There is another issue here, which is the tendency to criminalize behavior in the black community that is not criminalized, or lesser criminalized, in the white community. The classic example of that is the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powdered cocaine. So you start with a legal code that is biased against blacks, couple that with a judicial system that is biased against blacks, and add in a social structure in which blacks are overrepresented in the poorer socioeconomic classes, and is it any wonder that blacks are overrepresented in prison? It would be astonishing if it weren’t so.
You can blame “Black Culture” and surely there is some blame to be had there, but our whole society is loaded in favor of whites over blacks. We’ve made a tremendous amount of progress to alleviate that since the Jim Crow days, but there is no denying that our system still favors whites over blacks.
I think the OP missed a significant option - one which I think is most likely the correct one. The legal system isn’t significantly biased against black people - it’s biased against poor people. And the reason why an inordinately large percentage of prisoners are black is because an inordinately large percentage of poor people are black. So the issue of why so many black people are in prison should be seen as just a subset of the issue of why so many black people are poor.
Had people suggested that black criminals shouldn’t be blamed because “they can’t do anything about it” you’d have a point, but no one has, so you don’t.
I think you are addressing the heart of this. I’m trying to avoid bringing up my annoying attitude about race, but it’s very easy to seperate out poor people and establish the higher rates of social problems among them. From there you can begin to isolate that portion of the problem that is caused by perceptions of race. I think the problems of the poor have a significant cultural aspect. Not just in the culture of the poor, but the culture of the surrounding society as well. I don’t find it surprising that the same dynamic can be seen around the world, and the concept of race can readily be substituted with religion, political, or economic status. It might be something of a natural state for humans to take the route of least resistance and without cultural values to advance one’s position in life a large portion of the population will never fit the modern concept of a productive participant in society.
Nail on head. If there was really some link to blackness per se, you would expect there to be very little crime in countries with (relatively) few blacks. I live in one of those countries, Ireland, and I can assure you that’s not the case. Nor was it more the case when there were almost no blacks here, a mere 15 or so years ago.
On Implicit’s point, there is a minority group here who is overrepresented in the prison population - Travellers. They are white. And indigenous to Ireland. And for the most part, very poor.
In response to which, a white racist probably would trot out the point (they often do, IME, at every opportunity) that there is a lot of crime in countries with (relatively) many blacks, i.e., those in sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. But, of course, no society exists in a historical vacuum, and those countries are all very poor for historical reasons.
If you start with an equal amount of black and white drug users, and check in on them in a decade and you’ll probably notice that more of the black ones have had an interaction with the legal system because of the propensity of police to stop and search blacks. Basically through little to no fault of their own a group of people is more likely to have interaction with the legal system to begin with.
One of the main reasons blacks are over-represented among criminals in the US is that most black children are born out of wedlock, and are more likely than other groups to grow up without the stable, long-term presence of a father figure in the home. No matter what race, that correlates to practically every social pathology under the sun - crime, poverty, academic under-achievement, etc.
Racism by blacks toward whites is a seroius problem that seems to be ignored. Even though I am a conservative I have noticed that since Obama took office more and more blacks have adapted main stream english language. The power of roll models cannot be underestimated here. As an individual I always try to do my part in making blacks feel welcome in the neighborhood and it seems to work. I make eye contact and say good morning when passing, I will initiate conversations when appropriate etc. Little things we can do as individuals do help.
Would you mind linking to these studies.
10 percent of white americans are poor and 27 percent of black americans are poor, this means the poverty rate for black americans are 2.7times the rate of white americans. Meanwhile the arrest rate for black americans is over ten times the rate for white americans in murder, five times as high for sexual assault, eight times as high for robbery, and four times as high for aggravated assault. Here is the latest report of arrests broken down by race and type of offense.
I live in an area where 40 years ago white flight meant that if one blackmoved into your neighborhood within one year every white would abondon an entire housing tract or about 1 square mile. In a decade the whites moved almost 13 miles south to get away from blacks. The logic was that if one black moved in property values would drop about 30% immediately.
I live in a fairly expensive Southern Ca. community and we are probably about 10% black and steady. As a neighborhood we just don’t seem to be mixing as much as we should or as fast as we should so I encourage both blacks and whites that I know not to be shy about extending a hand first. Once the intitial ice is broken we seem to be getting along and socializing just fine.
Blaming racial predjudice on whites is naive, and many blacks will agree with me on this. It goes both ways. Mainstream America is predominantly white, if a black man or woman plans to make it they give themselves the best chance by becomming as mainstream as they can. Yes, they may have to try a bit harder than a white which is wrong but in the long run it is a good strategy.
I want to apologize. I have some unusual ideas about race, and I should avoid threads like this. I think you mean well. And I don’t believe racism is limited by anybody’s concept of ‘race’, i.e., in your terminology, ‘black’ people are racist also.
There are multiple factors in play, but two are specifically interwoven.
The first is hyperpolicing. Police, even in the largest and most diverse cities, work under a presumption – fueled by numerous factors, racism being one of them – that because crime is higher in black communities they must thus focus more closely on black people.
But it’s tautological, you find what you’re looking for and don’t find what you’re not looking for. The overwhelming focus on communities of color means that similar crimes – like walk through drug operations – in white neighborhoods are not as easily or frequently rooted out, and are given time to refine themselves to further avoid scrutiny when it comes.
Blacks are three times more likely to be yanked from our cars for physical searches at a traffic stop, twice as likely to be arrested than any other population, for any type of crime, and four times as likely to have physical force used against us in those arrests.
In New York City, there’s a highly controversial practice called “stop and frisk” which is exactly what it sounds like. Even in overwhelmingly white areas of the city, young black and Latino men are the ones who are stopped most often. In 2011, there were more stop and frisk incidents of black men ages 16-24 than the total number of black men 16-24 who live in the city. Many young men speak of being stopped multiple times each month, while doing nothing more than walking down the street. They’re not arrested because they’ve done nothing wrong, don’t have drugs or weapons, but they’re stopped, intimidated, violated. Young women who are stopped are also frisked (it is not illegal for a male officer to frisk a woman) and huge numbers report sexual improprieties and intimidation.
In 2011, nearly 2,000 people were subjected to this every single day, 85% were black or latino and only 12% were ticketed or arrested for any infraction, including those who were ticketed for disorderly conduct for complaining too vociferously about being stopped. (Like the man who was stopped in his pajamas and slippers while taking out his trash.)
And as for incarcerations, we cannot forget that the majority of people of all races in this country are there for drug crimes, and the “war on drugs” which has been vastly disproportionately waged in the black community. Though blacks are only 14% of regular drug users we represent 37% of drug arrests. In California alone data shows that black people are 4 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than anyone else, 3 times more likely to be imprisoned for those arrests, 12 times more likely if charged with a marijuana felony. Once we’re sent to prison, we serve longer sentences, and not only because of the longstanding crack-vs-powder disparities.
Then there’s the educational side, we continue to see outcome disparities between the races across all income levels. This has turned into policies focusing on improving individual black students’ testing abilities and outcomes rather than any effort to examine and root out racial bias in test design (and it is there) or testing methodology. We know that this focus comes at the expense of the regular curriculum, cheapening overall learning.
And the testing focus is only a part of the problem. We have data that show from kindergarten black children do not receive adequate in-classroom support, they’re not called on by teachers for participation as often. In majority black schools, participatory learning time (Q&A and discussions and hands-on lab work in sciences) is significantly lower overall than in more racially balanced or majority white schools.
We know that for all the lip service given to aiding students lacking home support, that doesn’t really happen. We know that signs of a lack of home support, even benign ones like falling asleep in class, are more likely to lead to punishment or classroom embarrassment (promoting stigmatization and bullying) than assistance.
When black students are punished, there is a disparity in punishment severity compared to other students and a higher likelyhood of detentions and suspensions. We know that black students with disabilities, physical, cognitive and mental health alike, are even more disproportionately punished compared to disabled students of other races or non-disabled black students.
Black students are expelled more frequently and expelled students at the high school level are highly unlikely to enroll in alternative schools, and that across all ages expelled students are more likely to run afoul of the law. We know that black students are arrested for school rule violations more frequently, especially in the “zero tolerance” era, and that 70% of in-school arrests involve black or Hispanic students.
What does all this mean? It means the black community:
[ul]
[li]faces education disparities that are not being addressed in reformative ways.[/li][li]has children whose basic disobedience is treated as criminal.[/li][li]has children who are not being availed of juvenile justice’s rehabilitative or educational efforts.[/li][li]is increasingly demoralized by heavy-handed policing tactics that view mundane activities as suspicious.[/li][li]is increasingly scrutinized by policing tactics that disproportionately target its members and sap respect for law and authority, especially amongst oft-targeted youth. (“They think I’m a thug, so why shouldn’t I be a thug?”)[/li][li]has a plague of families with absent parents due to incarceration or street violence which, despite the heavy-handed policing is not being routed out. (See: ~30 shootings in Chicago in the last two weeks).[/li][li]has a generation coming into adulthood that suffered under poverty and vast home life changes due to Clinton-era welfare “reform” that mythologized coerced low wage, low skill labor as a path toward prosperity and class mobility (it is not) at the expense of childrearing.[/li][li]has suffered more significantly due to the recent economic crisis:[/li][LIST]
[li]enduring more than twice as many foreclosure home losses[/li][LIST]
[li]major banks targeted blacks for sub-prime mortgages even when they qualified for regular ones[/li][li]even many renters lost homes, due to landlord defaults[/li][/ul]
[li]with an unemployment rate which at its worst was more than double the national overall, today, it’s 14% to the overall 8%[/li][/LIST]
[li]and continues to contend with constricted employment opportunities, licensing/permitting bans and wage stagnation for those with criminal records.[/li][li]plus voting bans for felons in many states, which limits the opportunity for and inclination toward civic participation in order to affect changes.[/li][/LIST]
When family units and entire communities are broken down via poverty, incarceration, violence, more incarceration and poverty which follows, and their kids are in a school where they’re not only not empowered to break out of that cycle in any way but are sucked right back into it from the schoolhouse itself, very little positive change can occur.
But by all means, continue to think that blacks are just a violent, law disrespecting race, predisposed to bad acts and not inclined to take responsibility for ourselves. That’s it, I’m sure. There are no outside factors involved at all…
Racism is unquestionably a factor. Black people are more likely to commit crimes (for whatever reason), but they are also more likely to be caught (thanks to racial profiling), and more likely to be sentenced to jail when they get caught (thanks to subconcious or conscious racism on the part of the jury.)
Stop and frisk is a policy designed to stop violent crime by making it harder to carry a weapon. Whites in NYC commit 5% of the violent crime according victim reports and are 10% of the people who are stopped and frisked. Blacks in NYC commit 66% of the violent crime and are 55% of the people who are stopped and frisked.
This is not true only 20% of inmates are incarcerated for drug crimes. 50 percent are in for violent crimes, 20 percent for property crimes, and 10 percent for other types. If the black arrest rate for drug crimes matched the percentage of black in the general population the number of black prisoners would go down 8%. The drug war is not what is causing higher incarceration rates.
On this board, at least, any notion that genetic differences can underlie behavioral differences is dismissed outright, either as “racist” (as if a label were a scientific counter-argument) or as untenable on grounds such as “race is a purely social construct” (as if that meant there were no average difference in genetically-driven physiology among various self-identified groups).
One way to approach the question at hand would be to look across other cultures and other national constructs/political systems and other cultural histories. If there are other such situations where asians, say, commit a disproportionate number of crimes to blacks, it can more easily be argued that “American” black crime is unique to our milieu, and can be explained by our own history.
May I suggest that those of you arguing the problem is America–and not genetic differences–bring forward violent crime statistics from predominantly black nations, or nations with other cultural histories, and show that disproportionate representation for “black crime” is unique to the United States? This would be more persuasive than simply dismissing out of hand that there cannot be behavioral differences among populations driven by differences in a given population’s access to a given pool of genes. For example, one might argue that higher levels of testosterone are a trigger for more aggressive behavior, and that since young black males have higher testosterone levels than young asian males (on average), a higher incidence of aggressive activity is to be expected.
I might add–before you lynch me–that I consider what our criminal justice system has done to our young black males to be…criminal. I am not interested in defending it. It is a heartache and an outrage to look at our incarceration rates, our default assumption that imprisonment is a good idea, and the further assumption that our stupid stupid “war on drugs” is worth a shit. The toll this idiotic paradigm has taken on an entire generation of young black men is shameful. Unfortunately, it does not mean there cannot be genetically-based physiologically different drivers of behavior among population groups.