Sport, race, and crime

In the past decades the media and scholars have paid grander attention to College athletes committing crimes on college campuses. Particularly athletes involved in American football and basketball are constantly exposed as offenders, often for violent and sex crimes. In consequence, many activists and organizations have pressured the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) to adopt policies such as mandatory background checks for athletes. While the NCAA has rejected this idea so far, several universities have adopted their own policies to effectively mirror their future athletes. The public has also demanded policy changes to increase campus security and to allow universities to monitor their future athletes more effectively. What are these polices? Who benefits from them and who suffers from them? The author hypothesizes that these policies will increasingly disqualify black athletes from participating in collegial sports. Data of the Bureau of Justice Statistics indicates that African Americans, particularly Males under 18, are disproportionally arrested and therefore are more likely to have a negative mark on their criminal record. These findings suggest that policy changes may have a detrimental impact on African Americans pursuing an athletic career and that relying on a discriminative criminal justice system for mirroring athletes is unjustifiable.