Why minorities commit more crimes

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.

In Washington, D. Marshall also challenged her opponents to take a broader picture of crime instead of just focusing on violent crime to make the case that blacks commit more crime. The team arguing for the motion only moved up three points from 57 percent.

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It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. Contact Us. News Alerts. Marshall delivered a grim history lesson on race and law enforcement, then pressed her case. Stern explained, however, that that the focus on violent crime was a common-sense point.

Consultation Form Ten offices across California to serve you. Contact us now to schedule a consultation. Contact form not loading? Click here! Rains Lucia Stern St. For example, although African Americans comprise about 13 percent of the US population, they account for about 39 percent of all arrests for violent crime see Figure 8. Latinos also have higher crime rates than non-Latino whites, but lower rates than those for African Americans.

Why do these differences exist? A racist explanation would attribute them to biological inferiority of the groups, African Americans and Latinos, with the relatively high rates of offending. Such explanations were popular several generations ago but fortunately lost favor as time passed and attitudes changed. First, African Americans and Latinos are much poorer than whites on the average, and poverty contributes to higher crime rates.

Second, they are also more likely to live in urban areas, which, as we have seen, also contribute to higher crime rates. Third, the racial and ethnic discrimination they experience leads to anger and frustration that in turn can promote criminal behavior. Just as social class affects the type of crime that people do, so do race and ethnicity. Wealthy, white people commit much crime, but it is white-collar crime they tend to commit, not street crime.

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Hawkins Ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shoemaker, D. Theories of delinquency: An examination of explanations of delinquent behavior 6th ed. Stark, R. Deviant places: A theory of the ecology of crime. Criminology, 25 , — Unnever, J. A theory of African American offending: Race, racism, and crime. New York, NY: Routledge. Walker, S.