The Economics of Race and Crime

The relationship between crime and the economy has received too little attention from researchers. This volume remedies that deficit, resurrecting several classic writings on this elusive topic by and about blacks, and presenting new contributions by researchers at the frontier of work on the subject. Among the landmark articles included are W.E.B. Dubois' famous examination of crime in Philadelphia, an analysis of black criminal behavior by Walter Willcox, who was chief statistician of the Census Bureau at the time he wrote this essay, and excerpts from the ninth Atlanta Conference on Negro Crime. The frontier articles use quality microdata to understand particular aspects of criminal justice processes. They address the relationship between employment and criminal behavior, trade-offs among education, employment, and crime, and the link between overall economic conditions and rates of incarceration. Among the authors represented in the landmark research articles are Harold Votey and Llad Phillips, Richard Freeman, David Good and Maureen Pirog-Good, Dario Melossi, and Samuel Meyers and William Sabol. Richard MaGahey concludes the volume with comments on the current status of research in the field. This volume captures the emerging tension within scholarship on race and crime, and provides both a reflective vision of work in this area as well as state-of-the-art research by leading scholars.