Why blacks commit more crimes

Due to differences in agency reporting practices, national estimates for the offenses of "rape" and "sex offenses" are not available after Additionally, estimates for the Violent Crime Index which included "forcible rape" are not shown after as this category is no longer compatible with prior years.

Estimated number of arrests by offense and race, Released on November 16, Available from the BJS website. But the following week, the same kid punched out a white schoolyard bully for bothering a black girl who wandered by. Just that white ambivalence is as familiar territory to me as it was to Norman Podhoretz. I grew up with it; I know that casual racism is there; I know the anger and shame you feel at seeing it all around you—and I know the competing anger, no less familiar: the anger at the knowledge that when real violence erupts, all too often the assailants are once again black.

Honest blacks know this, too. It does no good to say that these are a minority of black persons; that there are good and sufficient reasons for their troubling behaviors; that others, who are not black, have also fallen short.

We do not recognize these kids as us; the distance is great and difficult to bridge. My black crime problem, and ours, is that for most Americans, especially for average white Americans, the distance is not merely great but almost unfathomable, the fear is enormous and largely justifiable, and the black kids who inspire the fear seem not merely unrecognizable but alien.

After all, the child is father to the man: and think how many inner-city black children are without parents, relatives, neighbors, teachers, coaches, or clergymen to teach them right from wrong, give them loving and consistent discipline, show them the moral and material value of hard work and study, and bring them to cherish the self-respect that comes only from respecting the life, liberty, and property of others.

Think how many black children grow up where parents neglect and abuse them, where other adults and teenagers harass and harm them, where drug dealers exploit them. Not surprisingly, in return for the favor, some of these children kill, rape, maim, and steal without remorse. And around goes the negative feedback loop: reasonable fear feeds unreasonable white race hostility, whose reality in turn feeds unreasonable black paranoia about the justice system.

Is there anything social science research can do to help dispel all the ambivalence and confusion crowding around the subject of race and crime? At least it can tell the truth, as the data disclose it, about the reality of black crime and black punishment. 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. Yes, there are ways in which the justice system is failing all Americans, including black Americans.

Rather, it is by ignoring poor black victims and letting convicted violent and repeat black criminals, both adult and juvenile, continue to victimize and demoralize the black communities that suffer most of their depredations. Consider the data. A study of the racial impact of federal sentencing guidelines found that the imposition between and of stiffer penalties for drug offenders, especially cocaine traffickers, did not result in racially disparate sentences.

In , federal government statistician Patrick A. The data tell a different story. In , In , 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 months for blacks and 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.

In this vein, 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. And it was President Clinton who recently refused in no uncertain terms to change the federal penalty structure for drug crimes.

Second, liberal experts and advocates of drug legalization cloud the facts about who really goes to prison for drug crimes. As I and several other researchers have concluded, society gets little return on its investment in locking up low-level offenders who possess or even traffic in small amounts of drugs and commit no other crimes. But most drug offenders, both those behind bars and those who have served their time, do not fit that description.

In , for example, only 2 percent of the 36, persons admitted to federal prisons were in for drug possession. Moreover, as for imprisoned drug traffickers , most have long and diversified criminal records—only their latest and most serious conviction offense is a drug-trafficking offense. The average quantity of drugs involved in federal cocaine trafficking cases is pounds, while the average for marijuana traffickers is 3.

In an ongoing study of who really goes to prison in Wisconsin, George Mitchell and I are examining the complete criminal records, adult and juvenile, of a randomly selected sample of imprisoned felons from Milwaukee County. This is not to mention all the crimes swept completely under the official-records rug by plea bargaining, or all the wholly undetected, unprosecuted, and unpunished crimes the prisoners have committed while free. Of course, there are cases of truly petty drug dealers, black and white, being hit with long, hard time.

Some experts will come almost to the point of agreement with all that, but still will insist that the system is anything but color-blind when it comes to two important tasks: punishing juveniles and dishing out death sentences. But here, too, the evidence does more to exonerate than to indict the system. Out of hundreds of post studies of minorities in the juvenile justice system, barely two dozen offer evidence of any pattern of racial discrimination.

Even so, liberal strongholds like the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention OJJDP —which made a cavalierly fragmentary and outdated examination of only 46 of the relevant studies—continue to purvey the myth that young black offenders are treated more severely than young white ones.

Notwithstanding OJJDP and its race-baiting minions, the truth is not that the juvenile system is racist, or that the states incarcerate too many minority juvenile offenders—or, indeed, too many juvenile offenders of whatever background. Rather, as the National District Attorneys Association and other law enforcement officials have said for years, the juvenile system is an even worse revolving door than the adult system.

For example, in fewer than 20, male juvenile violent offenders were in public juvenile facilities—but in alone there were more than , juvenile arrests for violent crimes, and more than 1. In most states, police, prosecutors, and judges do not even have complete access to juvenile records, and some states still forbid fingerprinting juveniles, including kids charged with weapons offenses that would be grade-A felonies if committed by adults.

Over the coming decade, juvenile arrests in California and many other states are projected to increase by some 25 percent, even more for minority juveniles.

By the year we will probably have , 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.

What should be done with cold-blooded killers of whatever race? Like most other Americans, the majority of black Americans favor the death penalty. Yet around that punishment swirls the most acrimonious of all racial disparity controversies.

Here too, though, the data disclose no trace of racism. Reviewing the evidence in , Professors Stanley Rothman and Stephen Powers concluded that after controlling for all relevant variables, one finds simply no evidence of racial disparities in post capital sentencing.

The crucial variable is the severity of the crime. From the day the U. Supreme Court reinstated the death penalty in through the end of , more than , Americans were murdered. Over the same period, only killers were executed, 38 percent of them black.

In , blacks were 40 percent of the 2, prisoners on death row and 36 percent of the 38 convicted murderers executed. Most get out of prison.

Murderers released from state prisons in served an average of only 5. There is no evidence that black murderers get out any less quickly than comparable white ones. Yet, as with juvenile justice, anti-death penalty partisans, including congressmen, promote racially charged falsehoods like those that flew during the debate in Congress over the so-called Racial Justice Act RJA.

Though this disgraceful bill, which would have established a de facto racial quota system in murder cases, was defeated, it got very serious consideration. Many, like L. District Attorney Gil Garcetti—the man who spared O. Yet the experiences of poor and minority defendants within the criminal justice system often differ substantially from that model due to a number of factors, each of which contributes to the overrepresentation of such individuals in the system.

These double standards are not, of course, explicit; on the face of it, the criminal law is color-blind and class-blind. But in a sense, this only makes the problem worse. By affording criminal suspects substantial constitutional rights in theory, the Supreme Court validates the results of the criminal justice system as fair. That formal fairness obscures the systemic concerns that ought to be raised by the fact that the prison population is overwhelmingly poor and disproportionately black.

By creating and perpetuating policies that allow such racial disparities to exist in its criminal justice system, the United States is in violation of its obligations under Article 2 and Article 26 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights to ensure that all its residents—regardless of race—are treated equally under the law.

We welcome this opportunity to provide the UN Special Rapporteur with an accurate assessment of racial disparity in the U. Established in , The Sentencing Project works for a fair and effective U. Staff of The Sentencing Project have testified before the U. Congress and state legislative bodies and have submitted amicus curiae briefs to the Supreme Court of the United States on various issues related to incarceration and criminal justice policy.

This report chronicles the racial disparity that permeates every stage of the United States criminal justice system, from arrest to trial to sentencing to post prison experiences. In particular, the report highlights research findings that address rates of racial disparity and their underlying causes throughout the criminal justice system. The report concludes by offering recommendations on ways that federal, state, and local officials in the United States can work to eliminate racial disparity in the criminal justice system and uphold its obligations under the Covenant.

Crime in the United States What might appear at first to be a linkage between race and crime is in large part a function of concentrated urban poverty, which is far more common for African Americans than for other racial groups. New York, NY: Russell Sage Foundation But while there is a higher black rate of involvement in certain crimes, white Americans overestimate the proportion of crime committed by blacks and Latinos, overlook the fact that communities of color are disproportionately victims of crime, and discount the prevalence of bias in the criminal justice system.

Washington, D. The Unmet Promise of Equality. The New York Times. The rise of mass incarceration begins with disproportionate levels of police contact with African Americans.

This is striking in particular for drug offenses, which are committed at roughly equal rates across races. National Geographic. And that is where we allocate our resources.

Absent meaningful efforts to address societal segregation and disproportionate levels of poverty, U. This includes higher levels of police contact with innocent people and higher levels of arrests for drug crimes. In addition to pursuing policies that bring little gain in crime reduction and impose great costs on people of color, policymakers and criminal justice leaders have been late to address discriminatory policies for which they provide no justification—such as biased use of officer discretion and revenue-driven policing.

African Americans were incarcerated in local jails at a rate 3. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in , Feb. These disparities stem in part from the policies and practices of policing described earlier, but are compounded by those introduced at this stage of processing. Pretrial detention has been shown to increase the odds of conviction, and people who are detained awaiting trial are also more likely to accept less favorable plea deals, to be sentenced to prison, and to receive longer sentences.

Seventy percent of pretrial releases require money bond, an especially high hurdle for low-income defendants, who are disproportionately people of color. Blacks and Latinos are more likely than whites to be denied bail, to have a higher money bond set, and to be detained because they cannot pay their bond. They are often assessed to be higher safety and flight risks because they are more likely to experience socioeconomic disadvantage and to have criminal records.

Implicit bias also contributes to people of color faring worse than comparable whites in bail determinations. Bureau of Justice Statistics, Prisoners in , Jan. The Black Population: Census; Ennis, S. The Hispanic Population: This results in imprisonment rates for African-American and Hispanic adults that are 5.

Notably, these disparities exist for both the least and most serious offenses:. Among youth, African Americans are 4. Although levels of youth confinement have significantly declined in recent years, the racial gap between black and American Indian versus white youth has increased.

Racial Disparities in Youth Commitments and Arrests. The racial disparities in the adult and juvenile justice systems stem in part from the policing and pretrial factors described earlier, and are compounded by discretionary decisions and sentencing policies that disadvantage people of color because of their race or higher rates of socioeconomic disadvantage.

These include:. During the era of mass incarceration, a declining proportion of the prison population has a sentence that allows for discretionary release on parole, as lawmakers have required courts to shift from indeterminate sentences whose release requires a discretionary parole decision to fixed-term sentences which have set release dates. Among sentences that allow for discretionary parole release, the process can be harder for people of color.

Criminology, 46 4 : ; Morgan, K. Criminology and Public Policy, 4 2 , p. Racial bias among correctional officers also shapes parole outcomes. As revealed by a New York Times investigation on New York prisons, comparable in-prison conduct—a major determinant of parole decisions—may result in divergent prison disciplinary records for blacks and Latinos versus whites. Underinvestment and racial disparities also persist in community supervision—with many parole and probation systems offering supervision with little support, and with evidence that parole and probation officers are more likely to revoke people of color than whites for comparable behavior.

African Americans—particularly black men—are most exposed to the collateral consequences associated with a criminal record. Demography , — People with criminal records face a host of obstacles to re-enter society even after they have fully completed their term of incarceration or community supervision. These include barriers to securing steady employment and housing, to accessing the social safety net and federal student aid, and to exercising the right to vote.

Nearly one-third of U. African American job applicants, who are less likely to receive callbacks than whites to begin with, experience an even more pronounced discrimination related to a criminal record.

People with criminal convictions also face discrimination in the private rental market and those with felony drug convictions face restrictions in accessing government-assisted housing. Criminal Records, Race and Redemption.

The Welfare Reform Act of imposed a lifetime denial of cash assistance and food stamps to people convicted in state or federal courts of felony drug offenses, unless states opt out of the ban. Given the dynamics of social class and the accompanying disparate racial effects of the criminal justice system, women and children of color are disproportionately impacted by this exclusionary law.

By , 24 states had fully opted out of the food stamp ban, 21 others had only done so in part, and five states continued to fully enforce the ban. The Marshall Project. An even larger number of states continue to impose a partial or full ban on cash assistance for people with felony drug convictions.

Disenfranchisement patterns have also reflected the dramatic growth and disproportionate impact of criminal convictions. A record 6. Felony disenfranchisement rates for voting-age African Americans reached 7. In three states, more than one in five voting-age African Americans is disenfranchised: Florida, Kentucky, and Tennessee. See: Stolberg, S.