[Peace-discuss] Bad Will Hunting

[David Green]

  This column was printed in today's NG. Speculative comments and questions interspersed.  Incarceration rises, crime falls; deterrence at work — not racism  By By George F. Will, The Washington Post 
   
  Sunday, June 22, 2008 
   

    Listening to political talk requires a third ear that hears what is not said. Today’s near silence about crime probably is evidence of social improvement. For many reasons, including better policing and more incarceration, Americans feel, and are, safer. The New York Times has not recently repeated such amusing headlines as “Crime Keeps on Falling, But Prisons Keep on Filling” (1997), “Prison Population Growing Although Crime Rate Drops” (1998), “Number in Prison Grows Despite Crime Reduction” (2000) and “More Inmates, Despite Slight Drop in Crime” (2003).
   
  The Americans who "feel safer" are the ones who were relatively safe in the first place. The fear of crime is undoubtedly driven as much by perception as reality, and what creates these perceptions? Perhaps people feel safer because the media and politicans are finding additional ways to frighten people other than the specter of AA males, especially since 9/11.
   
  If crime revives as an issue, it will be through liberal complaints about something that has reduced the salience of the issue — the incarceration rate. And any revival will be awkward for Barack Obama.
   
  Not really. Obama will be right on board with blaming the victims. In fact, he needs to prove he's harder on AAs than McCain.
   
  Liberalism likes victimization narratives and the related assumption that individuals are blank slates on which “society” writes. Hence liberals locate the cause of crime in flawed social conditions that liberalism supposedly can fix.
   
  An army of straw men. We know that Bill Clinton is not a liberal, but Will thinks he is. Let's remember that Clinton was responsible for passing the 1996 crime bill. Let's remember that the Democratic Congress will not seriously act on Will's fantasy of what (Goldman Sachs) liberals believe. The fact that liberals are not serious about fixing social/economic conditions that could indeed be fixed provides fodder for Will's cynicism.
   
  Last July, Obama said “more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities.” Actually, more than twice as many black men 18-24 are in college as there are in jail. 
   
  Sleight of hand by changing the equation from "young black men" to "black men 18-24." Nevertheless, what's the comparison of 18-24 between white and black? Would the white proportion by anything close to 50%? 10%? 1%? 1/10th of 1%.
   
  Last September he said, “We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives.” But Heather Mac Donald of the (right-wing, "free market," ideologically driven) Manhattan Institute, writing in the institute’s City Journal, notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population. 
   
  This seems to me to be a non sequitur that begs for further elaboration. The prison population was increasing before 1999. And this doesn't mean that prison is not a revolving door for non-violent offenders disproportinately represented among minorities.
   
  Furthermore, Mac Donald cites data indicating that: “In the overwhelming majority of cases, prison remains a lifetime achievement award for persistence in criminal offending. Absent recidivism or a violent crime, the criminal-justice system will do everything it can to keep you out of the state or federal slammer.”
   
  It would be good to know if the local case of Lowell Helm, a first-time offender framed for the sale of a small amount of crack sentenced for 15 years, is an aberration.
   
  Obama sees racism in the incarceration rate: “We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from.” Indeed, in 2006, blacks, who are less than 13 percent of the population, were 37.5 percent of all state and federal prisoners. About one in 33 black men was in prison, compared with one in 79 Hispanic men and one in 205 white men.
   
  But Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offenses: “In 2005 the black homicide rate was over seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined. ... From 1976 to 2005, blacks committed over 52 percent of all murders.” Do police excessively arrest blacks? “The race of criminals reported by crime victims matches arrest data.”
   
  This begs the question of the socioeconomic/institutionalized racism context that Will writes this column in order to ridicule. Thus, AAs commit more homicides because?.....(genes, culture, etc.) But of course, this implication can no longer be labeled racism in the post-racism era, where race suddently has nothing to do with poverty. Moreover, the real test is not the disproportion of AAs, but the disproportion of those in poverty. Yes, that too can be explained away to be blaming the victim. But it's helpful to show that, ultimately, it's the poor that are being blamed for being poor. I don't know, maybe fewer people so easily accept that. Maybe not.
   
  As for the charge that the incarceration rate of blacks is substantially explained by more severe federal sentences for crack as opposed to powder-cocaine defendants (only 13 states distinguish between the two substances, and these states have small sentence differentials), Mac Donald says: “It’s going to take a lot more than 5,000 or so (federal) crack defendants a year to account for the 562,000 black prisoners in state and federal facilities at the end of 2006 — or the 858,000 black prisoners in custody overall, if one includes the population of county and city jails.”
   
  Again, this seems a non sequitur. Is any appreciable % of crack defendents prosecuted at the federal level? And how much anymore does the racism/incarceration argument depend on crack vs. powder cocaine. Perhaps this critique needs to be updated, so as not to provide a straw man for compassionate conservatives.
   
  James Q. Wilson, America’s premier social scientist, notes that “the typical criminal commits from 12 to 16 crimes a year (not counting drug offenses)” and Wilson says that 10 years of scholarly studies “have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the other ways — poverty, urbanization, and the proportion of young men in the population — that the states differed. A high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works.” It works especially on behalf of blacks, who are disproportionately the victims of crimes by black men.
   
  Again, begs the question of whether incarceration is the best way to lower the crime rate, although if you believe that poverty has nothing to do with the crime rate, you're right on board with that. It also avoids considering institutionalized racism in terms of who gets caught and prosecuted in the first place--maybe we could get the crime rate even lower if the cops raided suburban homes where underage drinking is going on (but really, who thinks of this as crime?) 
   
  Nevertheless, this assertion doesn't take into consideration the toll of incarceration on families and communities, not to mention the profit increasingly derived from slave labor in prisons. The question that obviously cannot be asked: What would the crime rate look like, and how much more safe would community members feel, if there were decent jobs for poor people?
   
  A recent report by the Pew Center on the States asserts that America incarcerates too many people, and in the process diverts money from higher education. Wilson notes that the report does not examine whether the slower growth of public spending on higher education than on prisons may be explained by the surge in private support for public universities. 
   
  So, the absurd nature of this argument aside (and the fact the people like Wilson are included among the beneficiaries of such contributions, rather than, say, minority students), why do tuition rates keep going up if lower public funds for higher ed are compensated for by private contributions? (But I shouldn't indulge this sort of thing). Nevertheless, this assertion (by Pew, if properly represented ) is beside the point, and the Pew Report probably shoots itself in the foot. The argument that American incarcerates too many people needs to stand alone in terms of compassion, equality, and social justice, not because it diverts money from higher education, as if that's where it should go if it weren't spent on prisons. It probably could be spent on a lot of better things.
   
  And, Wilson dryly adds, the report does not explore “whether society gets as much from universities as it does from prisons.” A good question, but not one apt to be studied in academia.
   
  (Aside from Wilson/Will's snide descent into barbarism) As Will says, Wilson is a famous university-based academic. Has he not in fact been asking his questions and studying this issue in respectable academia (my alma mater, U.C.L.A., unfortunately) for 30 or 40 years? In any event, the conservative think tanks that produce these analyses get as much or more attention in the media and among policy-makers than university-based studies, so what does Will care? Nor does he care to consider why different questions are usually asked in academia which, in all honesty, takes institutionalized racism somewhat seriously but generally does not take its fundamental roots seriously--although I'm open to exceptions such as Francis Fox Piven (Regulating the Poor, et al.).
   
  David Green
   
   
   
   
   


       
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