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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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970 An American Dilemma
he is forced to choose prison. The Negro’s ignorance acts in a similar
fashion: he does not know his legal rights and he does not know how to
present his case; thus even an unprejudiced policeman or judge may
unwittingly discriminate against him. Also associated with the Negro
lower class status in distorting his crime record is his lack of influential
connections: he does not know the important people who can help him
out of petty legal troubles. In the North, the fact that an unusually large
proportion of Negroes are in the age group 15-40, which is the age
group to which most criminals belong, operates to make the Negro crime
rate based on total population figures deceptively high. Negro concen-
tration in the cities in the North, where the crime rate is generally higher
than in rural areas, acts in the same manner. The Negro crime rate is
further inflated by greater recidivism: a given number of Negro criminals
are sent to jail more often than are the same number of white criminals.^®
The longer prison sentence meted out to Negroes raises the number of
Negroes in prison at any one time beyond what it would be if crime
statistics reflected only the total number of criminals.
In general, our attitude toward crime statistics must be that they do not
provide a fair index of Negro crime. Even if they did, a higher crime
rate would not mean that the Negro was more addicted to crime, either
in his heredity or in his culture, for the Negro population has certain
external characteristics (such as concentration in the South and in the
young adult ages) which give it a spuriously high crime rate. With this
attitude in mind, we may examine some of the statistics. The most nearly
complete, and the most reliable, set of statistics on crime for the nation are
the recent annual reports of the United States Bureau of the Census,
Prisoners in State and Federal Prisons and Reformatories. We shall use
the set for 1939, the most recent set available at the time of writing. These
statistics have two important weaknesses (in addition to those just re-
viewed) : First, they do not include criminals in local jails, but only those
in state and federal prisons and reformatories. For this reason, they do not
include most of the petty crimes, and to get a relatively complete picture
of types of offense we shall have to turn to other sources. Second, prisoners
are a very selected group of criminals: they have been apprehended,
arrested, indicted, convicted and committed. Criminologists generally hold
that the further the index from the crime, the poorer it is as a measure
of crime. This may be true for white prisoners, but it is not nearly so true
for Negro prisoners. So many Negroes are arrested on the vaguest sus-
picion that those who are actually sent to prison may more likely be a
representative group of criminals than those who are only arrested.
Table i shows that there are about three times as many Negro males
in prisons and reformatories as there are native white males, in proportion
to the sizes of their respective populations, and that the rate for Negro
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