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Abstract: This article/essay was originally derived as a symposium speech or presentation at the Second Annual Conference on Race, Gender, and Class Project held on October 20, 2000 in the city of New Orleans. The purpose of this communication was/is to share with non-criminologists the ways in which criminologists and other students of crime and justice approach the study of the relations between class, race, and gender as well as the influences or impact that these may have on the formation, enforcement, and application of criminal justice and the administration of criminal law. In the process of exposing the inequalities of crime, culture, and production, four criminological approaches to the study of class, race,, and gender are identified.
Keywords: class, criminal justice, criminology, gender, and race
In the post-modern and multicultural worlds of criminology and criminal justice characterized by post-structuralism, post-Marxism, post-affirmative action, and post-feminism, the variables of class, race, and gender remain fundamental to both theory and practice. After all, the disciplines of criminology and the fields of criminal justice have always been about the real and imagined differences between "criminals" and "non-criminals." Theoretically, explanations of crime and crime control, regardless of perspective or school of thought, have sought to make sense out of these differences. In the process of trying to sort out these differences, virtually every theoretical framework has addressed class and race overtly, and gender at least covertly. Up until recently, the problem with this line of inquiry was not only that there had been very little, if any, agreement on the effects of these three critical variables, but worse yet, folks were still debating whether or not these variables matter.
By the turn of the 21(st) century, however, a growing number of criminologists from several orientations, including but not limited to critical, feminist, Marxist, positivist, and integrative, had come to appreciate, in different yet related ways, that class, race, and gender matter. Today, many inquiries are interested in finding out just how exactly class, race, and gender matter in the production of crime and criminal justice. Some inquiries focus on class, race, and gender as autonomous variables. Some inquiries focus on these three variables as inter-related. Of course, key questions on the complexities of these relations and on the means...