Bias? This quote is from an article in National Review Online by Heather MacDonald. The research is sound but they may have missed a point: "The idea that the criminal-justice system discriminates against blacks — and that this bias explains blacks’ disproportionate presence in custody — is a staple of civil-rights activism and of the academic Left. Every effort to prove it empirically, however, has come up short. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosecution following a felony than whites did and that they were less likely to be found guilty at trial. ***Alfred Blumstein has found that blacks are underrepresented in prison for homicide compared with their arrest rates.*** A meta-analysis of charging and sentencing studies showed that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms, according to criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen." Note highlighted sentence - this could in fact be interpreted as evidence of racial bias. If black murderers are under-represented in prison, and since most of their victims are certainly black - does this indicate that the system is not as invested in spending resources to punish the murderers of black VICTIMS?
Posted on: Fri, 19 Jul 2013 05:07:18 +0000
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