Abstract
Bonnie Berry’s edited volume Appearance Bias and Crime confronts what she terms “the last and least considered form of discrimination” and its pernicious relationship to crime (p. 1). Berry’s volume provides a useful overview of appearance bias and crime, surveying a large number of subtopics and constructing the foundations of a unified literature primed to usher in a storm of new work on the topic.
What Berry sacrifices in depth, as only so much can be said within each single chapter of an edited volume, she makes up for in breadth. The book is presented in five parts, with editorial writings and questions framing each section comprising two or more chapters. This formatting is especially useful to scholars hoping to use the book as a course reader that introduces the topic and the range of applications of appearance bias in crime. The 15 chapters included in the book describe issues like unattractiveness and criminality, targeted identities, the influence of appearance on social control, identification of terrorists, and the salience of visible differences. Contributions range from empirical studies to thoughtful essays, utilizing a variety of qualitative and quantitative methods. Importantly, this diversity of applications signals the importance of appearance bias across a large number of disciplines and to a large number of real-world contexts.
Some particular standout chapters in this work are Robert Agnew’s contribution on appearance and juvenile delinquency, Lorenzo M. Boyd and Kimberly Conway Dumpson’s chapter on Black Lives Matter, and Brent Teasdale, Taylor Gann, and Dean Dabney’s discussion of attractiveness and traffic citations. These chapters are particularly well taken because they represent the history of the topic, the contemporary standing of the topic, and how our assumptions about the topic might not match our reality.
In the first of these, a reprint of Agnew’s (1984) “Appearance and Delinquency,” Agnew unpacks the social meaning behind the finding that unattractive young people are found to be more engaged with crime and delinquency than their attractive counterparts. Using labeling, strain, and social control theories, Agnew postulates that unattractiveness may yield more blame for delinquent acts and proposes a more complicated system of understanding the relationship between attractiveness and crime. The inclusion of this chapter is a very smart editorial decision as it grounds the rest of the book in the history of the discipline while simultaneously foreshadowing the complex discussion to come. By including this chapter, Berry welcomes both new and inexperienced readers to this area.
That’s not to say that Berry’s book is not also keeping time with contemporary changes in appearance bias and crime. In their chapter titled “Black Lives Matter: The Watchdog for the Criminal Justice System,” Boyd and Dumpson provide a nuanced look at the entanglement between law, society, policy, and appearance as identity in the contemporary United States. They unpack police killings, reactions to massive protests, deployment of stop and frisk techniques without sufficient justification, and legal outcomes in this space. This chapter does a lot of work to demonstrate how appearance bias in crime carries extreme consequences and continues to do so, beyond the world of academic studies.
Finally, Teasdale, Gann, and Dabney provide a third useful perspective by taking social assumptions about attractiveness and crime and putting them to the test. They confront the myth of the “attractive woman who gets out of traffic tickets” using 35 months of police ride-along data to code discretionary traffic citation outcomes. They find that it is not the attractive woman who avoids citations, but the attractive man. This chapter reifies the importance of a book on the topic of appearance bias in crime, since what we think we know might not be true after all. Importantly, this chapter also advocates for considering intersectionality in studies of appearance bias and crime. Teasdale, Gann, and Dabney describe the population of the study as primarily black and Latino, suggesting that we need to consider the definition of attractiveness within that particular social context. They further propose that it might not be purely attractiveness that matters, but rather “conventional” attractiveness as defined by a myriad of other contextual factors.
While Berry’s book as a whole purports to distinguish appearance bias from a host of other so-called “isms” (i.e., racism, sexism, etc.), the chapters of the anthology are understandably differently successful in doing so. Some of the works struggle to disentangle concepts like temporary appearance and attractiveness from demographic conditions that we know to be related to perceptions of guilt and innocence (such as race, gender, and SES). While some of the qualitative offerings also fall prey to this challenge, this difficulty is clearer in the some of the quantitative chapters. In these chapters there seems to be more discussion about the interpretation of other variables both theoretically and in the displayed statistical models. In particular, it seems that there is still space in this literature for a paper that demonstrates that a) appearance is not overly correlated with these demographic factors so as to be co-linear, b) the various variables composing measures of appearance aren’t necessarily derivative of a demographic condition (i.e., further study of temporal order in the measurements of appearance), and c) intersectional conditions can be investigated in a way that incorporates the nuance of social context.
Nevertheless, Berry’s volume reveals the complexity innate to the phenomenon of appearance bias and crime in a way not seen elsewhere in the literature. This volume would be a particularly astute choice for someone interested in a concise, yet thorough survey of many different parts of this domain. With this volume Berry will surely accomplish the stated goal of causing “[A]n eruption of new empirical work on this fascinating and troubling topic,” and I would recommend this title to anyone hoping to contribute in this growing space (p. 27).