DOES RACISM ACCOUNT FOR THE DISPROPORTIONATE NUMBER OF BLACKS IN PRISON?

Civil rights activists have made much of the disproportionate number of blacks that are languishing in jails and prisons, blaming their high rate of incarceration on white society's racist criminal justice system. While blacks represent only 13 percent of the total population, they make up nearly 38 percent of all jail and prison inmates.

Barack Obama has complained that "actually, more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities" and that "we have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives." However, George Will argues that "more than twice as many black men 18-24 are in college as there are in jail." And Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute revealed that "from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population."

Here, from a past George Will column, are some excerpts explaining why so many blacks are imprisoned:

The Manhattan Institute's Heather 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."

President-elect 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 are 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."

As I see it, there are more blacks in prison simply because they commit more crimes. Racism has little, if anything, to do with the disproportionate number of incarcerated blacks. Victimologists, like Jessee Jackson and Al Sharpton, have been trying to con us into buying their crap about a racist criminal justice system. Although social conditions are partly to blame for a subculture of crime in the black community, isn't it way past the time for civil rights activists to stop howling that racism is behind every misfortune experienced by black America?