Ethnic minority immigrants, crime and the state

Crime is often linked with ethnic minorities in popular ideology, political debate and media reporting. Criminologists have accordingly concerned themselves with these linkages, most often from an empiricist perspective. Critical criminologists need to ask, not only about empirically identifiable connections between ethnic minorities and crime, but why the questions are raised in the first place. Why are they raised in this way? Whose interests does this serve? What are the organising categories (and their related interests) which define 'ethnicity', 'minority' and 'majority' or mainstream, and how are they connected to those which define crime, wrongdoing, degree of harm, need for intervention and punishment, justice of intervention punishment, and so on?