Open AccessPrisoners and Paupers
Author(s) -
Susan Olzak,
Suzanne Shanahan
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
american sociological review
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 6.277
H-Index - 194
eISSN - 1939-8271
pISSN - 0003-1224
DOI - 10.1177/0003122414529771
Subject(s) - salience (neuroscience) , poverty , white (mutation) , foreign born , dominance (genetics) , criminology , argument (complex analysis) , inequality , race (biology) , political science , demographic economics , sociology , demography , gender studies , psychology , immigration , economics , law , medicine , mathematical analysis , biochemistry , chemistry , mathematics , cognitive psychology , gene
This article uses data on prisoners incarcerated for misdemeanors in late-nineteenth-century U.S. cities to assess a three-part argument that asserts that threats to white dominance prompted efforts of social control directed against African Americans and foreign-born whites: (1) For African Americans, competition with whites for jobs instigated efforts by whites to enforce the racial barrier. (2) For the foreign-born, upward mobility became associated with white identity, which allowed those who “became white” to be seen as less threatening. We thus expect the threat from foreign-born whites to be highest where their concentration in poverty was greatest. (3) We suggest that violence against a given boundary raises the salience of group threat, so a positive relationship should exist between prior violence against a group and its level of incarceration for misdemeanors. Using panel analyses of cities from 1890 through 1910, we find supporting evidence for the first two arguments and partial support for the third.