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February 26, 2005
Abstract: Blacks and Whites Behind Bars: An Emergent Analysis of Race Proportions in America's Prison System.
This paper is being turned in as part of Richard Wagner's macroeconomic theory class. The following abstract has been submitted to Dr. Jeffery Herbener for consideration to be accepted for presentation at this years Austrian Scholars Conference.
ABSTRACT: The black race is dominantly represented in prison populations in the American public. Various proposals have been presented from different areas of the social sciences to explain this imbalance, but they all seem to take a centralized approach to finding a single phenomenon to explian this aggregative result. This paper will present a brief summary of the major proposed explanations and refute their claims by offering a bottom up approach of emergent therorizing to explain disproportionate race populations in America's prisons. A short review of successful bottom up work (Murray and Hernnstein's Bell Curve and Gary Bcker's Economics of Crime and Punishment) on this topic is presented and saluted as steps in the right direction, but incomplete in application. Finally an emergent diagram of private security services will be explained to offer one plausible contributing factor to race proportions in America's prisons. In conclusion the paper hopes to show the interconnectedness of institutional arrangements that all need bottom up analyses to grant full understanding to the multiple social problmes developed in America's justice system. This paper presents the Austrian paradigm as the best fit for such research and will serve as a proposal to gain support for an applied Austrian research analysis of America's entire criminal justice system.
Posted by djdamico at February 26, 2005 8:01 PM