A reader asks:
In your recent posts regarding the racial disparity in conviction rates, you dismiss using conviction statistics as a proxy for knowing who is committing crime. However, you haven’t made the counter-argument — you simply assume that all races commit crimes at the same rates, and show how a racial bias could produce unequal conviction rates, but that’s begging the question. Do you have any data supporting that assumption?
I would be happy to provide you with data.
From a 2008 post at Simple Justice, Scott Greenfield takes a commenter to task for defending Paul Cassell’s absurd claim that Blacks are disproportionately imprisoned because Blacks simply commit more crimes than Whites. The commenter references FBI UCR statistics:
…Access the FBI uniform crime reporting program on their website. You can wade thru the stats or cut to the chase and just go to table 43, arrests by race, 2005 (last year of stats ). These corrolate with the DOJ victim stats. For instance, blacks make up approx. 13% of the U.S. population. In 2005 they made up 56% of the robbery suspects.
..We don’t get to make up the facts, just our opinions, and it’s not racist if it’s fact. Based on what the facts are, as contained in DOJ and FBI stats, and my own personal experience, black folk, mainly menfolk, commit a higher frequency of crime than other ethnic groups or races. Much higher. If you have any evidence that I’m wrong in my belief, bring it out or referrence it, I’d like to see it. I’m willing to change my opinion if the facts have changed, or I read them wrongly. But I’m not willing to substitute my emotion for my intellect.
What’s the problem with using these statistics as proof that Blacks commit more crimes than Whites? As Greenfield notes, conviction rates have almost zero relevance to who is actually committing crimes:
The stats do not show who commits crimes. They show who are arrested, prosecuted and convicted for crimes. The breakdowns don’t account for variables. If blacks and whites live in the same upper middle class neighborhood, do they still commit 56% of the crimes? If not, then you eliminate the variable of black from propensity and are left with poverty. If the lives and circumstances of whites and blacks were reversed today, then the stats would be the opposite because race plays no role in propensity to commit crime.
Blacks are disproportionately in prison because they are disproportionately investigated, arrested, and sentenced to prison for behavior that all races manifest in equal measure. As I explained in November:
Imagine you have two groups of individuals: call them A and B. Let us assume that both Group A and B participate in behavior that is punishable as a crime at equal rates.
Now let us imagine that the police are allowed wide discretion in whom they investigate for crime. Obviously, if the police decide to pay closer attention to one group rather than the other, they will discover more crimes within that group, and thus, make more arrests. But remember that both Group A and B participate in behavior punishable as crime at roughly equivalent rates. Yet because the police pay extra-close attention to Group B, more of Group B’s members end up in jail. This gives people the impression that members of Group B are more likely to be criminals, even thought Group A participates in illegal behavior at the same rate as Group B.
If all races were investigated, convicted, and sentenced to prison at the same rate that Blacks in America are today, the criminal justice system would grind to a halt underneath the weight of its own “efficiency.” Critical race scholars in legal academia have been screaming about this for years, but the inequities in our system continue unabated; in part because hacks like Paul Cassell, a former U.S. District Court judge, Supreme Court law clerk, and current professor of Law at Utah, continue to lend legitimacy to these theories by offering up statistics with zero critical analysis.
Documentary: Dark Girls, Directed by Bill Duke and D Channsin Berry
This video is a trailer preview for the Documentary “Dark Girls,” by Bill Duke and D. Channsin Berry. In this video, Black women of various shades discuss the emotional impact that their skin color has had on their lives, as well as the complicated sociological issues that have arisen in the Black community as a result of skin color.
As you listen to these women speak, a very clear and recognizable theme arises: the darker you are, the more ugly you are considered by society. The dynamics of hundreds of years of racism have conspired to create a strain of aesthetics that pervades not only our society generally, but also the Black community; an aesthetic which has been internalized by many people in the Black community, which results in isolation and harm to women with darker shades of skin color.
The stories are heart-breaking. One woman relates the story of asking her mother to put bleach on her skin so that her skin would turn a lighter shade. Another woman relates the story of a friend who’s never seen her natural hair, because since she was young, her mother would put chemicals in her hair to prevent it from getting “frizzy.” Another woman recalls the story of how one person told her “she’d been left in the oven too long.”
This is an experience, I feel, that much of White America does not have access to, and doesn’t realize is even happening. Much has been written on the subject of “Black inferiority” and the issue of Black self-esteem, particularly with respect to Black women. I think this is an extremely necessary, powerful documentary that needs to reach a wider audience. This is a piece of the experience of Black America that I think a lot of people would do well to expose themselves to, in order to better understand just how deep and resilient the legacy of slavery, segregation, Jim Crow, and racism in our country runs, and how it has shaped the culture of our society, particularly as it pertains to the Black community.
(Source: vimeo.com)
Years later, at a junior tennis tournament, I found myself sharing a hotel room with a white youngster from Mobile, Alabama. Late one evening, right as we were about to shut off the lights and go to sleep, this guy decided to tell me a final joke, one in which a reference to a “nigger” constituted the punch line. As soon as that line escaped his lips, his eyes bulged while the rest of his face froze. He knew immediately that he had made himself vulnerable to a judgment that he deeply feared. Why had he done so? I suspect that he had become so comfortable with me that he ceased, at least temporarily, to see me in terms of race. Or perhaps he had merely granted me the status of an honorary white. Either way, the reference to “nigger” seems to have suddenly made him aware anew of my blackness and thus the need to treat me differently than other acquaintances. I said nothing during the awkward silence that enveloped the room as his voice trailed away from the failed joke.
He apologized.
I do not recall whether or not I actually felt offended, but I do remember that from that moment on, the ease that has marked our budding friendship vanished.
"— Randall Kennedy, Nigger: the Strange Career of a Troublesome Word
— James Forman, Jr., Racial Critiques of Mass Incarceration: Beyond the New Jim Crow, 87 N.Y.U. L. Rev. 21, 28–31 (2012).
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I emitted audible chortles.
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NYPD Lieutenant Daniel Davin, according to the testimony of NYPD Detective Al Hawkins, who is aiding a discrimination suit against the NYPD which alleges that Black suspects were “treated like animals” by NYPD supervisors, and that Black officers in the NYPD were made to work in a hostile environment.
My personal favorite, allegedly said by NYPD Captain James Coan:
They are f——-g animals. You make sure if you have to shoot, you shoot them in the head. That way there’s one story,
The New Professionalism, ladies and gentlemen.
Which ethnic subset of American teens is most likely to become substance abusers and thus possessors of illegal drugs, alcohol, or tobacco?
a. Caucasians; b. Hispanics; c. African-Americans.
If you answered “c” you are wrong and probably Caucasian.
If you are the kind of person who obtains news from Twitter,...
Reflecting on this video, from MSNBC’s “Up w/Chris Hayes,” Mark Finkelstein writes:
[W]hat does it say about the liberal chattering class,...
I really don’t need you to tell me again why raising the minimum wage leads to increased unemployment.
From a 2008 post at Simple Justice,...
the...
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