Race, Class, and the Perception of Criminal Injustice in America

The results of two research literatures, one dealing with criminal sentencing and the other with public ranking of crime seriousness, have raised doubts that conflict exists in American society about issues of criminal justice. This paper offers a different and more direct approach to this issue by analyzing public perceptions of criminal injustice and by assessing the capacity of conflict theory to explain them. Our analysis is based on a national survey, and it focuses on the race, class, and status positions of the respondents, with class position measured in neo-Marxian terms. Three major findings are (i) that black Americans are considerably more likely than white Americans to perceive criminal injustice; (ii) that regardless of race, members of the surplus population are significantly more likely than members of other classes to perceive criminal injustice; and (iii) that class position conditions the relationship of race to the perception of criminal injustice, with the division between the races in these perceptions being most acute in the professional managerial class. These findings constitute substantial evidence that race and class conflict exist with regard to issues of criminal injustice, and that neither kind of conflict can properly be understood without consideration of the other. Implications for Marxist and non-Marxist criminologies are indicated.