Near the top is the violent criminal. Most of us fall somewhere between the person who obeys every law and the one who delights in breaking them. Using Department of Justice data, we constructed a scale of Standard Criminality . On it we placed black males, blacks, Hispanic males, Hispanics, white males, whites, black females, Hispanic females and white females. As a non-fuzzy threshold for criminality we chose incarceration rate.
Incarceration meets all our requirements.
It is non-fuzzy, unambiguously related to criminality, and reliable data are available. Some data from this publication are reproduced in Table 2 along with quantities derived from them. The standard criminality of the white male is arbitrarily set to zero. Values for other groups are given relative to this zero. The mean difference between any two groups is the difference in their standard criminalities .