By Ian Jobling • 5/5/08
Heather Mac Donald has just published a wonderful piece debunking liberal myths about race and crime in City Journal. Her article serves as a good compliment to The Color of Crime, which I wrote while I was working for New Century Foundation and which covers much of the same ground. The gist of Mac Donald’s article is that blacks experience higher rates of incarceration not because of police or judicial bias, but because they commit crimes at far higher rates than non-blacks do. The most powerful evidence comes from surveys in which crime victims are asked about the race of those who robbed or assaulted them. These surveys allow one to measure the percentage of criminals who are black. Generally speaking, the percentage of those arrested for a crime who are black is about the same as the percentage of criminals who are black, indicating that police are not racially biased in arrests.
Mac Donald also takes aim at the myth that harsh sentencing for crack offenders, who are almost all black, is responsible for racial disparities in incarceration rates. In fact, crack offenders make up less than one percent of prison populations, and blacks are almost as likely to be incarcerated for other crimes as they are for drug offenses.
Liberals would have you believe that American law enforcement is draconian, but as Mac Donald says, “Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer.” In fact, very few first time property crime offenders go to prison, even if they steal a car.
Below I’ve copied a few highlights from the article, but the whole thing is well worth a read. For more on race and crime, see The Improvident Races and The Reality of Racial Differences.
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.
From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed over 52 percent 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 percent of all violent-crime arrests, including 56.3 percent of all robbery and 34.5 percent of all aggravated-assault arrests, and 29.4 percent of all property-crime arrests.
The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data. As long ago as 1978, a study of robbery and aggravated assault in eight cities found parity between the race of assailants in victim identifications and in arrests—a finding replicated many times since, across a range of crimes.
In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms. A 1987 analysis of Georgia felony convictions, for example, found that blacks frequently received disproportionately lenient punishment. A 1990 study of 11,000 California cases found that slight racial disparities in sentence length resulted from blacks’ prior records and other legally relevant variables. 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 following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. Following 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.
Critics blame drug enforcement for rising racial disparities in prison… The facts say otherwise. In 2006, blacks were 37.5 percent of the 1,274,600 state prisoners. If you remove drug prisoners from that population, the percentage of black prisoners drops to 37 percent—half of a percentage point, hardly a significant difference. (No criminologist, to the best of my knowledge, has ever performed this exercise.)
The per-capita rate of imprisonment increased three times from 1973 to 2000; the number of state and federal prisoners grew fivefold between 1977 and 2007, from 300,000 to 1.59 million. When inmates in jails are included, the total number in correctional facilities at the end of 2007 was 2.3 million, according to the Pew Center on the States. One in 100 adults is in custody.
Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer. It can be disconcerting for the average law-abiding citizen to hear a prosecutor’s typology of the crime universe: most thefts, for example, are considered “nonserious crimes” that do not merit prison sentences, unless they concern a huge amount of money or took place in the victim’s presence. Steal an unoccupied car or burgle an unoccupied home and you’ll probably get probation; hijack a car from a driver or stick up a pedestrian, however, and you’ll probably go to prison.