Race and Criminal Violence: A Demographically Disaggregated Analysis of Urban Homicide

The most prominent explanation for the disproportionate involvement by blacks in criminal violence is the subculture of violence theory (Wolfgang and Ferracuti, 1967; Curtis, 1975). Recently, several studies have attempted to test the subculture of violence thesis by examining the direct effect of racial composition on the aggregate homicide rate in multivariate analysis. However, the aggregate homicide rate fails to distinguish the effects of racial composition from environmental context, thereby confounding the interpretation of community and individual-level influences. These studies thus have been unable to test key sociological propositions derived from subcultural theory. In this article, we address the race and crime issue by examining the structural sources of variation in age-, race-, and sex-specific rates of homicide offending in major U. S. cities.