Employing Du Boi and Myrdal to analyse the US criminal justice system

Forty years after the passage of the Civil Rights Act, low-skilled African Americans face substantial inequalities in income and employment, relative to non-blacks in the U.S. In this article we draw upon theoretical insights from W.E.B. Du Bois and Gunnar Myrdal to explain empirical inequalities for blacks in labor markets and the U.S. criminal justice system. We argue that Du Bois and Myrdal class and caste models help account for much of the racial disparities found in the empirical research on the criminal justice system.