14 DAY TRIAL // Following a study funded with grant money from the US National Science Foundation (NSF), researchers have determined that neighborhoods which experience low-quality social conditions tend to exhibit the largest concentration of people willing to take justice into their own hands. The investigation has also determined that these individuals are very likely to engage in risky behaviors, such as committing robberies, theft, aggravated assaults, and even murder. The root cause for all this is the fact that they do not trust the justice system or the police, PhysOrg reports.
According to Northwestern University (NU) criminal justice assistant professor Kevin Drakulich, who conducted most of the investigation while still at the University of Washington, police, courts and correctional facilities rank extremely low, as far as trust goes, in the eyes of people in poor neighborhoods. The expert bases his conclusions on a research he and his group conducted on more than 6,000 residents from Seattle. He explains that, in the case of some of the African-American communities in this metropolis, toughness, respect and pride underline the code of street justice that individuals live by. This code has little to do with the “official” one.
People living here basically take the law into their own hands, driven by a lack of confidence into what authorities can do. “There is more emphasis on protecting yourself if you don’t have faith in the formal system,” Drakulich says of the results he obtained from the study. His work currently focuses on the correlations between crime and race, an area of expertise that also includes racial profiling. “People are relying on stereotypes to believe there is more crime than there actually is. And they’re avoiding the source of their fears by not having any contact with residents of other races,” he further adds.
“If we can better understand exactly how community social processes either facilitate or deter crime, we can design more effective policies to help the most troubled communities. When parents go to jail, they can’t take care of their kids, and so the children go unsupervised. They can’t bring revenue to their communities. When they get released, their human capital is severely reduced, their chances of marrying are severely reduced,” Drakulich concludes. Over the past 40 years, the United States have been experiencing an unprecedented surge in the number of people being sent to jail.