Professor Bainbridge...on law, politics, religion, culture & food

Did Obama Ignore the Elephant in the Room?

Bill Stuntz:

Like many who heard it, I was powerfully impressed by Barack Obama’s speech in Philadelphia this week. But I found the speech unsatisfying, because it all but ignores the issue that is central to racial division in twenty-first-century America: crime and criminal punishment.

In his clearest reference to that subject, Obama was guilty of either fuzzy thinking or misplaced political correctness. He used his grandmother’s “fear of black men who passed by her on the street” as an example of racism. It isn’t.

By my calculations, the black murder rate in 2006 stood at 23.7 per 100,000. The white murder rate stood at 3.1. (The links to the relevant sources of data are here and here. I allocated the cases in which the race of the offender is unknown proportionately to the relevant racial groups, as is customary in discussions of these data.) The belief that one of those two groups poses a greater risk of criminal violence is not racist; it’s rational—just as it’s rational to believe that a man of any race poses a greater risk than a woman: the male and female murder rates in 2006 were 10.7 and 1.0. The belief that race and sex have nothing to do with the risk of violent crime isn’t enlightened or virtuous. It’s just wrong.

While white fears of black crime are more reasonable than Obama admits, black rage at a discriminatory justice system is more justified than most whites understand. According to the best available data, blacks are 20% more likely than whites to use illegal drugs. But blacks are an incredible thirteen times more likely to be imprisoned for drug crime. (Data source here). In effect, Americans live under two sets of drug laws: the forgiving set of rules that mostly white suburbanites know, and the unfathomably severe rules that govern urban blacks.

If drug crime is overpunished in black neighborhoods, violent crime is underpunished. Nationwide, police clear nearly 60% of violent crimes (meaning, they arrest the likely offender) in nearly all-white small towns and rural areas. In large cities, police clear fewer than one-third of violent crimes. (Data source here). Race-specific data are unavailable, but it’s a very good bet that black neighborhoods in every major city have clearance rates far below one-third, and most white neighborhoods see rates that are much higher. The bottom line is as simple as it is awful: When whites are robbed, raped, beaten, and killed, their victimizers are usually punished. When the same crimes happen to blacks, the usual result is: nothing. No arrest, no prosecution, no conviction. That is one reason why black neighborhoods are so much more violent than white ones.

In other words, the kinds of criminal punishment that do the most good are undersupplied in black America, and the kinds that do the LEAST good—so far as I know, there is no evidence that the level of drug punishment has any appreciable effect on the level of drug crime—are oversupplied. African Americans live with the worst of both worlds: unfathomably high crime rates, coupled with truly horrifying levels of criminal punishment.

Go read the whole thing for further analysis of the root causes of this serious problem. Also, be sure to check out this follow up post.