She pays careful attention here to types of crime within racial groups, finding that people in the U.S. are arrested for essentially the same kinds of crime regardless of race, although the extensiveness of crime differs between groups. Mann then presents and critiques various explanations of minority crime in Chapter Three. Much of this chapter is a refutation of the subculture of violence thesis, with special attention to homicide. The second part of the book focuses on responses to minority crime, including consideration of the intersections between class and race, and, where possible, between gender and race. The material covered in these chapters is organized sequentially, from law making and law enforcement in Chapter Four through court processing and sanctioning in Chapter Five, to corrections in Chapter Six.
Chapter Four includes the usual analyses of policing, adding insights from minority perspectives.
I periods that differentially affected racial minorities. Chapter Five covers the range of criminal justice decision points, from bail and indictment decisions through final sentencing. Special attention is given to processing events prior to sentencing, since research has shown that racial disparities are most likely to be evidenced today in these earlier stages and because there is already an abundance of literature on sentencing. Prosecutorial decisionmaking and sentencing patterns are also thoroughly discussed, with separate reviews of capital and noncapital cases. The various courtroom actors and the discretion available to each are also reviewed in this chapter, including the question of whether the type of defense attorney matters, the influential but often ignored recommendations of probation officers, and the selection and composition of grand and trial juries.