The race baiters and those who enable such nonsense about this subject are just flat out WRONG.
Excerpts:
"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."
"Robert Grace, the Los Angeles prosecutor, is acutely aware of the fragility and preciousness of the rule of law. 'As a civilized society, we can’t allow what’s happening in Latin America to take over here,' he says.
'Venezuela and Mexico are awash in appalling violence because they don’t respect the law.' Thus, when prominent figures like Barack Obama make sweeping claims about racial unfairness in the criminal-justice system, they play with fire.
'For any political candidate to make such claims out of expediency is wrong,' Grace says. 'If they have statistics that back up the claim, I’d like to see them. But to create phony perceptions of injustice is as wrong as not doing anything about the real thing.'"
And yet locally we still bow to manipulation, abuse and jingoism from groups like the Pulpit Forum and the Simkins PAC.
WHY?
"when prominent figures like Barack Obama make sweeping claims about racial unfairness in the criminal-justice system, they play with fire."
ReplyDeleteWhat sweeping claims?
"'For any political candidate to make such claims out of expediency is wrong..."
What claims?
Roch I can't decide if you are deafor blind or just hanging out behind a brick wall and out of touch with the world. For God's sake google "Black crime" and you will see all the "sweeping claims" you want from far more intelligent and knowledgeable people than than you or I. We are not making this stuff up about Black criminality or about being at war with Muslims. We just happen to read what many others are saying in commentaries, and the actions of Muslims that are being reported by prominent news outlets which you seem to favor and consider above reproach. Are they all lying about the problems of Blacks and Muslims? You're a bright enough guy so you tell me Roch are all these prominent people wrong? BB
ReplyDelete"What sweeping claims?"
ReplyDelete"What claims?
From the linked article, which you obviously didn't bother to read:
"At a presidential primary debate this Martin Luther King Day, for instance, Senator Barack Obama charged that blacks and whites 'are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, [and] receive very different sentences . . . for the same crime'"
But wait, there's more:
"If we know that in our criminal justice system, African-Americans and whites, for the same crime, receive--are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, receive very different sentences. That is something that we have to talk about. But that's a substantive issue and it has to do with how do we pursue racial justice......"
-- Obama, at the Black Caucus Democrat drbate on 1/21/08
Here's the rest of the story, from the link:
"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.
Another criminologist—easily as liberal as Sampson—reached the same conclusion in 1995: 'Racial differences in patterns of offending, not racial bias by police and other officials, are the principal reason that such greater proportions of blacks than whites are arrested, prosecuted, convicted and imprisoned,'Michael Tonry wrote in Malign Neglect. (Tonry did go on to impute malign racial motives to drug enforcement, however.)
The media’s favorite criminologist, Alfred Blumstein, found in 1993 that blacks were significantly underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their presence in arrest."
"The black incarceration rate is overwhelmingly a function of black crime."
ReplyDeleteWell...duh.
Roch wandered off of his pasture over at Coneistan and got attacked by the pack.
ReplyDeleteHey Roch chew on this:
Tracking down BS
FRED GREGORY
Part of the problem is you read "news" and assume it must be correct. Have you ever read the materials the news is "based" on? For example, in one post, Sampson and Lauristen are cited. Who went out and found that article and read it to see if the use of the research was appropriate? For example, a key discussion in Sampson and Lauritsen is that the differential in black and white homicide is due to firearms use -- black youth homicides due to firearms are 10 times higher than for white youth. Thus, an appropriate policy for controlling black youth homicides would relate to gun control. But who here has come up with gun control in response to minimizing racial differnces in offending? (Omitting differential treatment for the moment).
ReplyDeleteConsider also that the article that very selectively cites Sampson and Lauritsen (who actually conclude that discrimination in the criminal justice system is indirect, and that it is the long standing concentration of poverty and disadvantage among minority groups that contribute to their differential treatment in the criminal justice system)also makes its points through analogies rather than reference to reputable studies, and often misleads and misdirects by using inapporpriate statistics (for example, beginning with arrest data to prove racial differences in offending when arrests are already a product of the behavior of decisions to arrest or not to arrest). How many of you looked up the author? Or discovered that she works for a conservative think tank? That her work is promoted by that think tank and is not considered objective, and is not found in scholarly sources, and has not been subject to blind review as would be required of scholarly publications?
I could go on at great length here, but hope this is sufficient,
Sincerely, Crimprof