ABSTRACT
The idea of ‘black crime’ and more generally the relationship between race and crime are seen as recent phenomena, and, while our focus will be on explanations for current patterns of ethnic minority crime, it would be appropriate to start with a brief reminder that this is not a new issue. ‘Scientific’ approaches to the notion of racial differences and hierarchies are seen as originating at the time of the Enlightenment – with Enlightenment philosophers associating civilization with white European peoples and regarding other cultural and racial groups as less rational and moral than these white populations. Phillips and Bowling (2002) refer to Gobineau’s 1853 essay on The Inequality of Human Races in which ‘negroes’ are described as having mental faculties that are ‘dull or even non-existent’ and as killing ‘willingly, for the sake of killing’. Later in the nineteenth century, Lombroso (whose theorizing is examined more fully below) argued that there was a clear link between race and crime: ‘many of the characteristics found in savages, and in the coloured races, are also to be found in habitual delinquents’.
