High Incarceration Rate of Blacks Is Function of Crime, Not Racism
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After all, in 2006, blacks were 37.5% of all state and federal prisoners, though they’re under 13% of the national population. About one in 33 black men was in prison in 2006, compared with one in 205 white men and one in 79 Hispanic men. Eleven percent of all black males between the ages of 20 and 34 are in prison or jail.
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The black incarceration rate is overwhelmingly a function of black crime. Insisting otherwise only worsens black alienation and further defers a real solution to the black crime problem.
Racial activists usually remain silent about that problem. But in 2005, the black homicide rate was more than seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed more than 52% of all murders in America. In 2006, the black arrest rate for most crimes was two to nearly three times blacks’ representation in the population. Blacks constituted 39.3% of all violent-crime arrests, including 56.3% of all robbery and 34.5% of all aggravated-assault arrests, and 29.4% of all property-crime arrests.
The advocates acknowledge such crime data only indirectly: by charging bias on the part of the system’s decision makers. As Obama suggested in the Martin Luther King debate, police, prosecutors and judges treat blacks and whites differently “for the same crime.”
But in fact, cops don’t over-arrest blacks and ignore white criminals. The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data. No one has ever come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports.
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A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution after a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. After conviction, blacks were more likely to receive prison sentences, however—an outcome that reflected the gravity of their offenses as well as their criminal records.
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The media love to target the federal crack penalties because crack defendants are likely to be black. In 2006, 81% of federal crack defendants were black while only 27% of federal powder-cocaine defendants were.
Since federal crack rules are more severe than those for powder, and crack offenders are disproportionately black, those rules must explain why so many blacks are in prison, the conventional wisdom holds.
But consider that in 2006, only 5,619 crack sellers were tried federally, 4,495 of them black. It’s going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so crack defendants a year to account for the 562,000 black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006—or the 858,000 black prisoners in custody overall, if one includes the population of county and city jails.
Moreover, the press almost never mentions the federal methamphetamine-trafficking penalties, which are identical to those for crack. In 2006, the 5,391 sentenced federal meth defendants were 54% white, 39% Hispanic and 2% black. No one calls the federal meth laws anti-Hispanic or anti-white.
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The assertion that concern about crack was motivated by racism ignores a key fact: Black leaders were the first to sound the alarm about the drug, as Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy documents in “Race, Crime, and the Law.” These politicians were reacting to a devastating outbreak of inner-city violence and addiction unleashed by the new form of cocaine.
The crack market differed radically from the discreet phone transactions and private deliveries that characterized powder-cocaine distribution: Volatile young dealers sold crack on street corners, using guns to establish their turf. The national spike in violence in the mid-1980s was largely due to the crack trade, and its victims were overwhelmingly black inner-city residents.
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The first is that drug enforcement has been the most important cause of the overall rising incarceration rate since the 1980s. Not true.
Violent crime has always been the leading driver of prison growth, especially since the 1990s. In state prisons, where 88% of the nation’s inmates are housed, violent and property offenders make up over 3 1/2 times the number of state drug offenders.
Next, critics blame drug enforcement for rising racial disparities in prison. Again, the facts say otherwise. In 2006, blacks were 37.5% of the 1,274,600 state prisoners. If you remove drug prisoners from that population, the percentage of black prisoners drops to 37%.
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The JFA Institute, an anti-incarceration advocacy group, estimated in 2007 that in only 3% of violent victimizations and property crimes does the offender end up in prison. And taking criminals out of poor inner-city communities has allowed the many law-abiding residents there to get on with their lives, freed from constant fear.
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The continuing search for the chimera of criminal-justice bigotry is a useless distraction that diverts energy and attention from the crucial imperative of helping more inner-city boys stay in school—and out of trouble.
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(Posted on April 30, 2008)
Comments
Heather MacDonald, White Nationalist?
Posted by Howard in Las Vegas at 6:29 PM on April 30
Time to respond to some of the left’s foolishness in this stead.
Blacks tend to live in political jurisdictions that are heavily or majority black. Therefore black criminal defendants, thanks to the population of their cities and counties, and thanks to Federal civil rights laws, which virtually guarantee that a black criminal defendant will have at least one black man or woman on his jury (the prosecution cannot preemptively dismiss a black prospective juror if the defendant is black), these defendants are far more likely to have a nullification-happy jury. And these cities and counties tend to have black or white liberal judges, prosecutor’s offices, and politicians, that hand out lenient sentences (20% of St. Louis City’s first-time armed robbers get no prison time), or make prosecution decisions based on racial favoritism or pandering. Then there are the cops, run from the top by the same kind of aforementioned blacks and liberals, which, thanks to mandates against “racial profiling,” scrutinize blacks on the street far less than they should. And such a P.D. will have a lot of black cops (again thanks to meddling by the Federal judiciary and/or the U.S. Just-Us Department, imposing lower standards for black recruits), and many black cops tend to “hear no evil see no evil speak no evil” (not all but way too many), especially in the realm of black woman prostitutes.
Put all this together, and you will realize that many black criminal defendants have “the wind to their backs” in the criminal justice system. And with all these advantages, still, the prisons are disproportionately black. It would be even higher if the criminal justice system were truly “fair.”
Posted by Question Diversity at 6:31 PM on April 30
“At a presidential primary debate this Martin Luther King Day, for instance, Sen. Barack Obama charged that blacks and whites “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, (and) receive very different sentences … for the same crime.”
“Not to be outdone, Sen. Hillary Clinton promptly denounced the “disgrace of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates so many more African-Americans proportionately than whites.”
It’s absolutely amazing that there are these types of people running for the highest office in the land who are so out of touch with reality to the point of coming across as absolute fools.
I don’t know how McCain would regard high black crime, and I’m not a supporter of his, but I’m going to guess that he’s not as naive as these other two fools.
The dimwitted Spike Lee responded on the O’Reilly Factor to O’Reilly’s question as to why such a greater percentage of blacks are in prison than whites by saying that it was because whites have more money and could get out on bond.
This lack of intelligence is rife throughout the black community, which leads me to believe that not one of them can put together the fact that blacks commit more crimes per capita than whites, and they really believe the system is unfair to them.
This country isn’t able to function properly anymore due to the degeneration of the overall population as well as the self-appointed elites who think they know how to run it.
It seems that the two party system selects candidates who are the biggest fools, and the black community seems to be getting dumber and more militant with each passing year.
A nation so dysfunctional has got to be on the way out, and well it should be because rationality and intelligence have been slipping critically for the past several years.
The best thing that could happen to sane, conservative whites, who have a backbone, is for this economic steam roller to continue to roll over the nation until it is dead, gone and buried.
I’d rather have a tri-state area along one of the coasts or the Gulf, consisting of sane, aware whites, than the entire country where non-whites are included, especially blacks.
Posted by ice at 6:31 PM on April 30
Why is it, that whenever Bantus call for more gun control, they love to point out that Bantus are more likely to be victims of crime than any other race; but, in the same breath, they bemoan the fact that a higher percentage of Bantus are in prison? It’s as if they want to excuse Bantu criminals for their actions by not having them incarcerated.
I think the real reason is they want gun control so that Caucasians are stripped of their firearms, and won’t be in a position to fight back against Bantu criminals. That’s hy Nagin, the Chocolate Mayor of New Orleans had guns confiscated. That’s why Nutter of Philadelphia signed illegal gun control legislation in Philadelphia that went against PA’s state gun laws.
If Bantus expect law-abiding Caucasians, Hispanics and Asians to turn in their weapons, thy’re crazier than Mugabe.
From my cold, dead hands, Zulu!
Posted by Soprano Fan at 6:37 PM on April 30
I’ve noticed that most blacks have a childish inclination to place the blame on white racism for their own problems. The blacks who blame white racism for their disproportionate, high incarceration rates are again showing another example of their childish inclination to blame others for their own problems.
Part of growing up is learning how to take responsibility for your own actions. Obviously, 80% or more of blacks still haven’t gone beyond this level.
Posted by Mark P. at 6:44 PM on April 30
While I was locked up, one black inmate griped to me that the system was “racist”.
I looked him in the eye, and said, “I’m here, too, and for the same reason you are. We screwed up.”
Maybe the US does lock up too many people, folks wo would have been better off on probation. We tried two systems of justice, one for whites, and one for blacks. The feds decided that wasn’t “fair”, so then we tried applying white standards of punishmet to blacks, which didn’t work at all. Now the law treats everyone as if they were black.
The US now not only locks up a higher percentage of its population than any other nation in the world, but a larger number in absolute terms.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 7:22 PM on April 30
Excellent article. The color of crime but printed by a non-‘nazi’ organization. Though I wonder if now they’ll also just become ‘nazi’ and therefore no longer a valid source now.
Posted by Diamed at 7:53 PM on April 30
“…in 2005, the Black homicide rate was more than seven times higher than that of Whites and Hispanics combined..” Why am I not surprised the Investor’s Business Daily is willing to conceal the murder rate among their favorite import, Hispanics. Any statistic that doesn’t separate Blacks, Whites, Hispanics, and any other relevant groups is dishonest. It’s like saying that the U.S. imported ten billion gallons of oil and vodka in 2005.
Posted by Schoolteacher at 7:55 PM on April 30
If anything, far too few black people are in prison. Maybe the best solution is to simply stop pretending. Turn some of our largest cities into prisons. Anything goes inside the perimeter. You can do anything you want except leave.
Posted by at 8:59 PM on April 30
Face facts, they commit stupid crimes without foresight. However this inadequacy provides jobs for alot of people in corrections. So, they really do provide something meaningful in society afterall other than sports entertainment.
Posted by at 9:00 PM on April 30
Oh there they go again…..pity poor ole black me….I got caught robbing a little ole white lady and beat her up..and they had the nerve to arrest me and lock me up for ….seven whole years……wahhhhhh wahhhhhh wahhhhhhhhh…cry me a river….or better yet…go to africa do the world a favor!!!
Posted by lydia at 9:32 PM on April 30
“Why am I not surprised the Investor’s Business Daily is willing to conceal the murder rate among their favorite import, Hispanics.”
Funny, I’ve never read about any pro-Hispanic editorials in IBD.
They are consistantly anti-illegal aliens.
You must be thinking of the Wall Street Journal.
Posted by at 9:35 PM on April 30
9:35 PM: I have never read the Investor’s Business Daily. I assumed from the name that they are part of the Big Business/Republican front, which places profits above all other considerations. I stand corrected. I’d still like to know why they would contaminate their statistics by lumping Whites and Hispanics together.
Posted by Schoolteacher at 3:36 AM on May 1
Since blacks commit half of all crime they are incarcerated at a rate far lower than the crime that they commit. They have to stop complaining.
Posted by at 8:21 AM on May 1
11% of all black men in jail is pretty high. The truth is incarceration rates for all races skyrocketed during the 1960’s even as poverty rates were going down. The crime rate has been high ever since. They’ll blame white society for black crime though and whites will blame themselves.
Posted by at 9:49 AM on May 1
“The blacks who blame white racism for their disproportionate, high incarceration rates are again showing another example of their childish inclination”
I think many blacks who actually commit crimes don’t really care. Oh, I’m sure if using such a line about racism was in their own best interest they would use it. Well, you could be onto something. It could be true that 80 plus percent of them haven’t really ‘grown up’.
Posted by at 9:56 AM on May 1
People usually buy powdered cocaine with their own money. Crack is usually bought with someone else’s money.
Posted by at 12:43 PM on May 1
Federal crack rules are no longer more severe than those for powder cocaine. The law was recently changed, with retroactive sentence-reductions.
Posted by Michael C. Scott at 5:54 PM on May 1
The police don’t target crack dealers. Anybody, black or white who stands in the open, on a city street and sells drugs to strangers who drive up in cars is both an idiot and a sitting duck. The police catch the in your face/easy to catch criminals first and more often than not these are the blacks who engage in such stupid drug dealing behavior.
Posted by Robert at 7:31 PM on May 1
This lack of intelligence is rife throughout the black community, which leads me to believe that not one of them can put together the fact that blacks commit more crimes per capita than whites, and they really believe the system is unfair to them.
The number is probably pretty low, comparable to the percent of whites who are (true) race-realists, and adjusted (downward) for intelligence.
Posted by Svigor at 7:41 PM on May 1
Blacks are criminals by nature. So their purported high incarceration rate is simply a reflection of their crime-prone mentality.
Witness the absurdity featured on Friday’s MSN News and verifiable by accessing the Fort Worth Star Newspaper (online). A Black (of course), was stupid enough to try to cash a stolen check for $360 BILLION — emphasis on “stupid.” As a result he got arrested and charged with several other offenses, drugs, carrying an illegal weapon.
Blacks are more likely to produce career criminals than ANY OTHER racial group. One sees it all too often in our daily news stories (in spite of their efforts to conceal the racial make-up of the perps). One sees this also in the horror stories emanating out of the Dark Continent (Sub-Saharan Africa). Need I say any more?
Posted by Fed Up at 5:14 PM on May 2
As long as fools and criminals can vote the dishonest media and politicians will pander to them. Why? - because the world is full of fools and criminals and they are easy prey when it comes to securing their votes. Thy lying politicans will racialise crime statistics and so secure the vote of those dumb enough to believe them. One could improve the statistics slightly by incarcerating the lying white liberals who perpetuate the myth to serve their own devious ends.
Posted by Bear at 1:54 AM on May 5