Class Essay ⋆ Criminal Justice Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In much of the modern world, social class as a distinct system of stratification contains fluid boundaries, and determining an individual’s or family’s social rank requires a subjective approach. In societies without slavery, peasantry, or caste, the individual and family don’t have a clearly defined and concrete social position. Furthermore, where class boundaries are more porous, there is a greater probability of social mobility in comparison with other traditional systems of stratification. In the United States, factors that determine social class include relative wealth, occupational prestige, power, affiliations, and perception. Perception implies that class depends on the group who constructs its meaning.

Criminal justice as an institution is charged with developing and implementing practices based on fair and rational treatment of all members of society. Administers of justice face the challenge of determining appropriate penalties, using consistent and relevant criteria to evaluate the severity of the transgression and the level of harm done to the victim. Prejudices rooted in social distinctions may have a powerful influence not only in the discretionary actions of criminal justice professionals, but also in the construction of laws and even in the determination of what constitutes behavior undesirable enough to be criminalized.

Crime as Correlate of Downward Mobility

The Dennis Gilbert and Joseph Kahl model of social class contains six distinct tiers in descending order: the capitalist class, the upper-middle class, the lower-middle class, the working class, the working poor, and the underclass. Crime is committed by people belonging to all classes, though certain types of crime are perceived as belonging to one class or another. Reaction to such crimes appears to correlate with the social class with which the crimes are associated. People who commit corporate violence, tax fraud, or embezzlement are not generally perceived as belonging to a criminal class or as living in a high crime neighborhood. Crimes associated with a lower-income strata, such as burglary and drug possession, are perceived by the wider society as deviant, personally threatening, and endemic to communities belonging to the “sub middle class.”

Although a pattern of maldistribution of justice may appear individualist on the surface, such patterns produce collectivistic punitive results. When segregated residential patterns and targeted surveillance are combined, entire communities become increasingly prone to high concentrations of disenfranchised adults, households lacking a sufficient “breadwinner,” and a shrunken tax base, which in turn negatively affects the amount of revenue available for much-needed services such as infrastructure maintenance and public education.

The urban myth that standardized test scores of third-grade African American and Hispanic males are used to predict how many prisons to construct has been debunked; however, there is an element of truth in the myth. Test scores do predict dropout rates, and level of education spuriously predicts prison population. Persons with no high school diploma or its equivalence constitute the greatest proportion of inmates, compared with prisoners with high school diplomas, with some college, and with college degrees.

As a consequence of poverty in the midst of an affluent society, members of the sub middle class have limited ability to attain relative economic sufficiency. In accordance with Robert Merton’s thesis on social strains, members of such populations have an increased reliance on the informal economy or other illegal activities in order to meet society’s demands. Examples of the informal economy range from undocumented income from unlicensed child care services, hair salons, and “shade tree mechanics” to more illicit activities such as racketeering, the reselling of stolen merchandise, or the distribution of controlled substances.

By the early years of the 21st century, a large majority of the U.S. population was in the lower middle class or working class groups. Both groups experienced a degree of vulnerability to downward social and economic mobility. According to economist Paul Krugman, the bottom 90 percent of the population between the years 1973 and 2003 experienced a 7 percent decrease in real wages, adjusted for inflation. Nevertheless, the same population experienced continuous socialization toward relatively high consumption levels, despite the steady eroding of their purchasing power or the decline in their ability to adjust economically to abrupt industrial shifts.

Beyond the effects of poverty, the general consensus of research of the late 20th century and early 21st century indicates that the trajectory of widening economic disparity correlates with the presence of violent crimes in industrialized societies. In a global context of societies that are considered industrializing or less industrial, the presence of wide economic disparity serves as a predictor of violent uprisings and various other forms of political violence.

Differential Justice

Differential justice refers to patterns of treatment during the time of arrest, judgment, or sentencing of individuals based on group membership, whether by race, ethnicity, gender, age, or other variables of perceived external characteristics. Critical race theorists such as Derrick Bell, Patricia Williams, Kimberle Crenshaw, and Richard Delgado argue that a significant portion of the U.S. legal system has structured laws with racially coded implications.

Racial profiling functions as a form of differential justice in that racial biases play a role in determining suspicion or probability of occurrence of legal violation. The famous Harvard University study of “implicit associations” reveals that the stimuli received from perceived race, ethnicity, and gender accompanies an instant conclusion drawn without prior knowledge based on prejudices. Such subliminal attitudes have the ability to seep into professional practices such as law enforcement and the judicial system.

Law enforcement policies, for example, allow for routine traffic stops with reasonable cause, such as if officers suspect a moving violation. External, nonbehavioral indicators, however, can also serve as the basis for suspecting criminality, and the traffic code is conveniently expansive enough to allow an officer wishing to make a stop to justify the stop with a citation or warning as a means of legitimate cover. With the goal of detecting drug trafficking on highways and interstates, California Highway Patrol (CHP) officers who received Operation Pipeline training were instructed to target African American men with dreadlocks and presumed Latino men traveling in large groups as a means of increasing the probability of finding controlled substances. Operation Pipeline was effective in the seizure and dismantling of large-scale transportation and distribution of illegal drugs. Yet, the “racial profiling” practiced by CHP stirred controversy because of the assumption that unoffending motorists were likely engaged in criminal activity based on their ethnicity.

In 2012, under the administration of Governor Jan Brewer, U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton ruled that Arizona law enforcement may request individuals to display proof of immigration status while investigating other possible legal infractions if the police suspect that the individual is present in the United States illegally. The controversy in this law lies in the potential for disproportionate police targeting of persons of presumed Latino origin, which could result in wrongful arrest or detainment. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Islamophobia was heightened to such a degree that the first racial-profiling action to result in an arrest following the attack was of a Christian Indian American. In August 2013, Judge Shira Scheindlin ruled that New York City’s “stop-and-frisk” policy disproportionately targeted racial minorities.

Differential justice also occurs when members of different classes commit identical offenses. The solicitation and exchange of controlled substances are no more legal for the rich than for the poor. Yet the affluent drug addict has greater economic resources to obtain illegal substances and may engage in a drug habit on his or her regular income; whereas the poor addict may resort to additional criminal activity in order to obtain the means of acquiring illegal drugs. Furthermore, wealth provides greater access to more resources for substance abuse counseling and professional rehabilitative treatment when the higher-income addict chooses to quit, while arrest remains the more likely outcome for the poor addict.

The punitive element of fines appears fair on the surface because there typically exists standard monetary penalties for specified offenses. However, such fines and court costs have a disproportionately greater affect on persons living on smaller incomes than on affluent individuals.

Class also matters in terms of arrest, processing, and legal defense. Following arrest, individuals in the United States are entitled to a presumption of innocence until they are found guilty at trial. Affluent detainees have an advantage over the poor in having the economic resources to post a bond for their release; whereas the poor may have to remain incarcerated until the date of their trial. As a result, a suspect found to be innocent would have served excessive and unnecessary time in jail because of an inability to post a bond. Furthermore, the affluent have the advantage of being able to select private legal counsel to assist in their defense, whereas the poor must often accept assistance from assigned public defenders who may fail to serve a defendant’s best interests for a number of reasons, including inadequate time and resources to discover exculpatory evidence or mount a competent defense.

Fairness without justice occurs when the rules that apply to a population apply equally, yet there exists consistent patterns of different outcomes. Laws function as a critical sector of federal, state, local, and municipal government, and the institutions of criminal justice are supposed to operate with absolute neutrality. Yet, laws themselves have the capability to shape parameters and form trajectories that result in the formation of patterns of social, economic, and political inequality. Furthermore, the interpretation and application of laws is subject to hermeneutical biases or direct human error influenced by culturally embedded implicit associations.

Deviance as Class Construct

Pyrrhic defeat theory describes the ideologically based construction of marginalizing society’s “undesirables” as a means of justifying racist and xenophobic beliefs. Such beliefs further include the promotion of activities that contrast with a society’s collective self-interests. The theory derives from Émile Durkheim’s assertion of the necessity of social deviance for the function of society in that it contributes to increased social solidarity. The result of the construction of deviance is the formation of in-group alliances based on their distinction from the out-group “fringe” members of society. Furthermore, in-group privilege incentivizes notions of deviance as a means of reaffirming an individual’s social standing within a structural hierarchy. In the context of criminal justice, pyrrhic defeat theory asserts that a continuance of crime is necessary to sustain the system charged with eliminating it.

The perception of deviance is subject to the sympathies of those involved in criminal justice. Victim discounting occurs when the seriousness of a crime is evaluated based on the victim’s perceived external characteristics, such as race, ethnicity, gender, nationality, or sexual orientation. Factors that are prejudicial to the victim may effectively neutralize the actions of the offender in the minds of police, juries, and even the public.

Furthermore, the perceived distinction between street crime and white-collar crime reflects social inequality. Street crimes include activities such as robbery, assault, murder, prostitution, burglary, and selling controlled substances. Such activities tend to be associated with lower-income social classes. Particularly violent crimes in this category are sometimes accompanied by acute media attention, resulting in public demands for a swift retributive response. White-collar crimes frequently occur within the context of an esteemed professional occupation and tend to be associated with middle and upper social classes. Examples of white-collar crime include misappropriation of funds, insider stock trading, price fixing, legal or medical malpractice, or violations of occupational safety or environmental statutes. When such crimes occur, there tends to be a broad multitude of victims and typically they result in a significantly greater monetary cost to society. Nevertheless, the public perception of corporate criminals tends to be significantly more favorable than that of street criminals.

Though numbers of white non-Hispanic people in poverty are not significantly different from numbers of African Americans and Latinos, people of color are proportionately more represented in low-income categories. They are also more likely to be perceived as belonging to a “criminal class” than white people with a similar background. According to research conducted by Devah Pager, Caucasian men with criminal records have a greater chance of receiving an interview for prospective employment compared with African American men with clean records. Former felons are disproportionately African American. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander noted that in the early 21st century the number of African Americans in the criminal justice system exceeded the number enslaved in the mid-19th century.

Although policy makers in a democratic society have taken a sacred oath of office, they face a challenge of “dual servitude.” Legislators theoretically represent their constituents, especially the will of the majority of voters. Yet, if their campaigns receive significant donations from individuals, special interest groups, or political action committees, those elected officials face significant pressure to support legislation that favors the will of those who made contributions, sometimes contrary to the will or interests of a substantial proportion of their constituents. Lawmakers have a powerful incentive to write laws and vote for bills that favor the more affluent, whereas the poor have limited access to the halls of power and are less likely to vote. The interests of a largely disenfranchised community are less likely to be represented in the making and implementing of laws, and as an “out group” its members are more likely to be viewed as deviant by “in-groups” charged with administering the laws.

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