Impact Of Class And Culture On Crime Rates

My research question is, Does class and culture affect crime rates in North America? I will go into depth with my research to answer how class affects or how it does not affect the crime rates. I also want to answer why class and culture affects crime rates, or why it does not.

The Future of Children

Wildeman, C. , Western, B. , (2010). Incarceration in fragile families. The Future of Children. This paper discusses research on crime and incarceration in fragile families. The purpose of their research is to find any correlation between culture and incarceration. Culture is a terribly vague word with a lot of different meanings, so they went into different subsections of culture. They looked at the social class, gender, race, education and street life around the people and related each category to the incarceration rates in that culture. The research was focused on the inner city, where most of the people are low-income minorities with a lot of broken homes. Usually, these people have unskilled labour jobs and don’t have a post-secondary education.

The findings of these studies were not surprising; they found that the people most likely to go to prison in the United States of America are poor minority men with little schooling. The most interesting finding was that African American males born between 1975 and 1979 who finished their high school education, only have an 18% incarceration rate.

However, those who dropped out of high school now have an incarceration rate of 69%. Even further, those who went to college for some period of time only have a 7. 6% incarceration rate. This is only one subsection of the article. I chose this source because it fits my topic almost perfectly. Not only does the article look at the class of the people incarcerated, it gives detailed information in many other aspects of the culture. It hits all the talking points I want to go to in my paper.

The source is also very helpful because it gives intelligent opinions backed up with detailed statistics and facts. This allows me to use very specific numbers in my paper. The source is also very important to social science. It helps bring to light the reasons why incarceration rates have risen dramatically recently and displays why it happened. As I mentioned before it covers a vast majority of the topics offered to us. This allows me to compare my findings to other categories of impact. For example; comparing the impact class has, to the impact that gender has. All of those things combined become the culture of the place. This matters because then we can make predictions based on the culture of a place. For example, a young black male is more likely to be incarcerated in the slums of Detroit than a young black male living in the countryside of Ohio. Being able to make these connections means we can show why issues like this have nothing to do with race, but everything to do with culture. That is why this source will be able to help me in my research paper.

Homeless and incarcerated

Saddichha, S. , Fliers, J. M. , Frankish, J. , Somers, J. , Schuetz, C. G. , & Krausz, M. R. (2014). Homeless and incarcerated: An epidemiological study from Canada. This study was carried out in three large cities in British Columbia; Vancouver, Victoria, and Prince George. The study’s purpose was to find a connection between homelessness and incarceration. They were trying to find out if there was a correlation and if so, why? It focuses on the underprivileged people in British Columbia and why there is such a high incarceration rate among them. They asked people who were over the age of nineteen, were able to give consent to the study, and self-identified as homeless. They used exclusively face to face interviews done by mental health professionals. They asked 250 people in Vancouver, 150 people in Victoria, and 100 people in Prince George. Each participant was given $30 to take part in the study. It is also important to note, they described incarceration as more than one night in any kind of custody involving the legal system including jail.

Their findings were, incarcerated homeless people were often male, went through foster care, and were often on some sort of drugs (crack cocaine or crystal meth). They also found a high percentage of depression among them. This study will be incredibly useful for me because it deals with my topic directly. With my topic being on incarceration of all classes I need to find the rates of all perspectives. This gives me the perspective of the lowest class financially. The study also goes into background information about homeless people. This is helpful because it gives me a beginning to understand why their incarceration rate is quite high. It gives me my first piece of information I need.

The study is perfect for my uses because it is very direct and straight to the point. It is easy to read and makes a lot of sense. They provided where the people are from and how they got the information they did. They also made sure it was very random, there was no targeting of certain genders, races, religions, etc. This study is also very useful to society because it gives them a better knowledge of the people they see on the street. The study covers some aspects of how they got to where they are now. This can help us avoid the problems in the future. Drugs are often involved and the reason why they are in this situation. This study gives us the basic knowledge we need to start to formulate a plan. It is always worth it to gain knowledge of the problem we are trying to address.

Family Complexity

Sykes, B. L. , Pettit B. C. (2014) Mass incarceration, family complexity, and the reproduction of childhood disadvantage. This study is meant to study those people who are already incarcerated and their families. They studied black, white, and Hispanic families who have been exposed to some kind of incarceration. The purpose was to find how race and class inequality in parental imprisonment contributes to childhood disadvantage. They took data from different databases and put them together with their own calculations. This was to make the new studies they needed to complete their research. They looked at the total number of minor children (1-17) had parents that were incarcerated. They did this for every year so they could see the rise or fall of the data. Along with this, they looked if there were multiple kids with multiple partners, the gender of the parent, what race they are, and what level of education they received.

Their results were very predictable. The highest incarceration rate comes from uneducated parents of black children. They also found that the rates went up by over 300% since 1980. This source at first glance does not seem to help me with my topic. Because my topic is not very widely studied it is hard to find sources that fit perfectly. If you look deeper into the paper and read the study graphs you can see there are indications of class and culture differences all over them. The first example is the education question. Education can show the class that people come from. It is far more likely for a child to see their parent go to prison if they only achieved a high school education, rather than a college degree. This can be explained because of the culture college gives you.

The people there want to succeed and people get dragged into that wanting to succeed as well. When you don’t go to college, for the most part, there isn’t that drive to succeed like there is in other cultures. This relates to incarceration rates because of people in these situations who haven’t achieved the goal of the “American dream”. When the “American Dream” is not achieved people usually react with deviant behaviour. From this study, I can make my own connections between the results and the class structure, helping discover the answer to my research question.