Abstract
More than any other ‘Northern’ country, the United States is distinctive in the degree to which its social, economic and cultural development has been entwined with the global South from the beginning, and we cannot adequately understand the state of crime and punishment in the United States without taking that uniquely ‘Southern’ history into account. In this paper, I sketch some of the dimensions of one crucial reflection of that Southern legacy: the extraordinary racial disparities in the experience of violent death between African-Americans and whites. These disparities contribute substantially to radically different patterns of life and death between the races. But their structural roots remain largely unaddressed, and in some respects, the prospects for seriously confronting these fundamental inequalities may be receding.
This chapter was originally published as: Currie, E. (2017). Confronting the North’s South: On race and violence in the United States. International Journal for Crime, Justice and Social Democracy 6(1): 23–34. doi:10.5204/ijcjsd.v6i1.382.
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Notes
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The distinctive pattern of private and official violence in the American South also probably had a shaping influence on the overall American pattern of gun ownership and gun violence, which also sharply distinguishes the United States from other ‘Northern’ nations. That connection is sufficiently complex to require a treatment of its own.
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Currie, E. (2018). Confronting the North’s South: On Race and Violence in the United States. In: Carrington, K., Hogg, R., Scott, J., Sozzo, M. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Criminology and the Global South. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-65021-0_3
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