing factor to crime among the youth. The continuous arrest of African Americans has left children without fathers and plunged them into further poverty predisposing these children to follow their parents’ footsteps. To solve this problem, the United States government must design means to support behavior change without consequential incarceration outcomes. Imprisonment of these individuals seems to be worsening the situation and it as remained to be the same since the 1800s.
References
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