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Legal Cynicism and (Subcultural?) Tolerance of Deviance: The Neighborhood Context of Racial Differences

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Robert J. Sampson  and
Dawn Jeglum Bartusch
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Abstract

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We advance here a neighborhood-level perspective on racial differences in legal cynicism, dissatisfaction with police, and the tolerance of various forms of deviance. Our basic premise is that structural characteristics of neighborhoods explain variations in normative orientations about law, criminal justice, and deviance that are often confounded with the demographic characteristics of individuals. Using a multilevel approach that permits the decomposition of variance within and between neighborhoods, we tested hypotheses on a recently completed study of 8,782 residents of 343 neighborhoods in Chicago. Contrary to received wisdom, we find that African Americans and Latinos are less tolerant of deviance—including violence—than whites. At the same time, neighborhoods of concentrated disadvantage display elevated levels of legal cynicism, dissatisfaction with police, and tolerance of deviance unaccounted for by sociodemographic composition and crime-rate differences. Concentrated disadvantage also helps explain why African Americans are more cynical about law and dissatisfied with the police. Neighborhood context is thus important for resolving the seeming paradox that estrangement from legal norms and agencies of criminal justice, especially by blacks, is compatible with the personal condemnation of deviance.

Type
Articles
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 32 , Issue 4 , 1998 , pp. 777 - 804
Copyright
Copyright © 1998 by The Law and Society Association

Footnotes

Originally presented at the 1997 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, St. Louis. The article was prepared while the senior author was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA. Funding support from the American Bar Foundation, Carnegie Corporation of New York (Grant B-6346), and the Project on Human Development in Chicago Neighborhoods is gratefully acknowledged. Thanks are due the anonymous reviewers for helpful comments.

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