Which sociological perspective would you choose in order to best understand how race, class, and gender impact the rates of crime in the United...

Of course, the proponents of each of the three main sociological perspectives would say that their perspective is the best-suited to explaining how race, class, and gender affect rates of crime in the United States.  If I had to pick one of the three perspectives, however, I would pick symbolic interactionism.

Symbolic interactionism is based on the idea that all aspects of our lives have meaning for us.  We look at material objects, people, actions,...

Of course, the proponents of each of the three main sociological perspectives would say that their perspective is the best-suited to explaining how race, class, and gender affect rates of crime in the United States.  If I had to pick one of the three perspectives, however, I would pick symbolic interactionism.

Symbolic interactionism is based on the idea that all aspects of our lives have meaning for us.  We look at material objects, people, actions, and other such things and we assign meanings to them.  When we do this, we help to determine how we are going to behave.  The meanings that we assign to various things affect our behaviors and, therefore, would affect rates of crime.  Let us see how race, class, and gender would affect rates of crime in this perspective.

In social sciences, gender means something different from sex.  Sex is a biological thing, having to do with what physical parts a person has. Gender is the attitudes that society holds about what a person of a given sex should be like.  In our society, most people hold certain attitudes about what it means to be male or female.  When we look at a female person, we define them as someone who should typically be less prone to violence.  We define females as people who should tend to follow rules.  Since women tend to interpret their sex in this way, we have lower crime rates than we would if women felt that it was more acceptable for women to transgress social norms.

Class also affects the way people define themselves and their surroundings.  People who are in the middle and upper classes tend to define most parts of society benignly.  They see laws as things that are meant to help them. They see governmental authority as a force for good in the community.  They generally interpret our society as a friendly place, one in which they have a stake.  Poor people are less likely to interpret these things in the same way.  For these reasons, we can argue, poor people are more likely to commit crimes than richer people.  (We are also more likely to interpret poor people’s actions as crimes, making them more likely to commit things that we define as crimes.)

Finally, race is a major determinant of crime rates (though this is mixed up with class as so many non-whites in the US are poor). Nonwhites are much more likely to interpret American society as being hostile to them.  As we have seen from the Black Lives Matter movement and white reactions to it, nonwhites are more likely than whites to interpret the police as a force that is hostile to them.  Nonwhites might interpret our economic system not as a system that gives them the chance to advance but as a rigged game that tends to keep them down.  For these types of reasons, we see higher crime rates among non-whites than among whites.

For these reasons, I see symbolic interactionism as the best way of explaining how gender, class, and race affect crime rates in the US.