SOC 111 (MonWedFri 10AM) - Crime Quiz Essay Response - Alexander Ray Salmeron

Alexander Ray Salmeron - 547 words

Today I read two articles, "The Enduring Racial Divide in Death Penalty Support" by John K. Cochran and Mitchell B. Chamlin and "Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime" by Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager. These articles regard racial divisiveness on a political issue and the role race plays in identifying criminal activity, respectively.
In the article "The Enduring Racial Divide in Death Penalty Support", John K. Cochran and Mitchell B. Chamlin conduct a study which attempts to identify the significant factor accountable for the divisiveness between the viewpoints of white and blacks over the death penalty. Countless factors such as race, socioeconomic status, religiousness, and bureaucratic stance of respondents are each taken into consideration in this study. Prior literature analysis concludes that there are eleven significant reasons for racial support of the death penalty from both whites and blacks. A majority of these factors derive from opposing viewpoints of whites and blacks on political stances such as abortion, the criminal justice system, discrimination, religion, government spending, and economic spending. This study collected data from three sources, including two studies conducted in urban populations and one from the NORC- General Social Survey. The GSS prompted three questions regarding the death penalty, with each question worded differently in order to obtain significant data. Subfactors were assessed by measuring the eleven factors of death penalty support from both race groups. Findings exhibit that whites hold elevated levels of support for the death penalty compared to blacks. There is also indication that approval rates of the death penalty from both parties have increased over time. The gap between death penalty approval rates of whites and blacks has also increased, with whites supporting the punishment further. The NORC-GSS was unsuccessful in pinpointing the essence of the racial interstice in capital punishment support.
In "Black Neighbors, Higher Crime? The Role of Racial Stereotypes in Evaluations of Neighborhood Crime", Lincoln Quillian and Devah Pager explore possible relationships between perception of crime in neighborhoods and the population of black men in such neighborhoods. Surveys conducted in Baltimore, Chicago, and Seattle, accompanied by crime statistics provided by police departments from each of these cities, accounted as data for this study. The main sources of data used for this study were extracted from prior findings of researchers like Richard Taub and Garth Taylor (1997), Terme. D. Miethe (1998), and Ralph Taylor (1999). Each of the three prior studies regard individual and neighborhood elements which account for perceptions of crime. The total percentage of black men in a neighborhood served as the independent variable in all three studies. The perception of criminal activity in the respondent's community served as the dependent variable in all three studies. In the Chicago study, a total of 2,796 respondents of Hispanic, Caucasian, and African-American background were extracted from the initial total of 3,312 respondents. The incorporation of Hispanic and Caucasian backgrounds served as a method in identifying significant crimes committed by young African-American males. The Baltimore and Seattle studies gathered a base sample of 4,494 and 609 respondents, respectively. The Chicago study prompted respondents to answer five questions regarding neighborhood crime, whereas the Baltimore and Seattle studies inquired one question. Questions were aimed at finding a correlation between crime rates and young African-American males within a neighborhood. Significant findings were revealed for each city. Each study indicates that there is significant correlation between perception of criminal activity within a neighborhood and the percentage of young African-American males residing in that area.