Black Rage in the American Prison System (Criminal Justice: Recent Scholarship). This item is unavailable.Black Rage in the American Prison System (Criminal Justice: Recent Scholarship)

Noble's thesis is that African-American inmates transport "black rage" into the prison subculture, which significantly affects prison violence rates. He finds previous studies superficial and raises the bar for future examinations by proposing a sensitive and taboo theory to explain the strong racial patterns observed in prison victimization. Noble's work supports the importation theory of the inmate subculture proposed by Irwin and Cressey. He builds on their theory by advocating for the inclusion of race and other cultural factors concerning the inmate and staff populations into predicative models. He concludes that prisons with greater racial disparities between the inmate and staff populations experience higher staff assault rates.

Rosevelt L. Noble received his Ph.D. in Sociology from Vanderbilt University in 2003. He is currently Director of the Workforce Investment Act with the Tennessee Higher Education Commission (THEC) and a Senior Lecturer in the Sociology Department at Vanderbilt, where he teaches courses on Prison Life, Criminology, and Statistics.