OREO-5. Constructing the African American Drug Criminal in America

Patrick Dimasin¹
Faculty Mentor: Levent Atici, Ph.D.^2
1West Career and Technical Academy
²Division of Research, Office of Undergraduate Research

ABSTRACT
Historically, African American people have had an implicated relationship with the criminal justice system: higher arrest rates, higher conviction rates, and worse sentencing results are common, especially in drug-related crimes. In this study, I aim to identify the relationships of the social environments of participants in two categories, race and gender. Using the contact and threat hypothesis, I seek to analyze the correlation between positive and negative attitudes of “outgroup” individuals and the perception of what a “violent” criminal appears to be. Results from previous studies have affirmed that increased intergroup contact increases positive attitudes, but an increasing size of an ethnic outgroup increases the risk factor for negative attitudes like threat perception. Using a phenomenological foundation, I was able to conduct correlational research that found increased intergroup contact is more likely to lead to more “violent” perceptions of darker-skinned, male, drug-related criminals. These findings strongly suggest that threat hypothesis has a strong potential in controlling subconscious biases towards varying ethnic groups, and has a future in determining whether these findings hold true in other categories of crime. I suggest that if the threat hypothesis is true for public perception of criminals, then these results should provide a foundation for further inquiry of threat hypothesis’