ABSTRACT
One of the basic principles of sociology is that we are profoundly affected not just by our immediate personal situation but also by the larger social system. Patterns of inequality are major features of how social systems work, whether these patterns are based on race, class, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, or age. This chapter explores how the criminal justice system reflects and reinforces these class inequalities in terms of various categories of crime. Race is another socially constructed category, meaning that although there are differences among people, many of these differences are not due to natural racial characteristics, but instead result from social and economic structures. Sociologists and other social scientists have been doing careful empirical research on the facts of crime for more than a century and, as a result, know a great deal about the nature and distribution of crime and the social conditions involved in illicit behavior.
