Article about black crime written in 1996 – you know, “before we had the courage” to talk about race

This was written during the first black president’s administration, Clinton, when we didn’t have the courage to discuss race.

This was also written when people posted tomes as articles, believing people had the patience to read for more than a 3 minute spurt. Here are some excerpts –

City Journal-

For God’s sake, let’s be truthful. Especially in urban America, white fears of black crime—like black fears of black crime—are rational far more than reactionary or racist.

—- As a number of analysts have begun to notice, blacks are about 50 times more likely to commit violent crimes against whites than whites are to commit violent crimes against blacks. If you divide the total number of black-on-white violent crimes in 1993 (1.29 million) by the number of black males age 20 to 29 in the population in 1993 (3.94 million), you get a ratio equal to 1,013 violent crimes against whites per 10,000 young black males. If you do the same calculation for the total number of white-on-black crimes (186,000) divided by the total number of twenty-something white males (22.9 million), you get a ratio of 17.6 violent crimes committed by whites against blacks for every 10,000 young white males. Thus, the incidence of interracial black-on-white violent crime by young black males (1,013) is 57.5 times the incidence of interracial white-on-black crime by young white males (17.6). Using different denominators (for example, white versus black males age 15 to 29) moves the statistic down a bit (in the example given, to 48 to 1). But it clusters around “50 to 1.”

—-  In 1991, 372,200 black men were in prison, along with 363,600 white men. About 60 percent of all prisoners in 1991 had committed one or more violent crimes in the past. Suppose that we released 40 percent of the black prisoners—the 40 percent, say, with either no official history of violence or the least severe records of it. That would leave 223,320 black men behind bars. Then, because slightly more than half of the violent crimes committed by blacks are committed against whites, let’s release, say, 55 percent of the remaining black violent male offenders. That would leave 100,494 black males in prison, 27 percent of 1991ís actual total. They would be doing time with 3.6 times as many white males. But since whites in the general population still would outnumber blacks by roughly 8 to 1, the racial “disproportionality” would persist. To make it disappear completely—to get an 8-to-1 white-black ratio in prison—we would have to release all but 45,450 of the 372,200 black men in prison in 1991.

—- Even if, therefore, the justice system punished only those blacks who commit violent crimes—indeed, even if it punished only black violent criminals whose victims were themselves black—blacks would still be “overrepresented” in prison, in jail, on probation, and on parole.

—- …nothing affects crime rates more than the number of young males in the population—and by the year 2010, there will be about 4.5 million more males age 17 or under than there were in 1990: 8 percent more whites and 26 percent more blacks. Since around 6 percent of young males turn out to be career criminals, according to the historical data, this increase will put an estimated 270,000 more young predators on the streets than in 1990, coming at us in waves over the next two decades. Numerous studies show that each succeeding generation of young male criminals commits about three times as much serious crime as the one before it: the occasional fatal knife fight of 1950s street gangs has given way to the frequent drive-by shootings of 1990s gangs.

—- …not only is the number of young black criminals likely to surge, but also the black crime rate, both black-on-black and black-on-white, is increasing, so that as many as half of these juvenile super-predators could be young black males.

—- The bottom line of most of the best research is that America’s justice system is not racist, not anymore, not as it undoubtedly was only a generation ago—in spite of the Driving While Black experience. If blacks are overrepresented in the ranks of the imprisoned, it is because blacks are overrepresented in the criminal ranks—and the violent criminal ranks, at that.

—- Consider the data. A 1993 study of the racial impact of federal sentencing guidelines found that the imposition between 1986 and 1990 of stiffer penalties for drug offenders, especially cocaine traffickers, did not result in racially disparate sentences. The amount of the drug sold, the seriousness of the offender’s prior criminal history, whether weapons were involved, and other such valid characteristics of criminals and their crimes accounted for all the observed interracial variations in prison sentences.

—- Similarly, a 1991 RAND Corporation study of adult robbery and burglary defendants in 14 large U.S. cities found that a defendant’s race or ethnic group bore almost no relation to conviction rates, sentencing severity, or other key measures. In 1995, federal government statistician Patrick A. Langan analyzed data on 42,500 defendants in the nation’s 75 largest counties and found “no evidence that, in the places where blacks in the United States have most of their contacts with the justice system, that system treats them more harshly than whites.”

A 1985 study by Langan of black-white differentials in imprisonment rates demonstrated that “even if racism exists, it might explain only a small part of the gap between the 11 percent black representation in the United States adult population and the now nearly 50 percent black representation among persons entering state prisons each year in the United States.” An otherwise typically liberal-leaning 1993 National Academy of Sciences study voiced the same basic conclusion.

—- It is often asserted that the 1980s war on drugs resulted in a more racially “disproportionate” prison population. The data tell a different story. In 1980, 46.6 percent of state prisoners and 34.4 percent of federal prisoners were black; by 1990, 48.9 percent of state prisoners and 31.4 percent of federal prisoners were black. In 1988, the median time served in confinement by black violent offenders was 25 months, versus 24 months for their white counterparts. The mean sentence lengths were 116 months for blacks and 110 for whites, while the mean times actually served in confinement were 37 months for blacks, 33 months for whites. These small differences are explained by the fact that black violent crimes are generally more serious than white ones (aggravated rather than simple assaults, weapon-related crimes rather than weaponless ones).

—- …liberal experts contend that the penalties for crack cocaine possession and sale are excessive compared with powder cocaine penalties. I concur. And liberals are also right that blacks are far more likely than whites to use and sell crack instead of powder cocaine. But they go badly wrong on two key counts. First, they feed the conspiratorial myth that federal anti-crack penalties were born of a white conspiracy led by right-wing Republicans. Go check the Congressional Record: in 1986, when the federal crack law was debated, the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) supported it, and some CBC members pressed for even harsher penalties. A few years earlier it was CBC members and other Democrats in Congress who pushed President Reagan, against his considered judgment, to create the Office of National Drug Control Policy (better known as the drug czar’s office). And it was President Clinton who recently refused in no uncertain terms to change the federal penalty structure for drug crimes.

—- By the year 2005 we will probably have 200,000 convicted juvenile criminals, half of them black males, in secure confinement, including adult prisons and jails—over three times more than the number of incarcerated juveniles today. The reason for this will not be racism or what OJJDP calls “disproportionate minority confinement.” The reason will be that more black boys grew up without adults who were willing and able to save them—and their victims—from tragedy.

—- Though the vast majority of murders are committed by someone of the same race as the victim, black-on-white murders are more likely than black-on-black murders to be cases of strangers killing strangers and to “involve kidnapping and rape, mutilations, execution-style murders, tortures, and beatings,” according to Rothman and Powers. “These are all aggravating circumstances that increase the likelihood of a death sentence.”

—- Even the raw statistics don’t show much sign of racism. From the day the U.S. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in 1976 through the end of 1993, more than 400,000 Americans were murdered. Over the same period, only 226 killers were executed, 38 percent of them black. In 1993, blacks were 40 percent of the 2,716 prisoners on death row and 36 percent of the 38 convicted murderers executed. The scandalous truth is, most of the thousands of murderers behind bars don’t face too harsh but too lenient a punishment. Most get out of prison. Murderers released from state prisons in 1992 served an average of only 5.9 years. There is no evidence that black murderers get out any less quickly than comparable white ones.

—- Recently a page-one story in the Wall Street Journal tackled the question of “jury nullification” in cases involving black defendants. It is increasingly common for black jurors to “side with African-American defendants against a mostly white-dominated justice system,” even to the point of acquitting black defendants whom the jurors know to be guilty on the legal merits—and even when the victims are black. More black jurors “are choosing to disregard the evidence, however powerful, because they seek to protest racial injustice and to refrain from adding to the already large number of blacks behind bars.” The story noted that in the Bronx, where juries are more than 80 percent black and Hispanic, black defendants are acquitted in felony cases 47.6 percent of the time—three times the national acquittal rate of 17 percent for all races. In Washington, D.C., where virtually all defendants and 70 percent of jurors are black, 28.7 percent of all felony trials end in acquittals. Similar patterns hold in Detroit and several other cities where black jurors predominate. Paul Butler, a black criminal-law professor at George Washington University, was quoted as arguing that in cases involving black defendants charged with nonviolent crimes, black jurors should “presume in favor of nullification.”

—- Indeed, in a highly publicized 1995 report, the Sentencing Project, a Washington-based counterpart of NCIA, found that nationwide about one in three black males age 20 to 29 was under some form of correctional supervision. As the Sentencing Project reported, in 1989 about 610,000 black males in their twenties—23 percent of the cohort—were in custody. But by 1995 that number had risen to over 827,000—32.2 percent of the nation’s twenty-something black males. One could quibble with the estimates, but the finding is valid; in fact, my own estimates would indicate that the number is already closer to 50 percent in some places, and that nationally it will be nearer to a half than a third by the year 2000.

—- You can’t have it both ways—protesting that police are less responsive to black crime victims than to white ones in one breath, charging that “too many” black victimizers get caught, convicted, and sentenced, in the next; spinning out conspiratorial theories of white acquiescence in letting drugs flow into black communities in the morning, complaining that efforts to crack down on the drug trade are motivated by racism in the afternoon.

—- As the bipartisan Council on Crime in America has reported: “America’s violent crime problem, especially the rage of homicidal and near-homicidal violence, is extremely concentrated among young urban minority males. . . . A study of murders committed in the nation’s 75 most populous counties found that blacks were 52 percent of all murder victims and 62 percent of all murder defendants,” but “they were only 20 percent of the general population in these metropolitan jurisdictions. . . . Between 1985 and 1992 the rate at which males ages 14 through 17 committed murder increased by about 50 percent for whites and over 300 percent for blacks. Between 1973 and 1992 the rate of violent victimizations of black males ages 12 to 24 increased about 25 percent; for example, black males ages 16 to 19 sustained one violent crime for 11 persons in 1973 versus one for every six in 1992.”

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