Abstract
There has been a steady accumulation of literature on racial differentials in crime and the response of the criminal justice system. A neglected component of societal response to crime has been the volume of prosecution expenditures. This article seeks to repair this neglect by examining state level difference inper capita prosecution expenditures in 1980 using a multiple regression equation. The results show that, holding other factors constant, lower prosecution expenditures are associated with higher percentages of blacks in a state’s population. The relationship of this to discrimination is discussed in terms of England.
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Notes
See Samuel Myers, “Black-White Differentials in Crime Rates,”Review of Black Political Economy, Vol. 10 No. 2 (1980), pp. 133–152; “Racial Differences in Post-Prison Employment,”Social Science Quarterly, Vol. 64 No. 4 (1983), pp. 655-669; “Race and Punishment: Direction for Economic Research,”American Economic Review, Vol. 74 No. 2 (1984), pp. 288-292; Llad Phillips & Harold Votey, “Black Women, Economic Disadvantage and Incentives to Crime,”American Economic Review, Vol. 74 No. 2 (1984), pp. 293-296; Kwabena Gyimah-Brempong, “Empirical Models of Criminal Behavior: How Significant a Factor is Race,”Review of Black Political Economy, Vol. 15 No. 1 (1986), pp. 27-44; special issue ofReview of Black Political Economy, Vol. 16 Nos. 1-2 (1987).
This work was begun by Alfred Blumstein, “On the Racial Disproportionality of United States’ Prison Populations,”Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, Vol. 73 (1982), pp. 1259–1281. The failure to find racism in the criminal justice system has provoked heated public debate, culminating in the new National Academy of Science report on the status of black Americans, which concludes that there is still no evidence of systemic discrimination in the criminal justice system.
Gunnar Myrdal,An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy (Pantheon Books 1962, first published 1944).
This is explained in most textbooks of public economics while a useful short outline is given by Robert Ekelund & Robert Hebert,A History of Economic Theory and Method (Mcgraw-Hill 1983), pp. 522-523.
Edward Mathis & Charles Zech, “The Community Demand for Police Officers,”American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Vol. 44 No. 4 (1985).
See L. Carrol & P.I. Jackson, “Race and the War on Crime: The Sociopolitical Determinants of Municipal Police Expenditure in 90 Non-Southern U.S. Cities,”American Sociological Review, Vol. 46 No. 2 (1981) and David M. Gordon, “Class and the Economics of Crime,”Review of Radical Political Economy, Vol. 3 No. 1 (1971).
The variables used here are derived from Thomas F. Pogue, “Effect of Police Expenditure on Crime Rates: Some Evidence,”Public Finance Quarterly, Vol. 3 No. 1 (1975), pp. 14–44. The instrumental variables are as follows PINC, PCTOT, POP, POPGR, DENSE, POV, YTH1, YTH2, PCPOL, UR. Sources and definitions of these are given in Chart I.
On the issue of imprisonment, see Samuel L. Myers & William J. Sabol, “Unemployment and Racial Differentials in Imprisonment,”Review of Black Political Economy, Vol. 16 Nos. 1-2 (1987), pp. 189–209; and Samuel Cameron, “Determinants of the Prison Population: An Empirical Analysis,”International Journal of Social Economics, Vol. 16 (1989), pp. 17-25. On policing see Samuel Cameron, “Police Cost Functions for England and Wales,”Applied Economics, Vol. 21 No. 10 (1989), pp. 1279-1289.
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Cameron, S. Race and prosecution expenditures. Rev Black Polit Econ 19, 79–90 (1990). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02899933
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02899933