Numbers
The interviewee says that blacks are disproportionately imprisoned in the United States; notes that though blacks only make up 13% of the general population, they make up 40% of the prison population. While it is quite likely that blacks are disproportionately imprisoned, it is what the interviewee didn’t say that begs asking. Why is it that blacks are being disproportionately imprisoned? For the answer to that, first, let’s take a look at some U.S. Department of Justice data on arrests:
Selected from the above linked table: Estimated number of arrests by offense and race, 2019, All ages:
All offenses blacks more than 25% of total
Murder and nonnegligent manslaughter blacks more than 50% of totalotal….
Robbery blacks more than 50% of total
….
Aggravated assault blacks more than 33% of total
….
These Justice Department figures tell us that blacks are in fact committing a disproportionate percentage of all crimes being committed. What else do we know in our search for the why?
It is known, or at least believed to be known: That, by far, most black citizens are law abiding. That upper and middle income blacks are exceptionally law abiding. That in modern day populations, males are far more likely to commit crimes than females. That almost all crimes by black Americans are committed by young black males. That nearly half of black Americans live in areas of concentrated poverty. That almost all of the crime committed by black Americans is committed by young black males between the ages of 12 and 34 years of age who live in areas of concentrated poverty (most of their victims live in these same areas).
It would help to know: What percentage of those black Americans who live in areas of concentrated poverty are males between the ages of 12 and 34. What percentage of this group commit criminal acts.
If we estimate 12 to 34 year old black males constitute 12% of the black population in areas of concentrated poverty, and that one-half of them are committing criminal acts; we aren’t looking at 13% of the population committing a disproportionate of all crimes committed. We are looking at (0.5 x 0.12 x 0.13 x 100 ~ 0.9%) less than 1%, of the overall population committing an extremely disproportionate per cent of all crimes committed. More specifically, we are talking about young black males in poor urban black communities committing an extremely disproportionate per cent of all crimes.
Why is it that 12 to 34 year old black males who live in urban areas of concentrated poverty are committing crimes at such a disproportionately high rate? Why is the cause we seek. Living in poor urban areas of concentrated poverty is the where. Why do young black males living in poor urban areas of concentrated poverty more like to commit criminal acts? It is known, or thought to be known, that young males are more likely to commit crimes. There appears to be little, if any evidence, that race alone is a factor. Leaving us with young males living in poor urban areas of concentrated poverty; with good reason to suppose that the lack of adequate housing, food, healthcare, education, hope, … of everything they need, and want, might be the most significant factor, the greater cause. These causes/things: inadequate housing, inadequate food, inadequate healthcare, inadequate education, little reason for hope, …, are things we as a society can do something about. Our doing so would be far better than going forward with the long failed more and more incarceration, imprisonment.
—
It appears that the most proximate cause of the most disproportionate percentage of young black males being incarcerated was their socioeconomic environs. Suppose that the reason for one group of citizens having a disproportionately high arrest rate was found to be because of their ‘culture’, their biology, their genetics, their upbringing, their psychology, …? Or, some combination of these things? What would an ‘Estimated number of arrests by offense and socioeconomic status’ look like? What would an ‘Estimated number of arrests by offense and culture’ look like? We have learned that there is a strong correlation between whether the child was wanted. What would an ‘Estimated number of arrests by offense and parenting’ look like? What other things do we not know? Asking the right questions and getting the correct answers is all important; is our best hope for finding solutions.
Ken:
Lets start somewhere else in discussion. Would we call African Americans, blacks or Black Americans. I have issues or trouble with calling African Americans, blacks when they refer to themselves as “Black” or African American. I usually capitalize the B when using the word Black(s) as a noun.
Not a criticism by me and more a careful approach to addressing African Americans. Case in point, read the script here: African American or Black: Which term should you use?
Note how they describe themselves in going back and forth between one or the other term.
Young white males living in poverty also commit crimes. I live in an area with very few Blacks. (The biggest minority group is Native American.) We have crime, and it’s mainly young white guys without a whole lot of money, education or much in the way of prospects.
It’s definitely a cultural thing, but it’s part of an overall culture of poverty with limited education, frequent drug use and limited attachment to the work force. The poor kids who get an education – our schools aren’t that bad – wind up moving elsewhere for the most part. The local drug of choice is meth which seems to be a rural thing.
As for your attempt to isolate the causes, good luck. So many traits are correlated that I doubt the analysis you suggest can be realistically performed. If you are born a dalit, you can get a good education, move halfway around the world to a place that doesn’t know a dalit from a dalek, get a job at prestigious company and still get treated as an inferior. Tell me about how the culture of being a dalit keeps you off the analyst track and stuck in a low level maintenance job at Google.
Are you sure you are looking at the right culture?
black citizens are law abiding. That upper and middle income blacks are exceptionally law abiding. That in modern day populations”
this quote points out the fact that we should not be categorizing people according to color which has got nothing to do with anything; but instead we should categorize people according is their wealth. we then find that poor people commit more crimes because they are hungry. Read
Les Misérables
!
we should approach this in two ways:
offer Free vasectomy to everyone
a jobs program
the most sensible governmental jobs program is to Simply stop taxing the employers out of business. stop the payroll tax. stop minimum wage regulation. stop corporation tax . stop capital gains tax. Institute a maximum wage regulation. maximum wage regulation doesn’t get anyone fired.
our greatest resource for eliminating poverty is the creation of more job openings and our greatest resource for creating job openings is the free market system unencumbered by taxation.
gopher
it
!
Eliminate the Operational Overhead and it will create more jobs for Labor . . .
Ken,
Kaleberg is certainly on the right track although some of it went over my head. In Oakland a large segment of the crime culture is centered around the biker gang culture, mostly white I would think. In Houston and Dallas the crime gangs are cowboy meth heads and Hispanic. Hispanic gangs compete with black gangs in LA and much of Florida. Where communities are subject to gang rule then enlisting new gang members into their crime syndicates is socially acceptable and practically unavoidable. Black markets have better paying jobs with higher social standing than supermarkets.
“Respect”
The single marker that sociologists most often refer to is communities where children are not safe to walk to school. In such communities a lot of crime is never even reported, particularly drug abuse and rape and even a lot of theft. Out of reported crimes prosecution is low because people are afraid to testify against gang members.
Cops cannot prevent crime and they do not even make arrests for most crime. So, it is particularly insulting when they shoot unarmed young people, sometimes for sport but most often because they are scared shitless and react accordingly. We have made a joke of law enforcement, but somehow it is not very funny.
NeighborhoodScout’s Murder Capitals of America – 2021 – NeighborhoodScout
2021 Top 30 Cities in the U.S. with the Highest Murder Rates, Ranked
For the seventh straight year our research reveals that East St. Louis, IL continues to dominate the nation regarding murders per capita, again claiming the number one spot on our annual Top 30 Cities in the U.S. with the Highest Murder Rates list. With a population of 26,047, East St. Louis reported 36 murders, increasing the murder rate nearly 37% compared to last year. The city now has a murder rate more than twenty-seven times the national average. To put this in further perspective, East St. Louis had nearly the same number of murders this year as Boston, a city with more than twenty-six times the population of East St. Louis.
There are 12 new cities making the list this year. The newcomer on this list with the highest murder rate is Jackson, MS. The number of murders in Jackson has more than doubled from the previous year. Another newcomer, Richmond, VA, has not appeared on the list since our first list was released in 2014….
Look Back: ‘Murder Capital’ No More – richmondmagazine.com
Look Back: ‘Murder Capital’ No More
Is Richmond a safer place now than it was in the 1990s?
by Tina Eshleman
January 29, 2020
9:09 AM
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We’re celebrating our 40th anniversary with monthly dives into our archives. This month’s look back is from our December 1989 and March 1993 issues.
A startling picture in the December 1989 issue of Richmond Surroundings, this magazine’s predecessor, shows a man’s body lying in bloody snow on Old Brook Road. The unidentified man’s violent death was one of 100 homicides in 1988, the first year of triple-digit killings in Richmond. The number would peak at 160 in 1994 and earn the city the unwanted distinction of being the U.S. “murder capital” in 1997 (on a per capita basis), when 140 people were killed…
[We celebrated that victory a bit too early.]
When you look at incarceration rates you are including the process of getting convictions or plea bargains. We know rich people have resources to get themselves off. What do the data say on race and socioeconomic factors there?
Most police interactions do not lead to arrests. Anecdotally, it would appear that Rayshard Brooks was not willing to take his chances on the court system. He was calm until 5:50 in this video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chdTYo4NUh4, when he realized this interaction was not like most.
I think the current focus on police reform misses how much of the problem comes after the arrest.
The housing crash and great recession brought a lot of “urban” problems out to the suburbs. Turns out that no jobs and no hope for improvement does things to formerly, normally, nice suburban families that it has always done to the urban areas where poverty is a constant thing. Whocoodanode?
Run
is there any chance AB saves a comment interrupted by power failure pefore posting?
coberly:
I do not see it in spam or trash
This is false. What the numbers tell us is that blacks are a disproportionate percentage of people being arrested. An article written by a person who does not understand a simple statement of fact is not likely to teach me anything of value. Alternatively, the author may be intentionally making false statements to advance a hidden agenda.
@Procopius,
Ken Melvin may not be the sharpest pencil in the box, but he certainly does not have a reactionary agenda that he is pursuing. Ken is one of our most liberal contributors. Sure, convictions would have been much better basis than arrests, but actual stats on crimes committed do not exist. Only the criminals know for sure. OTOH, crime is a neighborly pursuit. Exactly what would you expect the stats to tell us were such available?
Quality of life is a matter of particular circumstances, but more than just growing up poor, rather a matter of hope and opportunity, resilience and grace, chance or tragedy. Do the math.
On last night’s 60 Minutes episode amidst all the handwringing over the hopelessness of racism in the US was a brief admission that it was found that substituting housing vouchers for public housing so that families could be assimilated into general neighborhoods instead of federally subsidized ghettos had the greatest improvement on outcomes of any program tried. Fancy that :<)
For over fifty years I have been frustrated by the insane irony that the liberal program to relieve black segregation and poverty relied primarily on guarantying blacks a life of segregation and poverty. Out of sight – out of mind, so to speak.
Subsidized housing in the United States – Wikipedia
“…In response to many of the emerging concerns regarding new public housing developments, the Housing and Urban Development Act of 1968 attempt to shift the style of housing developments, looking to the Garden Cities model of Ebenezer Howard. The act prohibited the construction of high-rise developments for families with children. The role of high-rises had always been contentious, but with rising rates of vandalism and vacancy and considerable concerns about the concentration of poverty, some contended these developments were declared unsuitable for families.[5] One of the most notorious of these developments was the Pruitt-Igoe development in St. Louis, Missouri, constructed in 1955 and 1956. This development posted 2,870 units in thirty-three high rises buildings.[5] By the late 1960s, vacancy rates reached as high as 65%, and the project was demolished between 1972 and 1975. More recent scholarship about the story of Pruitt-Igoe, which has often been used as a parable for the failures of large-scale public housing in the United States, has elucidated that the unraveling of the complex had more to do with structural racism, disinvestment in the urban core, white flight, and the diminishing post-industrial incomes of the buildings’ residents than with high rise architecture or the nature of publicly-owned and -operated housing.[12][13]…”
[St Louis again. Small world. Still fighting over the chicken or the egg.]
@Ron I don’t know what the statistics might tell us if they were available, but I am tired of people reaching conclusions on the basis of misinterpreted or misrepresented data. One of my pet peeves is “high crime neighborhoods.” They are called “high crime” because lots of arrests are made there. Lots of arrests are made there mostly because lots of police spend most of their time there. Lots of police justify spending most of their time there because they are “high crime neighborhoods.” An interesting statistic I saw a couple of weeks ago was from Philadelphia, where the new District Attorney directed police to stop making arrests for many lesser misdemeanors and refused to prosecute those where the police made the arrests anyway. The overall crime rate declined significantly. The police chief admitted he was astonished, that he had expected the crime rate to soar (“broken windows” policing philosophy). An anecdote is not data, but I haven’t seen that discussed anyplace except the original story I read, and I don’t even remember where that was. I’m not a regular here, and I’m not an economist, but I’ve been unavoidably aware of the lack of critical thinking and downright craziness in public discussion since Hillary lost. It really goes back to the 1950s, but I had pushed it out of my consciousness.
https://angrybearblog.com/?s=deniality
Run
thnks for checking. meanwhile Arne, Procopius, and Ron made my points.
a video appeared on another site [google Loveland, Garner, Body cam, and see if that brings it up]. might provide some insight into the problem. the incident was a police “arrest” of a 75 year old woman with dementia. not black. not in a black neighborhood. the woman is far too old to seek revenge…even the lawsuit will not count as revenge… but if it had happened in your neighborhood or to you… more than once… you would understand the rage that “some people” feel against the cops, and the whole damn system-situation.
coberly:
I saw that clip also.
Ron
i just read the legal “complaint.” interesting to me that they used words i would not have used… probably the legal language for “inhumane” but might sound a little overwrought to the casual reader [“quiet here.” “mmm, yeah, too quiet.”]
what struck me in the video was the absolute lack of concern the cops showed for the woman at any time. the spervisor did’t even look at her. and, yes, the other thing..the cops absolute belief that they have a right to injure people who show the slightest “disrespect” for their authority… And one other thing, in comments i read on other threads: the stated belief by some commenters “yes, but what else could they do?”
or as the wife beaters say, “why do you make me do this to you?!”
I did not say that as well as I needed to. It’s the “what else could you do” that is bothering me. these people (mostly the commenters, the police don’t have the excuse, because they have written guidelines telling them “what else”) have nothing happening in their brains that even suggests there might be a ‘what else.’
whether that is “just” a lack of education, or a lack of mental capacity, or the result of a choice to not see… I think it’s at the root of our problem.
incidentally, there is a picture the cops took of the woman in custody. she looks fierce… she did not look fierce in the body cam…but what i missed the first time is that the hood of her sweatshirt had been artfully draped over her injured shoulder to conceal the injury. since she is still wearing handcuffs behind her back, i have to assume she did not do the arranging herself.
so, does anyone want to talk about evil intent?