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Race, Crime And The Pool Of Surplus Criminality: Or Why The "War On Drugs" Was A "War On Blacks", Kenneth B. Nunn
Race, Crime And The Pool Of Surplus Criminality: Or Why The "War On Drugs" Was A "War On Blacks", Kenneth B. Nunn
Kenneth B. Nunn
The War on Drugs has had a devastating effect on African American communities nationwide. The concept of the pool of surplus criminality may explain the drug war's focus on African Americans. Faced with a perceived drug problem, White Americans naturally identified African American people as the source of that threat and targeted them for police harassment and penal control. There are ways in which the drug war may be construed as a race war. The disproportionate impact on the African American community, evidence that policy makers anticipated the drug war would disproportionately harm the African American community, and the historic …
Factors Influencing Racial Disparities In Traffic Enforcement In Massachusetts, Jack Mcdevitt
Factors Influencing Racial Disparities In Traffic Enforcement In Massachusetts, Jack Mcdevitt
Jack McDevitt
This dissertation seeks to understand the extent to which community-level or organizational-level factors are related to the level of racial disparity in traffic enforcement in Massachusetts. Prior research has demonstrated that racial disparities exist in the ways traffic laws are enforced in Massachusetts and in many other communities across the United States. Little research, however, has focused on what factors may be associated with these disparities. Two theoretical frameworks suggest potential explanations for the disparities that have been identified: racial-threat theory and police-organizational theory. Racial threat theory suggests that racial characteristics of a community, such as the size of the …