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Full resolution (TIFF) - On this page / på denna sida - X. The Negro Community - 44. Non-Institutional Aspects of the Negro Community - 2. Crime
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Chapter 44. Non-institutional Aspects 969
insane or feeble-minded. Such persons are likely to be committed to the
regular jails or prisons, whereas similar white cases are put in a separate
institution and so do not swell the prison population.
Some of the ^‘crimes” in the South may possibly be committed only by
Negroes: only Negroes are arrested for violations of the segregation laws,
and sometimes they are even arrested for violation of the extra-legal
racial etiquette (the formal charge is ‘^disturbing the peace,” “insolence
co an officer,” “violation of municipal ordinances,” and so on). The beating
of Negroes by whites in the South is seldom regarded as a crime, but
should a Negro lay hands on a white man, he is almost certain to be
apprehended and punished severely. As Frazer points out: “In the
South, the white man is certainly a greater menace to the Negroes home
than the latter is to his.’”^ Similarly, when white lawyers, installment
collectors, insurance agents, plantation owners, and others, cheat Negroes,
they are never regarded as criminals.^® But stealing by Negroes from
whites—^beyond that petty stealing which is part of the patriarchal tradi-
tion from slavery—is almost always punished as a crime.
In one respect, Southern discrimination against Negroes operates to
reduce the Negro’s crime record. If a Negro commits a crime against
another Negro, and no white man is involved, and if the crime is not a
serious one, white policemen will let the criminal off with a warning or a
beating, and the court will let him off with a warning or a relatively light
sentence. In a way, this over-leniency stimulates greater crimes since it
reduces risks and makes law enforcement so arbitrary, I.ife becomes cheap
and property dear in the Negro neighborhood—a situation conducive to
crime.
These things occur in the North, too, although in much smaller degree.
In the North it is not so much discrimination which distorts the Negro’s
criminal record, as it is certain characteristics of the Negro population. In
the first place, unorganized crime is much more prevalent in the South
than in the North, both among whites and among Negroes, and when the
Negro migrates North, he brings his high crime rate along with him.
Specific cultural practices brought from the South also affect the Negro’s
crime record in the North: a member of New York’s grand jury told the
author that part of the high Negro juvenile delinquency and crime rate
was due to the Negro practice of fighting with knives instead of with fists,
as whites do. “The fights start in the same way among both groups, but the
law defines the Negro’s manner of fighting as a crime, and the white’s
manner of fighting as not a crime.’”®
A third impersonal cause of distortion of the Negro’s crime record is
his poverty: he cannot bribe the policeman to let him off for a petty
offense; he cannot have a competent lawyer to defend him in court; and
when faced with the alternatives of fine or prison by way of punishment,
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