DEBUNKING THE MYTH OF A RACIST CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM

"Our criminal justice system is racist." That's what white sociologists in academia, black activists and liberal politicians like Barack Obama have been saying for years. They cite the disproportionate number of blacks serving time in prison. They claim that the laws against crack cocaine, as opposed to those against powder cocaine, were specifically designed to target and incarcerate young black men. And they are convinced that the police stop blacks simply for DWB - "Driving While Black."

Two recent articles have debunked all that crap about a racist criminal justice system. One article, "American Murder Mystery" by Hanna Rosin, appeared in the July/August 2008 Atlantic Monthly with the subheading of "Why is crime rising in so many American cities? The answer implicates one of the most celebrated antipoverty programs of recent decades." The other article, "A Surprising Story on Crime" by George Will, appeared in Townhall.com on June 22, 2008.

Rosin's article dealt with the aftermath of the mid-nineties nationwide eperiment "to free the poor from the destructive effects of concentrated poverty." As part of the federal antipoverty program, the government provided funds to demolish high-rise public-housing projects like Chicago's infamous Cabrini-Green project, and to scatter the displaced project residents throughout other neighborhoods. The overwhelming majority of public-housing residents have been poor African-Americans.

Richard Janikowski, a criminology professor with the University of Memphis, and his wife Phyllis Betts, a housing expert at the university, studied the aftermath of relocating residents displaced by the demolition of Memphis' public-housing projects. The former project residents were given federal "Section 8" rent-subsidy vouchers and were encouraged to use the subsidies to rent housing in new and better neighborhoods.

Janikowski and Betts' studies disclosed that, in many instances, the crimes committed by young blacks in the Memphis projects accompanied the displaced residents to their new neighborhoods. Other studies showed the same results with residents who had left Cabrini-Green in Chicago and who had left public-housing projects in other cities as well. While the relocations flattened out crime in the central cities, crime increased in outlying neighborhoods.

George Will's article really debunks the myth that our criminal justice system is racist. Here are some eye-opening excerpts from his column:

Last July, Obama said "more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities." Actually, more than twice as many black men 18-24 are in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, "We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives." But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute's City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. Furthermore, Mac Donald cites data indicating that:

"In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. 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."

Obama sees racism in the incarceration rate: "We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from." Indeed, in 2006, blacks, who are less than 13 percent of the population, were 37.5 percent of all state and federal prisoners. About one in 33 black men was in prison, compared with one in 79 Hispanic men and one in 205 white men.

But Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offenses: "In 2005 the black homicide rate was over seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined. ... From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed over 52 percent of all murders." Do police excessively arrest blacks? "The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data."

As for the charge that the incarceration rate of blacks is substantially explained by more severe federal sentences for crack as opposed to powder-cocaine defendants (only 13 states distinguish between the two substances, and these states have small sentence differentials), Mac Donald says:

"It's going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so (federal) 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."


There is no doubt in my mind that prior to the civil rights era, the criminal justice system, especially in the South, was discriminatory against blacks. And I am sure that during these enlightened times there will still be occasional instances in which there may be a tinge of racism in the administration of justice. But to charge that our criminal justice system is racist is pure bunk!

A racist criminal justice system? No! A system that is discriminatory against the poor? Yes! When crime accompnies displaced public-housing residents into new and better neighborhoods, what does that tell us? It tells us that crime is a socio-economic problem. And with those young black men who were relocated to new neighborhoods, crime seems to be a cultural probem as well.

The reason there are a disproportionate number of blacks locked up in our prisons and jails is not because ours is a racist criminal justice system - the reason is that blacks commit a disproportiante number of crimes.