As remains the case today, blacks in the past were overrepresented
among those arrested and imprisoned. In urban areas in 1967, blacks were
17 times more likely than whites to be arrested for robbery. In 1980
blacks comprised about one-eighth of the population but were half of all
those arrested for murder, rape and robbery, according to FBI data. And
they were between one-fourth and one-third of all those arrested for
crimes such as burglary, auto theft and aggravated assault.
“Even
allowing for the existence of discrimination in the criminal justice
system, the higher rates of crime among black Americans cannot be
denied,” wrote James Q. Wilson and Richard Herrnstein in their classic
1985 study, “Crime and Human Nature.” “Every study of crime using
official data shows blacks to be overrepresented among persons arrested,
convicted, and imprisoned for street crimes.” This was true decades
before the authors put it to paper, and it remains the case decades
later.
“The overrepresentation of blacks among arrested
persons persists throughout the criminal justice system,” wrote Wilson
and Herrnstein. “Though prosecutors and judges may well make
discriminatory judgments, such decisions do not account for more than a
small fraction of the overrepresentation of blacks in prison.” Yet
liberal policy makers and their allies in the press and the academy
consistently downplay the empirical data on black crime rates, when they
bother to discuss them at all. Stories about the racial makeup of
prisons are commonplace; stories about the excessive amount of black
criminality are much harder to come by.
“High rates of
black violence in the late twentieth century are a matter of historical
fact, not bigoted imagination,” wrote Mr. Stuntz. “The trends reached
their peak not in the land of Jim Crow but in the more civilized North,
and not in the age of segregation but in the decades that saw the rise
of civil rights for African Americans — and of African American control
of city governments.”
The left wants to blame these outcomes on racial
animus and “the system,” but blacks have long been part of running that
system. Black crime and incarceration rates spiked in the 1970s and ’80s
in cities such as Baltimore, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia,
Los Angeles and Washington under black mayors and black police chiefs.
Some of the most violent cities in the United States today are run by
blacks.
Black people are not shooting each other at these
alarming rates in Chicago and other urban areas because of our gun laws
or our drug laws or a criminal justice system that has it in for them.
The problem is primarily cultural — self-destructive behaviors and
attitudes all too common among the black underclass. The problem is
black criminal behavior, which is one manifestation of a black pathology
that ultimately stems from the breakdown of the black family. Liberals
want to talk about what others should do for blacks instead of what
blacks should do for themselves. But if we don’t acknowledge the
cultural barriers to black progress, how can we address them? How can
you even begin to fix something that almost no one wants to talk about
honestly?
Jason Riley is a member of the Wall Street Journal Editorial Board.
