Dr Alpa Parmar Awarded British Academy Small Grant

Dr Alpa Parmar, Departmental Lecturer in Criminology and Dr Coretta Phillips (LSE) have been awarded funding from the British Academy for their project Black, Asian and White Minority Ethnic Offending: Unravelling the Mechanisms at the Level of Agency, Structure and Culture. The project will run from April 2016 to April 2018 and will be using life histories and visual methods to capture data.

This study examines why young black Caribbean, black African and mixed race men are more vulnerable to committing crime and being prosecuted than Pakistani and Bangladeshi men in the UK, despite being similarly socio- economically disadvantaged. It will also be the first study to explore the offending and non-offending trajectories of white minority ethnic young men. In 2012, 11% of British national male and female prisoners were of Black origin despite comprising only 3% of the general population while those of Asian origin were proportionately represented. So far, the persistence of these entrenched patterns remains unexplained, whilst the prison population continues to grow. This project, which lays the foundation for an international comparative study, will establish the role of economic, familial, cultural, religious factors and institutional racism and discrimination, which may explain these groups' different lifestyle and offending pathways. Reasons for ethnic disproportionality amongst those who enter the CJS, are vital to developing knowledge based policy measures.