Marlene Alcantar

From the article, "Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Structural Disadvantage and Crime: White, Black, and Hispanic comparisons" by Jeffery T. Ulmer, Casey T. Harris, and Darrell Steffensmeier, the method that they used to get the data is from using census place-level data from California and New York. The goal of this study is to find out what is going on with racial/ethnic disparities in violence. They do so by focusing on the relationship between race/ethnic gaps in the differences in violent crime amongst those groups. The dependent variables were black-white, Hispanic-white, and black-Hispanic gaps in homicide and violent index. Violent index is the sum of arrests for homicide, aggravated assault, forcible rap, and robbery. The way that they calculated the gaps were by subtracting the race/ethnic disaggregated arrests from one another. The independent variables were three indicators of disadvantages from the gaps. Those three indicators were poverty, unemployment, and female headship. Each of these indicators were measured differently. Poverty is measured as the percentage of residents below the poverty line. Unemployment is measured as the percentage of labor between the ages of 16 and 59 that is unemployed. Female headship is measured as the percentage of families who have children under the age of 18 that are taken care of by a female lead. Some independent variables that they did not mention was age, crime record, demographics, and location-rural, suburban, or urban. There was also some control variables in this study, and these were young male population, population density, and police per capita. The findings from this article was that blacks have the highest homicide and violent index crime rates, followed by Hispanics and then whites.  Another finding was that blacks and Hispanic poverty levels are greater than twice of whites. Also, Black female headship is three-times greater than white female headship. The most important finding that I thought was no surprise to me, was that the mean black-white gaps were significantly larger than the Hispanic-white and black-Hispanic gaps.

From the article, "The Enduring Racial Divide in Death Penalty support" by John K. Cochran, and Mitchell B. Chamlin, it talks about the divide between whites and blacks in the United States with the death penalty issue. The method that they used to retrieve this data was from three separate studies, two local surveys of venirepersons and the General Social Surveys. This study tried to examine and understand the reason for such a big divide between blacks and whites with capital punishment. The independent variables for this study were racial differences in socioeconomic status, religion/religiosity, political ideology, positions on right-to-life and other social issues, fear of crime and victimization experience, experience with the criminal justice system, philosophies of punishment, and attribution styles. While the dependent variables were the race/ethnicity of black, white, and differences of how they are effected by the capital punishment support.  The most important finding from this was that Whites show significantly higher levels of support for capital punishment than Blacks. Another important finding was that the cumulative data file of the GSS revealed that 72.4 percent of the White respondents supported capital punishment, while only 43.9 percent of the Black respondents supported it. The difference in that is a 28. 5 percent difference that divides the blacks and whites on capital punishment. They also found from the data that Black-White and Hispanic-White differences in death penalty support was not due to differences in economic status, subcultural orientations, political persuasion, religion, right-to-life views, support for welfare, distributive justice, perceptions about criminal justice, fear of crime, victimization experience, media exposure, nor attribution styles. Lastly, they found race to be one of the strongest correlations of death penalty support in the United States because it has an average gap of twenty percent between White and Black levels.