Heather Mac Donald writing at City Journal has an excellent (and somewhat lengthy) where she asks, “Is the Criminal-Justice System Racist?“.
And then answers her own question with, “No: the high percentage of blacks behind bars reflects crime rates, not bigotry.”
The favorite culprits for high black prison rates include a biased legal system, draconian drug enforcement, and even prison itself. None of these explanations stands up to scrutiny. 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.
Which is exactly the position I’ve held anytime the subject comes up. Simply put — blacks are in prison at a disproportionate rate because they commit a disproportionate amount of crime.
Period.
Especially in the one crime statistic that I care the most about — homicide. Where the black homicide rate was over seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.
A couple of other bothering statistics for you:
- From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed over 52 percent of all murders in America.
- 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
Race hustlers, racial activists, and criminal apologists alike don’t like to talk about the fact that blacks are simply committing more crimes than everybody else. Instead they look to find someone else (the system, corrupt cops, prejudice, whitey, etc.) for their plight.
Until the black community and black leaders take a serious look at how they are going to address and change this trend, black men will continue to commit the most crimes in our nation, and they will continue to be constitute the majority of our prison populations.
Aside from the merits of your question you have to acknowledge that your explanation is a case of circular reasoning:
“Is institutional racism in the justice system? No, blacks are convicted of more crimes.”
this is a fantastic oversimplification/misrepresentation of the posts theme. it implied, and writefully so, that there is a direct positive correlation between frequency of crime committed by black people and the proportions of incarcerated black people. taking a “that doesn’t prove causation” position fails to acknowledge the relevance of the data and the very real possibility that black people commiting proportionately more crime is a substantial cause of the incaceration numbers.
“conviction rates” are very different from crime rates and/or arrest rates. if we want to speculate about the degree to which these are influenced by racial bias, wouldn’t we examine the races of those wrongfully convicted and then look for disproportions compared with arrest or alleged/believed infraction?