ABSTRACT
William Edward Burghardt Du Bois began to research and formulate his ideas on crime and justice. Du Bois's aims to examine the impact of the 1803 statute enacted to suppress the slave trade. Along with the convict-lease system, Du Bois identified the courts as another source of injustice. Du Bois believed that the final cause of African American criminality was segregation. It was his thought that this practice was an exaggerated and unnatural separation of the races. Several observers of Du Bois's analysis have commented on its similarity to the turmoil generated by social disorganization. So when the science of criminology formally emerged in the United States in the early 1890s, and the criminal anthropological school began to produce a body of literature that primarily attributed African American criminality to their racial stock. Therefore, Du Bois asserted that, in the case of the Negro there were special causes for the prevalence of crime.
