ABSTRACT
This chapter explores prevalent factors that have played a role in the disproportionate incarceration of African-American males (both adults and juveniles) from the 1960s to the present. The thrust of this chapter is that historically speaking, it is only after the 1960s that the American crime scene has come across the specter of the so-called black crime problem. Although members of the African-American community, like other ethnic and racial groups, have committed crimes and misdemeanors in the past, it was only in the aftermath of the Civil Rights era that the black crime problem seems to have taken a new urgency to its etiological, epidemiological configuration prompting criminologists and criminal justicians to study it as a separate crime entity; it is in the context of this “rediscovery” that the pre-1960s “docile” black male has been transmuted into the epitome of the fullfledged predatory urban criminal capable of inflicting unimaginable levels of harm and violence on the American society. In this transmutation of the black male into the epitome of the victimizer of the whites, two macro social/institutional forces have played significant roles: First, the news media has consistently depicted the black crime problem as predatory and violent. Second, from the 1960s to the present, a large number of inner-city communities have experienced cycles of illicit-drug related violence propagating the popular notion that the bulk of black crime is of a predatory nature perpetrated by black males. This has occurred despite the fact research-based studies have shown that with the exception of rape and robbery, the rest of predatory crime is committed by poorly educated and economically challenged white males. We start with the general profile of American prisoners as a prelude to a more detailed exploration for the reasons of disproportional incarceration of the African-American males during the 1960-2007.
