The burdens of crime and incarceration are not evenly spread; instead, they are highly concentrated by race and class. Neither race nor class alone is a sufficient explanatory variable. (Bruce Western has done groundbreaking work on this.)
The picture is worst for African-Americans; even adjusting for overall lower incomes, African-Americans suffer much more crime than do members of other ethnic categories. Homicide provides the most dramatic example; representing less than 15% of the population, blacks suffer more than 50% of the murders.
Like all crime problems, this problem tends to be self-sustaining. Since enforcement and prosecution resources are much more equally distributed than is crime, an offender who commits a crime where crime is common is less vulnerable to arrest, vigorous prosecution, and a stiff sentence than an offender who commits the same crime in a more law-abiding neighborhood.
Strong patterns of residential segregation by race and class plus differential crime rates together mean that the average poor African-American grows up in a higher-crime environment than a white American of comparable income or a more prosperous African-American. And since higher-crime areas are also lower-punishment-per-crime areas, crimes committed against poor black people draw lower-than-average punishments.
Thus the current system fails to fulfill the Constitutional mandate of “equal protection of the laws,” if “equal protection” means that a crime against a poor or black person will be investigated as diligently, prosecuted as forcefully, and punished as severely as the same crime against a rich or white person.
Assuming that the threat of punishment has some deterrent effect, growing up where that threat is smaller – and licit economic opportunity less available – should be expected, other things equal, to lead to a higher rate of criminal activity. And indeed that is what we find. African-Americans are far more heavily victimized than others, but not as a result of cross-ethnic aggression; crime is overwhelmingly intra-racial.
Despite the effective penalty discount for crimes committed in areas where poor African-Americans concentrate, higher crime rates there lead to much higher levels of incarceration. An African-American man who fails to graduate from high school has a better-than-even chance of serving prison time before his thirtieth birthday.
High rates of African-American incarceration have not escaped public notice. But, paradoxically, efforts to reduce the racial disproportion in the prison population are likely to intensify the implicit racial discrimination among victims that results from lower per-crime rates of punishment, leaving African-Americans even more exposed to victimization. The critique of the current system in terms of imposing prison terms and the consequent social stigma on a much higher proportion of African-Americans than of whites is fully justified by the facts, but the mechanisms involved are far more subtle than conscious, or even systemic, racial discrimination by officials against black perpetrators.
Indeed, racial disproportion in incarceration has grown even as racial prejudice and discrimination have become less marked, in part at least because the criminal justice system has become more diligent about punishing crimes against black victims. Providing something closer to “equal protection of the laws” would make the problem of racial disproportion in punishment worse, not better, unless and until higher per-crime punishment risks caused black crime rates to fall. While the standard critique portrays a melodrama, the reality is a tragedy.
Worse, insofar as the impact of incarceration rates on crime rates is subject to the law of diminishing returns, it is likley that further increasing the incarceration rate among poor African-Americans would have modest — or perhaps even negative — net impacts on crime.
The urgency of finding means of reducing crime and incarceration simultaneously – by using punishment more efficiently, but using punishments other than confinement, or by using means of crime control other than punishment – is therefore especially high in poor, black neighborhoods.
[This is the fourth in a series of posts drawn from my book When Brute Force Fails: How to Have Less Crime and Less Punishment Previous posts covered the logic of crime control policy, positive feedback and strategic enforcement, and benefits and costs. A final post will provide a laundry list of specific recommendations.]
wkwillis says:
We had a problem on our street back in upstate New York. Our street had been bluelined as a drug zone by the local police. The dealers were selling drugs in our driveway (shared with several other neighbors) because it had an easy escape into a labrynth of abandoned buildings.
It’s not that we had any particular problems with them selling drugs, because our older brother had been in that business himself. It was because they were harassing people walking down the street. They wanted to discourage foot traffic so as to make it more difficult for other dealers or the police to interfere with them.
We had to explain to them that it was a public street and if they wanted to do business in our driveway, they would operate by our rules. They were just some kids and when they showed up for the meet they were carrying knives and pipes and we had shotguns, so we quickly arrived at a detente.
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October 29, 2009, 1:24 amDerek Shampoo says:
Nothing of note to say but I thought I would mention I am really enjoying these posts. I’m very interested in what the other posts will say.
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October 29, 2009, 1:27 amUSCitizen says:
Could it be that some demographic groups commit and are therefore, incarcerated for more crimes relative to the general population?
I’m going with “Yes”.
Law Enforcement is an Equal Opportunity Arrestor.
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October 29, 2009, 1:45 amricky says:
And let’s cure cancer while we’re at it.
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October 29, 2009, 2:02 amEH says:
Could it be that some demographic groups commit and are therefore, incarcerated for more crimes relative to the general population?
In some contexts, crime can be defined as the behavior of the losers of the class war. At times, the police themselves have found themselves on the wrong end of this relationship with society, so...y’know...you might want to tread lightly in your materialist justifications.
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October 29, 2009, 2:11 amjosh bornstein says:
I actually had not heard that statistic (re male black high-school dropouts having a 50% chance of prison before age 30). Astonishing. Is there a cite? (Not that I don’t believe it; I’d just like to look at how it was calculated.) I wonder if it was further broken down by city population . . . I’d guess that in large urban areas, the percentage of incarceration would be even higher, while in more rural areas, it would be lower.
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October 29, 2009, 2:34 amgwinje says:
[USCitizen and EH’s hair blow in the wind as the point zooms past their heads]
I enjoyed this series of posts as well, and am looking forward to the recommendations.
And we have cured (effectively) some kinds of cancer.
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October 29, 2009, 3:36 amTracy W says:
I appreciate that this post covers that the poor are victims of crime.
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October 29, 2009, 4:29 amcubanbob says:
“Thus the current system fails to fulfill the Constitutional mandate of “equal protection of the laws,” if “equal protection” means that a crime against a poor or black person will be investigated as diligently, prosecuted as forcefully, and punished as severely as the same crime against a rich or white person.”
This is possibly the dumbest thing I have read in a long time from a supposedly learned individual. There is so much assumed stupidity in the article one doesn’t know where to begin. However let’s give it a try: West Chester County NY, one of the most affluent areas of the nation has it’s local police departments and has it’s prosecutor. Nearby Bronx County has its’s prosecutor and it’s police department. Now Bronx County has far more poor and African American’s than West Chester County. So Kleiman’s argument is if a black criminal is more likely to be arrested in West Chester County by virtue of the fact that there being proportionately less crime per capita in West Chester County than in Bronx County and therefore the police in West Chester are able to arrest criminals at a higher rate than the Bronx by virtue of having a higher police to criminal ratio than the Bronx it is discriminatory. And that West Chester is able to field more police in proportion to the local criminal population is unconstitutional. Therefore the cure is for West Chester to either arrest less criminals in order to be proportionate to the Bronx or have it’s local police departments loan officers to the NYPD in the Bronx to maintain a more uniform arrest level there.
But the idiocy doesn’t stop there. It’s the fault of rich West Chester being able to afford more policing in proportion and due to lower overall crime rates that the case loads are less thereby the prosecutors are able to try more cases proportionally than the Bronx prosecutors and plea bargain less cases in proportion. Also the West Chester prosecutor must not overcharge the defendant but rather use the same charging guidelines the Bronx prosectors use and they should select their jury pools from from the Bronx less richer white people convict criminals at a disparate rate. Naturally it follows that rich white people who by the way commit far less crime than other groups who are less wealthy ought not be allowed to hire expensive competent attorney’s but rather be compelled to use the same public defenders the poor rely on less we have a disparate outcome. For Kleiman’s argument to make any sense at all, all crime must become a federal issue, all policing must become a federal issue and all prosecution must be done by the feds and all defense attorney’s must be federal public defenders. Then the allocation of resources that he argues for and the decision to charge becomes the responsibility of one government and his premise can then be acted on. However for that to happen the constitution would have to be amended.
Being born poor is not a choice. Staying poor in adulthood is a choice. Keeping criminals in prison lowers crime. After all crime is the livelihood of criminals just like law is the livelihood of lawyers. And in prison it is a lot more difficult for the criminal to practice his trade. Why crime is so much more prevalent in the black community than in other community’s of comparable income I do not know. However policing and prosecuting do not cause crime and if going to prison does not deter criminals as Kleiman is implying, nothing else will short of swift and certain summary execution will. To belive what Kleiman is arguing one has to be a learned intellectual. No ordinary person could be such a fool.
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October 29, 2009, 4:29 amVisitor Again says:
I am a white guy who lives in South Los Angeles in a relatively high-crime area where nearly the entire population is black or Latino. I have lived and/or done work there for more than 40 years, starting my legal career in early 1969 as a poverty lawyer in Watts.
I believe one of the major problems in dealing with crime in South Los Angeles is the hostility to law enforcement among law-abiding residents. That stems largely from the lack of respect the police have for people of color. They treat almost every person of color, and especially young people, as if they were a criminal. This breeds contempt and distrust among everyone who lives here, not merely those who are directly abused but their families, relatives and friends, those who witness the abuse and those who hear about it. As a consequence, the police do not get the cooperation and support they need to prevent crime and to apprehend offenders.
To get respect, the police need to show respect. It’s so simple, and yet law enforcement pretends to be baffled at community hostility and pretends to be bemused when law enforcement bond proposals sometimes go down to defeat at election time.
There are police chat rooms online where one can see first hand the attitude police have towards people who live in the ghettos and barrios of our large cities. They regard these areas as war zones or jungles where it’s kill or be killed. And yet a large majority of these citizens is entirely law-abiding and an overwhelming majority does not commit crimes of violence although some may violate other laws.
When I see someone acting crazily or weirdly–which happens sometimes in my neighborhood–the very last people on earth I would call for help are the police. Calling them for help carries an appreciable risk of having someone shot dead for making a suspicious movement or for many of the other reasons the police manage to come up with, and I wouldn’t want that on my conscience. Only if a crime causing injury or death has been committed would I call the police, and then only because there’s no one else to call.
The Los Angeles Police Department’s motto–to protect and serve–is regarded as a joke in this area. The police are more like an invading force whose purpose is to keep the have-nots from causing any threat or inconvenience to the haves and whose methods involve regarding everyone of color as a criminal posing such a threat.
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October 29, 2009, 4:42 amPerseus says:
There was a good discussion of many of these issues several months back among Glenn Loury, Bruce Western, John Lott, and James Q. Wilson: “Behind Bars in the Land of the Free.”
James Q. Wilson posed a series of questions that ought to be addressed:
If you wish to write helpfully about mass incarceration, it is necessary to talk about all of these questions: the benefits as well as the costs of incarceration, the difficulty in finding programs that will eliminate the crime-production tendencies of father-absent families, the greater value of prevention over rehabilitation, and the complex intellectual and political problems that attend any effort to make prevention strategies more commonplace.
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October 29, 2009, 4:46 amkdackson says:
Three cheers for pseudoscience.
The main fallacy of this “study”, and all “studies” of this sort is the basic, unstated, underlying assumption. That is:
All individuals, regardless of race or class have an equal liklihood of committing a violent crime.
This is patently bogus on its face. If you were raised as a criminal, you will likely be a criminal. If you were raised with a respect for law and society, you will likely not become a criminal. There’s always the chance that you will break the cycle in either direction.
What it comes down to is that race and/or class are not necessarily independent variables, so standard orthogonal statistics have little chance of correctly predicting bahaviors. Instead, they can be co-correllated to some extent, which the analysis presented by the “study” tends to suggest (i.e., that neither race nor class alone is a sufficient explanatory variable). There are methods to handle such data (i.e., Partial Least Squares and Principle Component Analysis), but they are not widely used outside of chemical analytical laboratories.
I would suggest the following truth:
If you can’t afford the time, don’t do the crime.
And that should guarantee “equal protection under the law”.
Unless you want to randomly select people to fill jails by quota.
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October 29, 2009, 7:53 amgeokstr says:
I read a book years ago that attributed much of the crime rate among blacks to the institution of the welfare system, which essentially paid young black girls to have babies and not get married, as the government actually gave them more money and in-kind transfers like food stamps and rent vouchers for doing nothing than a young man could earn just starting his career at minimum wage. And the payments stopped or were greatly reduced if they got married.
The intact black family before welfare began in the ‘60s was actually more common than among whites, but that situation radically reversed virtually overnight because of this. Black family income also made its greatest gains against white family income before welfare, not after.
The book also posited that one of the main driving factors that civilizes young men of all races and allows them to prove themselves in society is the responsibility to care for a family. Once that responsibility is taken away from them, they have to prove their manhood among their peers in some other fashion, which often turns to violent and/or criminal behavior.
I’m working strictly from memory, but I believe that was the gist of the theory. It certainly made sense to me at the time and still does. I am not certain how this can be fixed now that it has so thoroughly broken by the good intentions that pave the liberal highway to hell. A system set up to ostensibly help the poor ends up exacerbating and perpetuating poverty. Unintended consequences will always come back to haunt.
Now they want to do health care.
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October 29, 2009, 7:57 amMalvolio says:
I once had a very enlightening conversation with a policeman here in San Francisco. Someone had recently shot at a passing patrol car and the officer I was talking to was frustrated the brass were not talking his preferred mode of addressing the issue: his idea was that the police should hassle local residents and roust anyone with skin a shade darker than George Hamilton’s until “the community” gave up the shooter, or at least learned the lesson that it was a bad idea to take pot-shots at cops. He seemed to think collective punishment was merest common sense.
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October 29, 2009, 8:03 amFraggle Rock says:
Or just losers.
When success in school is labeled “acting white” and considered a bad thing, that culture is broken and doomed to failure.
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October 29, 2009, 8:10 amRichard Aubrey says:
Talking mostly about the perps here. Since the CW is that the “overwhelming majority” of the ethnic group in question is not criminal, we have a problem.
They’re not perps. They’re vics. Don’t they get any consideration?
Apparently not if the result is to lock up a disproportionate number of their lookalikes.
John d’Iulio (sp) once remarked that getting the perps out of black neighborhoods would be a good idea but would reach a point of diminishing returns when the vics found out how many of their friends and relatives were gone. Possibly we’ve reached that state already.
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October 29, 2009, 8:31 amNR says:
<>
I’m a big fan of Kleiman and have been greatly enjoying these posts. I also think he makes a lot of sense on the policy issues. But this is a bad constitutional argument. Disparate impact without discriminatory intent does not establish an equal protection violation.
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October 29, 2009, 9:31 amEric says:
Notice the passive tone for all these observations?
Let’s not be so scared of ‘blaming the victim’, that we don’t hold people accountable for their actions. African Americans commit a lot of crime, proportionally. They need to stop it.
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October 29, 2009, 9:32 amNR says:
(Meant to block quote Kleiman’s EPC argument.)
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October 29, 2009, 9:33 amDouglas2 says:
My experience living in suburbia is that if I phone the police with a suspicion that some activity is not quite kosher, they send someone right away to investigate.
My experience living in the inner-city of a rustbelt city includes phoning the police to report that a gang of youths is rampaging through a vacant apartment that I can see from my window, tossing plumbing fixtures out through the glass windows of the apartment. They insist that they will not send anyone unless I assure them that some person is being harmed or in danger of immediate harm, and even then won’t send someone unless I provide the exact address of the apartment in question.
I am sure that there are complex reasons for this disparity, and in lay terms I would call it unjust and say that we should do something about it, not from any imaginary constitutional mandate (hey, each community got the leadership they voted for, after all. We should fix it because we like justice and think that citizens rights should be enforced against all criminals.
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October 29, 2009, 9:51 amArthurKirkland says:
In a “collective punishment” war between police and the “community,” I’d take the police — but only if you spotted me a bunch of dead cops and some raped/murdered wives of cops.
I therefore dislike the officer’s “solution.” Did his brainstorm end there?
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October 29, 2009, 10:01 amOren says:
Willis, can you defined “bluelined”, and perhaps put it on urbandictionary for the enrichment of the world?
Not taking sides (yet) but does your argument really extend to no matter how disparate the impact is?
If the Bronx police out-and-out refused to do anything about petty theft, would a resident have a claim that he is being denied protection of the law? This isn’t even an “equal” protection argument, really, it’s an argument that even poor minorities in crime-ridden areas deserve to be protected against petty theft.
Douglas,
That is an example of the point made in the last post — suburbia is in the low-crime equilibrium and so every violation is punished, the city is in a high-crime equilibrium so most violations go unpunished.
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October 29, 2009, 10:16 amSuperSkeptic says:
All you have to do is live in a city (or near one, or have ever been to one) to know that the comments (even so far) are more insightful than the post.
Assuming that the threat of punishment has some deterrent effect, growing up where that threat is smaller – and licit economic opportunity less available – should be expected, other things equal, to lead to a higher rate of criminal activity.
Ah, so he DOES concede it’s simply the criminalization of economic activity. Take the next step...
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October 29, 2009, 10:19 amMark Buehner says:
I see a lot of tsk tsking, but not a lot of solutions. We know what the problems are, clarity is not the issue. But nobody wants to touch the PC third rail to deal with the ‘root causes’:
- Disastrous Great Society era programs that have taken half a century to try to undo but is still haunting us. Welfare reform was a huge achievement under Clinton, but we are sliding back into its shadow. The astonishingly stupid idea of ‘project’ housing created even more concentrated ghettos and helped create a critical mass for powerful street gangs.
- The lunatic drug war made dealing drugs far more lucrative than joining the legitimate work force. It also provided the fuel for the street gang explosion, as well as locking up a huge number of people who learned to become better criminals in prison.
–Broken families, young unwed mothers, and the absence of fathers is probably the single greatest blow.
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October 29, 2009, 10:25 amDave Hardy says:
“The Los Angeles Police Department’s motto–to protect and serve–is regarded as a joke in this area.”
I thought they changed the motto to
“We treat you all as if you were King.”
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October 29, 2009, 10:31 amTGGP says:
Kdackson:
Kleiman does not believe what you think he believes.
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October 29, 2009, 10:36 amA. Criminal says:
As a criminal, my disdain for the law was nurtured by the drug war.
“And since higher-crime areas are also lower-punishment-per-crime areas, crimes committed against poor black people draw lower-than-average punishments.”
Since nearly all crimes against blacks are committed by blacks, you’re claiming that, for the same crime, blacks are punished less severely than whites. The Outrage Machine usually claims exactly the opposite.
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October 29, 2009, 10:37 amSarcastro says:
Yep. being black sucks, so we should totally abandon them. It’s their fault they’re in a cultural downward spiral, so lets just forget about them and work on helping the rest of us who have good cultures. What’s the worst that could happen?
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October 29, 2009, 10:38 amSteve Clay says:
No one has suggested such a plan. Yes, inequality in the ratio of police resources to number of crimes means more crime where the ratio is lower, but Kleiman is aware that no simple solution exists to raise the ratio, and recognizes even that may not help. “further increasing the incarceration rate among poor African-Americans would have modest — or perhaps even negative — net impacts on crime.”
This is why his work is important; it doesn’t require steps as pointless as those you mentioned.
He already told you something very simple does deter crime: swift and certain punishment. The HOPE program has data to prove it.
Where the threat of “going to prison” can actually be carried out (and quickly), yes, prison deters crime. Our pesky due process makes uncertainty and delay of punishment go up with the severity of the punishment. So you can either gut due process (bad) or find punishments that you can legally hand out swiftly and certainly.
Our efforts to say “Hey, stop staying poor.” haven’t kicked in. Maybe we could just make it illegal.
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October 29, 2009, 10:39 amChris says:
NR: “Disparate impact without discriminatory intent does not establish an equal protection violation.”
That’s true under Arlington Heights, but I argue here and here (esp. the latter at p. 294) that the protection-based original meaning of “equal protection of the laws” doesn’t support a discriminatory-purpose requirement. Section 3 of the Civil Rights Act of 1871, for instance, said that the failure to supply protection, “from any cause,” constitutes a constitutional violation.
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October 29, 2009, 10:48 amyankee says:
There are actually two separate effects here A crime committed by a black perpetrator will be punished more severely than the same crime committed by a white perpetrator. Conversely, a crime against a black victim is punished less severely than the same crime committed against a white victim.
But yes, I thought that the net result was that black-on-black crime was punished more severely than white-on-white crime, because the black perp effect is larger than the black victim effect. I’m surprised Kleiman didn’t address this point.
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October 29, 2009, 10:49 amPatHMV says:
The phenomenon described by Visitor Again leads to a really vicious cycle. When resident refuse to cooperate with police, obtaining convictions is much more difficult. Even where the community is not antagonistic to the police for racial or cultural reasons, witnesses in high-crime areas are less likely to cooperate, because they have a very rational fear of retaliation by the defendants if they testify.
I think that the only way to approach that problem is through the “broken window” approach, community policing, and better training of police officers to avoid the cultural insensitivity issues described by Visitor Again (the extent of which I’m sure I would quibble with him about). You give people a small penalty, but one that they will really feel, when they’re first caught doing something criminal. Not just probation, where your biggest hassle is calling the guy once a month. Probation is not a serious consequence, and I believe it has little deterrent effect on people in high-crime communities. Right now, in my experience, offenders tend to commit, and get caught for, a whole string of relatively petty crimes and get a slap on the wrist for the first few convictions, up until they do something really serious and suddenly get thrown in jail for a long, long time. The wrist slapping do not provide any deterrent effect.
Meanwhile, we’re left with the fundamental resource allocation issues which Kleiman still hasn’t addressed. Should we provide job training to the guy arrested for a relatively minor crime? Sure. But how can we justify providing job training to him without providing job training to his neighbor, who is the same age, same economic circumstances, same race, but has thus far chosen NOT to commit any crime? That provides perverse incentives, like the old stereotype of the bum who hits a cop, just so he can get arrested and thrown in jail on a cold winter’s night, so he’ll have a warm bed and some free food.
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October 29, 2009, 10:56 amAndrew Lazarus says:
Prof. Kleiman is a major-cancer survivor. Glad you think he is on the right track.
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October 29, 2009, 11:05 amyankee says:
What is this supposed to mean, “let’s not be so scared of blaming the victim that we forget to blame the victim?”
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October 29, 2009, 11:10 amegd says:
What are the political orientations of suburbia versus the rustbelt inner-city? Do you think that liberal social voting patterns tend to advance the state of rustbelt inner-city police disinterest?
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October 29, 2009, 11:11 amAndrew Lazarus says:
I don’t believe my grandfather who lost millions in the 1929 Crash agreed. I mean, one of my cousins survived Auschwitz, so presumably the ones who didn’t are losers?!
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October 29, 2009, 11:13 amSoronel Haetir says:
Generally the outrage seems focused at the numbers at any one time without looking at how long the individual sentences are. You can have a lower average sentence for the same crime yet still have a larger percent incarcerated. I’ve seen this phenomena called the urban discount on numerous occasions.
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October 29, 2009, 11:13 amMark Field says:
Chris beat me to this, which is only fair since s/he is the source of the argument.
The quoted phrase accurately states current law under the 14th A. A better reading of the guarantee of equal protection, though, is that the state must actually supply equal protection. Such an interpretation would force states to supply omissions as well as to account for commissions (which is all current law requires).
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October 29, 2009, 11:24 amPintler says:
I always recall Mao’s famous dictum about “moving among the people as a fish swims in the sea”. It applies equally to policing, I think.
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October 29, 2009, 11:32 amRowerinVA says:
Um ... what? As others noted, Mr. Kleinman lapses into passive and opaque language. He’s intentionally pussy-footing. Let me see if I can edit this into something coherent:
Interesting. Why can’t Mr. Kleinman bring himself to say explicitly what he apparently means? Is it conscious, or an unconscious fear of political correctness attacks?
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October 29, 2009, 11:38 amDerHahn says:
Steven Clay — Our efforts to say “Hey, stop staying poor.” haven’t kicked in. Maybe we could just make it illegal.
But we’re working on it, Steve. There are a whole bunch of people really hot to make it illegal to be too poor to buy health insurance.
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October 29, 2009, 11:43 amPlastic says:
Where’s the study that says this, and why doesn’t increased incarceration bring crime closer to the “tipping point” discussed in an earlier post, where a new equilibrium is reached by a temporary increase in enforcement?
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October 29, 2009, 11:52 amTheBadness says:
I read a book years ago that attributed much of the crime rate among blacks to the institution of the welfare system, which essentially paid young black girls to have babies and not get married, as the government actually gave them more money and in-kind transfers like food stamps and rent vouchers for doing nothing than a young man could earn just starting his career at minimum wage. And the payments stopped or were greatly reduced if they got married.
The intact black family before welfare began in the ‘60s was actually more common than among whites, but that situation radically reversed virtually overnight because of this. Black family income also made its greatest gains against white family income before welfare, not after.
Takeaway: “no man in the house” rules are needlessly destructive, and ought never to have been taken seriously.
Sigh.
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October 29, 2009, 11:53 amToby says:
They were losers in a very bad game, one with a stacked deck they should have not been forced to play, but lose they did. Or do you think they won?
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October 29, 2009, 11:53 amStrict says:
“Keeping criminals in prison lowers crime.”
But what about crime committing while in prison? Or are you one of those folks that thinks prison should be a place where we encourage crime amongst the prisoners, as “part of their punishment”?
“After all crime is the livelihood of criminals just like law is the livelihood of lawyers.”
This is not true. Not all crime is about getting income. For example, millions of people are arrested for drug possession without intent to sell (they intend to consume the drugs).
As far as this talk of “criminals” go, I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who has never committed a crime. So what is a criminal? Someone who commits one crime?
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October 29, 2009, 12:00 pmDanInAustin says:
>If the Bronx police out-and-out refused to do anything about petty theft, would a resident have a claim >that he is being denied protection of the law
This happens all the time. Police or local communities ignore the law in order to take care of what they perceive as being a higher priority. In this example it’s petty theft but it could be prostitiution, or marijuana or illegal immigration. The solution to this sort of problem is the ballot box and not more lawsuits.
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October 29, 2009, 12:23 pmtherut says:
Those living in crime ridden inner cities need to move!! Go rural young man go rural. Get yourself out of the poor environment. Also which comes first the chicken or the egg? Does poverty cause crime or does crime cause poverty? There is a whole country out here to move around in. Quit thinking the crime ridden balck culture is your heritage. There are pockets of poor white crime ridden areas as well. The goal is to MOVE. Those who want to stay have made their choice.
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October 29, 2009, 12:26 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
Several Comments
1. I do not hold Kleiman in high regard at all as in his blog, he simply deletes any comments which prove the pro-Oduma (which is my name for Obama) bisas of ABC, BBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC & NBC.
He deleted my description of a Ch 7, ABC biased report of a Tea Party meeting held in Griffith Park here in LA last Sunday as well as my description of just who we ‘Tea Partiers’ are.
FYI ‘Tea Partiers’ ARE Black, Hispanic Oriental & White, former Dumocrats, Moderates, and Independents. From poor to rich and from very religious to Atheist Activists like me, And or course, Tea Partiers include more people who have served in the military, who on average pay more taxes and provide more jobs than do OBOTS!
He deleted a URL containing a list of over 150 documented lies Oduma has told in the last few years. And he even deleted a post from “Fred” which said something to the effect of, “Neil, all of Oduma’s lies make me sick!”
2. I am a white 74 year old who do to not expecting to live past 50, and messing up planning for the future, I’m now forced to live in a mostly black area in Hawthorne, CA. (As when I was younger, I put my life on the line for Black Civil rights, anyone who calls me a racist is an idiot.)
Living where I do & riding on buses, I’ve come to the conclusion that, in general, blacks are MORE racist than whites are.
One time, a black lady waiting for a bus & I were discussing this. She said black racism toward whites really bothered and offended her.
FYI Our President. Oduma’s own words in his own books PROVE he IS a Racist!
An interesting blog written by a Black who is Republican and a conservative, is called:
Wake Up Black America
3. Klienman is saying a black arrested for robbing a poor black, then charged with the crime, gets a lesser sentence than had he robbed a rich black person or a while?
I say, BS!
Or a black convicted of the murder of a poor black does not get the same sentence of one convicted of killing a rich black or white does?
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October 29, 2009, 12:31 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
TO FINISH
Or a black convicted of the murder of a poor black does not get the same sentence of one convicted of killing a rich black or white?
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October 29, 2009, 12:42 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
TO FINISH
Or a black convicted of the murder of a poor black does not get the same sentence of one convicted of killing a rich black or white?
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October 29, 2009, 12:42 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
TO FINISH
Or a black convicted of the murder of a poor black does not get the same sentence of one convicted of killing a rich black or white?
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October 29, 2009, 12:43 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
AGAIN — TO FINISH
This KEEPS cutting off the end of my post
Or a black convicted of the murder of a poor black does not get the same sentence of one convicted of killing a rich black or white?
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October 29, 2009, 12:47 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
AGAIN — TO FINISH
This KEEPS cutting off the end of my post
Or a black convicted of the murder of a poor black does not get the same sentence of one convicted of killing a rich black or white?
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October 29, 2009, 12:48 pmStrict says:
I hope Neil isn’t having a stroke.
Ok, so blacks on buses in your neighborhood are more racist than whites on buses in your neighborhood. Nice observation, but what’s your point?
Also, why are you “forced” to live in that neighborhood?
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October 29, 2009, 12:55 pmOren says:
I don’t know, it might improve his cognitive function.
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October 29, 2009, 1:02 pmChrisTS says:
Cubanbob’s claim that the adult poor have chosen to be poor is utterly stupid. Some people become poor even thought they were not born into poverty. You know, folks who lose their jobs and homes?
Undoubtedly there are more folks who are born into poverty and remain poor. But at what point do we think they made the ‘choice’ to remain so? 10 years old? 15? 20? And, how does the magical age of autonomy effectively negate the effects of the life lived up to that point?
I think most of us can agree that we have a complicated problem: one in which economic opportunity, education, culture, law, and crime all intersect. Idiotic sloganeering gets us nowhere.
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October 29, 2009, 1:04 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
To further Chris’s comment ...
There are those who are born into poverty. Low IQ. Crappy neighborhood, crappy schools. Start having babies at 14. No accessible role models of self-supporting adults and few jobs they can handle that would support them decently anyway. These people are going to be poor as adults. I don’t think they ever make the rational decision to stay poor, and I don’t actually think they have much choice about it. I lived in Memphis for 25 years and I saw this. Schools whose average standardized test scores were around the 30th percentile, for every test, every grade, year after year. These are American citizens. What do we do with them — stampede them off a cliff? Put them into spaceships and blast them into space? Pretend they don’t exist so we can make stupid statements about poverty being a choice?
...I stopped reading Neil’s communications when I got to the word “Oduma” and I bet I’m not the only one.
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October 29, 2009, 1:22 pmArthurKirkland says:
Nowhere good, I would agree.
Nowhere? The evidence says otherwise.
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October 29, 2009, 1:23 pmJames T. Carrington says:
My understanding of bluelined is that it represents which streets/neighborhoods get patrolled regularly, with beat cops looking after the area, that being on the “right” side of the line. Those on the “wrong” side are basically ignored, 911 calls take longer, hassling those walking through as potential criminals, etc.
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October 29, 2009, 1:24 pmMark Buehner says:
Cubanbob’s claim that the adult poor have chosen to be poor is utterly stupid. Some people become poor even thought they were not born into poverty. You know, folks who lose their jobs and homes?
But that isn’t generational poverty. People do fall into poverty and rise back out (sometimes more than once). That is different than being born or becoming poor and staying there. There is far more movement into and out of poverty than most people realize. That should be encouraging– being born poor is not a life sentence. And being born wealthy or middle class is not a lifetime entitlement.
Undoubtedly there are more folks who are born into poverty and remain poor. But at what point do we think they made the ‘choice’ to remain so? 10 years old? 15? 20? And, how does the magical age of autonomy effectively negate the effects of the life lived up to that point?
There’s a famous study that finds you are almost guaranteed to end up over the poverty line if you 1.graduate High School 2.Dont have babies out of wedlock 3.Don’t get married before you turn 20. And that is entirely independent of how poor you start out.
The interesting thing is that each one of those points is entirely within the control of every individual, with no need for any more help from the government than is already in place. All that is required is a minimal level of self disciple. These are life decisions made at ages where kids should be able to make them, but need reinforcement from schools, communities, and families. All of these have failed badly in the African American communities.
Our policies should be based around incentivizing these 3 points. For many years we have been doing the opposite.
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October 29, 2009, 2:57 pmlls says:
(The justice system’s) Holding victims accountable is the reason the incarceration rate is very high. You get caught breaking the law, you go to jail. Much of the comments here indicate that victims should ‘do something.’ The victims are paralyzed with hate, or consumed by an inability to effect a new direction in their lives.
I remember when there were ‘alternatives to incarceration programs.’ But what had happen was, some conservatives convinced us that we’re spending too much on people who don’t deserve the help. Then, along came the crack epidemic, which enhanced the lock ‘em up view.
And now, we refuse to do something new and/or entirely different about the problem. Or better yet, studying the problem is more credible than actually doing something. People like Presidents Truman, Johnson, and several others prior to the 80’s, made policy change happen.
The laundry list of specific recommendations gives me hope.
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October 29, 2009, 3:05 pmpete says:
Part of the problem is that modern society has left a large portion of the bottom fifth of the IQ/low education curve behind and a large chunk of that group end up in prison, on welfare, or homeless. To be blunt: it is really hard to find a job that can lift you out of poverty in modern society if you are not that bright. In past generations there were enough manufacturing and agricultural jobs that you could at least support a family without much education or even much intelligence, but most of those jobs are gone now.
Try getting a decent job today without a high school diploma (about 25% of the US population does not graduate) or without knowing how to type up and submit a resume on a computer (not an exact parellel to general intelligence, but pretty close). Even places like grocery stores looking for stockers often expect you to apply online and if you do not even know how to send an email or use a mouse your choices are much more limited.
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October 29, 2009, 3:05 pmgeokstr says:
Good work, there, Andrew.
You’ve totally demolished Bob’s argument with your anecdote that has absolutely nothing to do with the matter at hand — the culture of poverty and crime that pervades the minority communities. Liberals are good at the anecdotal evidence thing; you can deny a opponent’s entire array of evidence covering a whole population by coming up with a personalized sob story (and half of the ones they used at the town halls were phony plants of Dem operatives.) As Larry Elder likes to say — “A fact to a liberal is like Kryptonite to Superman.”
Yes, of course, Bob must have definitely meant to call your Grandfather a loser because he made a deliberate choice to lose millions in the Depression (so did my Grandfather). Did he stay poor the rest of his life? Those who have made it once often do it again if it falls apart, because their whole attitude and mindset is focused on success — not failure, not complacency, not dependency on handouts.
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October 29, 2009, 3:17 pmMark Buehner says:
Part of the problem is that modern society has left a large portion of the bottom fifth of the IQ/low education curve behind and a large chunk of that group end up in prison, on welfare, or homeless.
Well... its not fair to equate low IQ with lack of education. We’re talking about graduating high school here or getting a GED. The average income for a high school grad or equivalent is about $25,000 accoring to the census. For HS drop outs its $18,000. That’s a 40% swing. The poverty line for a family with 2 kids is $21,000. In other words if 1 parent has a HS diploma, the family can have 2 kids and odds are they are still above the poverty line. A married couple would average $50,000, and if they wait a few years to have kids you’ve instantly escaped poverty.
Obviously graduating high school isn’t necessarily the cause of success, but its certainly a major indicator. It displays a basic level of being able to show up somewhere and learn a little bit, which is a question of personal discipline and support from family and community.
The question we should be asking isn’t how to a poor kid that drops out and has a baby out of wedlock into a middle class life– the poor decision making has already been done. By that point society has already failed. We focus our efforts way too late. We should be focusing on keeping kids in school and unpregnant, then everything else will take care of itself. Sure, we can provide a safety net for the remainder, but there is no possible way to get the same bang for your buck. To interrupt the cycle of poverty you have got to make a difference before, not after, high school and the late teen years.
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October 29, 2009, 3:20 pmtherut says:
I grew up poor but most people at that time were poor. I know classmates that to this day are still living in poverty. Why??? Drugs and poor choices. Why did they make these choices and other did not? I know those with low IQ’s who work and have brought themselves and their children out of poverty. I know those who grew up with alot more money and have ruined their lives with drugs and poor choices. These are all white people. Do I feel a ethnic rage that these white people have been hurt by those with more money. No. The idea of such has never crossed my mind.
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October 29, 2009, 3:56 pmNickM says:
Many of the commenters are misinterpreting the post’s reference to “lower per-crime rates of punishment”. This is amount of punishment per crime, not per conviction. The only way to change that is to catch more criminals who are victimizing black people (or, since most of these criminals are repeat offenders, to catch them after fewer crimes).
That’s not fully within the power of government. You don’t often have eyewitnesses or physical evidence pointing to the culprit. Life isn’t CSI.
Nick
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October 29, 2009, 4:10 pmVisitor Again says:
I’m not so sure who’d win–people in the ghettos and barrios are heavily armed and there are some crazy motherfuckers on our side who, unlike the cowards on the Los Angeles Police Department, are willing to do battle at the slightest opportunity–but it would last quite a few days and you’d also have to spot a few thousand businesses burned to the ground and maybe lots of homes as well.
The vaunted Los Angeles Police Department surrendered large parts of the city to the mob in 1992 and we all watched in amazement on television as the mob rampaged through the city, looting and burning. I lived a mile south of the Beverly Hills city limits at the time, and the rioters came right up La Cienega Boulevard past where I lived and burned down businesses as far as two blocks north of me. Those responsible were discriminating in what they burned down in the riots of 1965 and 1992 in Los Angeles–both of which I witnessed close up. They might be less so in an all-out war.
I believe most police officers are so afraid of violence that there’s a chance they might be beaten in a war. The authorities would have to call in the National Guard to restore order because the LAPD is not up to it.
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October 29, 2009, 4:43 pmAllan Walstad says:
Charles Murray’s book Losing Ground demonstrated 25 years ago how programs ostensibly intended to help the poor can actually give them short-term incentives to engage in behavior that is long-term self-destructive. Problem is, changing back is much more difficult than simply not going down the meddlesome-government road in the first place. Welfare, minimum wage laws, and drug prohibition may have looked benign, but with hindsight it should be possible to admit they were destructive mistakes. One of the destructive outcomes is more crime. Thomas Sowell is another author who noted that supposed anti-poverty programs and other putatively well-intended big-government projects caught blacks at a time when they were making rapid progrss, and shut a lot of the progress down.
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October 29, 2009, 4:52 pmChrisTS says:
Laura:
I, however, like a good train wreck. :-)
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October 29, 2009, 5:02 pmVisitor Again says:
You have one fucked-up mind.
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October 29, 2009, 5:15 pmEH says:
Cubanbob’s claim that the adult poor have chosen to be poor is utterly stupid. Some people become poor even thought they were not born into poverty. You know, folks who lose their jobs and homes?
I don’t know if it’s Keynesian, but there are economic theories that laud the maintenance of a certain level of unemployment. I’m not sure that qualifies as an individual choice.
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October 29, 2009, 5:27 pmSarcastro says:
It was the best of train wrecks, it was the worst of train wrecks.
I do like therut’s anecdote and will listen to it instead of Andrew Lazarus’s anecdote. Cause we need data about how the only way to make people rich is to make sure they starve otherwise!
Really the Great Depression was awesome. Toughened up people, killed the weak in the herd.
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October 29, 2009, 5:27 pmRyan Waxx says:
My god, he’s right. The “too many Black perps” problem and the “too many black victims” problem can’t both be solved unless at the expense of the other. At first his “non-confinement solutions” sounded like he was going to propose “Midnight Basketball II — Double Dribble”, but then I realized that there really was only one way to remove Black perps from the prison system without creating more Black victims: Mass Executions.
Interesting.
(Yes, the above is sarcasm. I anticipate his answer actually being along the Midnight Basketball II lines. Typical liberal method of facing an insolvable problem is to come up with a fantasy answer, declare victory, and when it turns out that the fantasy didn’t actually come true, ignore it or blame someone else for the failure). Only people to benefit is the government agency tasked with throwing someone else’s money at the unicorn.
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October 29, 2009, 5:28 pmTweets that mention The Volokh Conspiracy » Blog Archive » Crime and punishment, race and class -- Topsy.com says:
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Jan Olsen and NextHotMovieStar, Kai Kaapro. Kai Kaapro said: race and crime, a tragedy — http://bit.ly/4wFoF6 [...]
Reminds me of says:
Reminds me of a story, perhaps apocryphal, of a complaint that local police were discriminating against blacks in local writing traffic tickets. So the newspaper staked out a few intersections where the rolling-stop tickets being complained of were common, and logged all the violations, noting the gender and race of the driver and passengers. Turned out that the police were discriminating — blacks were less likely to be ticketed than whites who ran the stop signs, at the same location, but blacks much more likely to roll through the stop sign and commit the offense in the first place.
Race distribution in incarceration likely mirrors the racial distribution of the commission of the offense.
Blacks and whites, Republicans and Democrats, cops and prosecutors, management and labor, everyone needs to call out bad behavior, and stop closing ranks with “people like me” and coddling bad behavior.
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October 29, 2009, 5:32 pmReminds me of says:
Bob’s quite was “staying” poor... not becoming poor. Many people may become poor despite making good choices, but few of those people stay poor except by their own choices.
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October 29, 2009, 5:37 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
This is from an article about Nifong, before the charges against the Duke students were dropped.
Author: “John Schwade is a Durham resident and a psychologist at a state prison.”
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October 29, 2009, 5:39 pmHarry Schell says:
So are “losers” entitled to a free pass for violent crimes? How many murders should a “loser” do before someone says “enough”?
Marxist politics and economics have failed every time to deliver on their promises, and usually the poor pay even more for the excesses of “leaders” like Mao and their “class war”.
Maybe you should tread heavily in some history books, and learn that there are objective truths in life, before you offer up stuff like “class war” to justify crime.
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October 29, 2009, 5:51 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
He was not poor but he never regained anything remotely resembling his former standard of living.
There’s something singularly American (and singularly foolish) in believing that both the rich and the poor somehow ‘deserve’ where they are. Republican economics are devoted to reducing what little class mobility we have (e.g., huge increase in the cost of public universities). When Paris Hilton is a street-corner hooker, then I’ll believe we have significant downward mobility for the upper class. Falling out of the middle class gets easier, not that this is a good thing.
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October 29, 2009, 5:56 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Andrew, do you think that Republicans want to reduce class mobility? If so, do you think that the Great Society folks wanted to destroy the black family?
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October 29, 2009, 6:03 pmChrisTS says:
Perhaps this is noncontroversial, but I am not sure given some of the comments: adults are largely though not entirely the products of their childhoods.
So, to use the dumb binary of ‘nature/nurture,’ it’s both, and most current cogsci indicates that the effects of nurture on nature are significant. This is true even when we are not speaking of the effects of ‘environment’ on the brain — as when mommy drank while pregnant or baby went home to an apartment with lead paint, or kiddie spent most of her infancy staring at a wall.
Children are not impervious to their surroundings. If no one works, if friends and relatives do drugs or engage in criminal activity, if beloved older sister has an illegitimate baby at 15, kiddie learns that world. If school is a place in which one is as likely to get beaten up or shot as to learn anything, schooling will be less than effective. If grandma is the only one who tells you really need to study and finish high school, you won’t do it unless grandma has more influence over you than everyone else in the neighborhood and family [and on television, the radio, etc.].
And you know what? The same truism applies to kids from any kind of background. Parents never made you pick up after yourself? You don’t learn to. Parents and teachers always praised you for whatever you did? You learn neither to work hard nor to deal with failure. The maid always puts the milk in your cereal? At age 8 you ask your aunt to do so because you cannot imagine doing it for yourself [anecdote].
But, when we add to the failures of upbringing of the poor the effects of environment – pre and post natal — on brain and cognitive development, well, those kids are not going to grow up suddenly to be rational, autonomous ‘choosers.’
So, we can say “let them starve/go to prison” or we can try to figure out how to address these problems. But, “just choose differently” is nonsense.
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October 29, 2009, 6:04 pmVisitor Again says:
I witnessed the start of the welfare industry first hand as a poverty lawyer in Watts and later Venice. The War on Poverty money was not spent on long-term programs that could have improved living conditions and the life prospects of the poor. It should have gone to fund day care programs, pre-schools, elementary and high schools, job training programs and housing, employment and health programs. Very little went there.
The schools in the inner city were terrible then and they are terrible now. Only the very brightest and most diligent students stand a chance of getting a decent education. It is difficult to get out of the poverty rut if one does not have the proper education.
I cannot believe that there are still people around who regard the poor and the victims of violence as losers. Then again, there are psychopaths who are genuinely incapable of having any regard for other people.
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October 29, 2009, 6:06 pmCato The Elder says:
Please. The Republican Party is the party of the nouveau riche, at most. The Democratic Party is the party of the super-rich (net worth > $10MM), of people who could never accumulate that much wealth within one lifetime or by one lucky break; the party of scions and spoiled dilettantes. I’m sure Ms. Hilton would gladly perform a concert for climate change if you asked her very nicely.
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October 29, 2009, 6:10 pmReminds me of says:
Not at all. People chose their behavior. They chose whether to do their classwork, go to school, study, don’t do drugs, don’t smoke, don’t drink, don’t steal, graduate, show up on time to a job. True, peer pressure is there tempting you to fail, but that too is resistible.
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October 29, 2009, 6:13 pmReminds me of says:
@ChrisTS:
What you are saying is that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.... and you are absolutely right.
So we need to pick up the apples, and take them to different trees. 15yo and pregnant? We take the child and raise it in an orphanage. 25yo and 5 kids by 5 men and all in poverty? Fine, take the kids away — raising kids like that is per say child abuse.
Orphanages are very underrated.
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October 29, 2009, 6:20 pmluagha says:
>(Yes, the above is sarcasm. I anticipate his answer actually being along the Midnight Basketball II lines. Typical liberal method of facing an insolvable problem is to come up with a fantasy answer, declare victory, and when it turns out that the fantasy didn’t actually come true, ignore it or blame someone else for the failure)<
You never know. His answer might be more along the lines of counterinsurgency operations (COIN) similar to those used in Iraq. We have loads of military personnel coming back trained in and with knowledge of the Anaconda strategy. Similar pressures all along the criminal supply chain could do wonders for actual crime incidence.
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October 29, 2009, 6:37 pmCato The Elder says:
So the punchline is that liberalism needs even more money to work? Who would have guessed that! If you want re-calibrate your political views with empiricism, start with this entry here of the excellent blog D-Ed Reckoning and then work backwards. Plentiful graphs make the job sweeter. A taste:
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October 29, 2009, 6:53 pmgeokstr says:
So, you mean like, if both a child’s parents are full-on Maxists, and his grandmother who raises him is a Marxist, and his beloved mentor from his entire formative teenage years is a card-carrying member of the CPUSA, and by his own admission he seeks out Marxist professors in college, and loves his pastor who preaches a theology based directly on Marxism at him for 20 years, this might actually have some effect on him, his ideas about life, and his behavior, as he grows older?
Wow, thanks, never thought I’d see anyone admit it.
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October 29, 2009, 6:58 pmChrisTS says:
Visitor Again says:
Not to mention pre & post natal care,and [more specifcally] housing not in hideous towers in the middle of nothing, housing with encouragement towards ownership, incentives for marriage and Dad sticking around, etc.
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October 29, 2009, 7:42 pmAndrew J. Lazarus says:
You know, if an Angel appeared and said we could pay $1 in taxes for schools and crime would go down 20% or $10 in taxes for prisons and crime would go down 10%, an awful lot of commenters here would choose the prisons, just so that… well, I can’t quite figure out just so that… fewer colored folks on the streets?
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October 29, 2009, 7:47 pmChrisTS says:
Actually, jokster, I would not be that surprised. Of course, depriving him of adequate health care and of adequate early-life stimulation, surrounding him with no other visible options at all [quite apart from what Mom, Dad, and Grandma say], and otherwise limiting the child’s options and possiblities to an all-marxist world would probably be most effective.
And you are surprised to learn that environment affects kids, why?
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October 29, 2009, 7:48 pmMark Field says:
I don’t know if they want to or not, but class mobility did decline over the last 29 years.
Just sayin...
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October 29, 2009, 7:49 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
In my view, Prison populations and their Costs as well as WELFARE and all it’s associated costs could be, OVER TIME. greatly reduced by doing the following.
Now while some may think this is really “Out of the Box” and perhaps “nutty” many others will not.
I submit a majority of open minded and smart people who take the time to really carefully consider & research the following, WILL end up agreeing with me,
As A & B below ARE TRUE, it equals less people in jail which equals less money spent on crime prevention, welfare, etc.
A. Some (a little) crime is caused by the frustration children cause their parents as all parents are just not equipped to handle it. So the parents do stupid things like beating the hell out of each other.
Reduced the stress of parenting and you reduce any crime it may have caused.
B. Children who are better mentally and physically equipped to succeed in life commit not only LESS crime, they add
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October 29, 2009, 8:10 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
DAMN THIS THING FOR NOT POSTING MY ENTIRE MESSAGE!
NOW I will have to rewrite and post the resop of it which will take some time.
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October 29, 2009, 8:17 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
DAMN THIS THING FOR NOT POSTING MY ENTIRE MESSAGE!
NOW I will have to rewrite and post the rest of it which will take some time.
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October 29, 2009, 8:19 pmLaura(southernxyl) says:
Andrew, what do you base this on, other than your apparent hatred for people who don’t share your political views? Do you have to demonize people you disagree with? It almost seems as though you don’t dare to have views that differ from other people without those other people being evil. Everything isn’t the good guys v. the bad guys.
...Mark, it’s one thing to point out that something has happened, another thing to say that it happened as a result of the policies of group X, and a third thing altogether to say that group X meant for it to happen. Which is what Andrew said.
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October 29, 2009, 8:25 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
B. Children who are better mentally and physically equipped to succeed in life commit not only LESS crime, they add to the tax base and our quality of life.
It IS possible to both reduce the stress of being parents & better equip more children by using a TIME and MANY PEOPLE PROVEN technology called “Baby plus”
Mandate ALL pregnant women on welfare MUST, starting in their 17th to 18th week of pregnancy, use a “Baby Plus” for one hour at a time twice a day and separated by a 12 hour period.
While there will be the cost of furnishing the initial “Baby Plus’s” to each mother in the PRIMARY groups, as they can be used over and over and over again, the costs to supply them would be reduced.
You could also charge a deposit which would only be returned IF the “Baby Plus” was returned in a good condition.
AND
You also really PUSH the hell out of it on TV, the internet, TAX Break laws, etc. so mothers not on Welfare would want to use it.
Make it so ALL AMERICAN PARENTS know, THEIR children, when compared to children whose mothers did use a “Baby Plus, WILL be at a real disadvantage both in school and in life.
As I said, LESS parent frustration and BETTER equipped kids equal LESS crime and a BETTER world.
“Baby Plus” had been very effectively used for at least TEN years when I saw a Discovery Channel one hour documentary on it. And it was over ten years ago when I saw this program.
There have been OVER 100,000 babies born to mothers who’ve used Baby Plus. And all of the mothers who have used on one child, used in on all succeeding ones.
Babies who are born after being exposed to Baby plus ARE
A. STRONGER
B. MORE COORDINATED
C. LEARN FASTER
D. SMARTER.
PLUS,
THEY CRY AROUND 90% LESS
AND they SHARE TOYS!
Even if using it did not do the first four items, I would want my wife to use it JUST for the last two!
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October 29, 2009, 8:39 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
So LAURA,
If you disagree with Obama, you are a “racist” and if you disagree with some others as Andrew has, it means he “hates” them?
With logic like yours, you must be a liberal.
Liberal ideas, are what MOST rational &
intelligent people GROW OUT OF as they
gain in experience and knowledge.
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October 29, 2009, 9:26 pmMark Field says:
Agreed.
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October 29, 2009, 9:31 pmVisitor Again says:
Chris TS: “Not to mention pre & post natal care,and [more specifcally] housing not in hideous towers in the middle of nothing, housing with encouragement towards ownership, incentives for marriage and Dad sticking around, etc.”
Absolutely. We are on the same page. I believe we have to be very honest in confronting the problems the poor face. I still believe that we can end poverty, but it will require a huge effort.
The man in the house rule was enforced rigidly and viciously when I was a poverty lawyer in the late 1960s and early 1970s in Watts and Venice. I specialized in welfare cases for a while, which, as I revealed in the comments on Orin Kerr’s recent post entitled “Response to Delahunty’s ‘The Fourth Amendment Goes to War,’” is part of the reason I came to have my conversations intercepted by the FBI as part of its national security warrantless wiretap of the Black Panther Party headquarters and to be the subject of Nino Scalia’s last opinion as a circuit judge before he went on the Supreme Court, Ellsberg v. Mitchell. One of my welfare clients was a woman who was herself a prominent member of the Black Panther Party and who was married to a prominent Party leader. Some of my clients told me of scurrying around their homes desperately trying to cover up any sign of a male presence in the home before the welfare authorities arrived for an in-home inspection. They also told me of hiding the new toaster, the new play pen, the new anything that their mates had bought for them, in justified fear that they would be disqualified from receiving benefits. Some of them had entirely separated from their male partners for fear someone would report them for having a man in the house.
These women were pioneers of a sort in a slowly evolving tragedy. They had every incentive to become dependent on welfare, they had every incentive to cut off contact with the fathers of their children, they had every incentive to engage in sex with men to whom they were not married and did not live with. They were the matriarchs of generations of daughters and grandaughters and so on who were themselves to become dependent on welfare. Meager as welfare benefits then were, some of them had children in order to get welfare benefits and some of them had more and more children in order to get higher welfare benefits. The welfare system fostered a generational disease: dependence on welfare. It’s quite apparent that, deliberately or not, the welfare system was designed to perpetuate welfare dependence and thus its own continued existence. War on Poverty funds were funneled to the poor as a substitute for wages traditionally earned by the father (though women were increasingly entering the labor force). Precious few funds were used for constructive programs that would have helped lift the poor out of poverty and into productive jobs.
At the same time, it must be said that there were precious few opportunities to get off welfare or to avoid welfare dependence in the first place. Many of these women had dropped out of school very early because of pregnancies or because of lack of interest in continuing to attend truly appalling schools. They had absolutely no skills making them employable. There were no job training programs available. There were no jobs available for them even if they wanted to work, and many of them did.
The habits and lifestyle that welfare dependence fosters are passed on from one generation to the next. Before I knew her, my living partner for the past 20 years, Priscilla, worked for a while in the late 1970s as a job developer for the California Department of Unemployment, renamed officially and optimistically as the Employment Development Department. She tried to find jobs for the unemployed and even the unemployable, mostly for women who were threatened with losing all their welfare benefits if they did not find a job.
Priscilla found a job for one young woman, Judy, a 19-year-old welfare-receiving mother who lived with her child, her brothers and sisters and her mother, also a welfare recipient, in the projects, Avalon Gardens, on Avalon Boulevard by 88th Street, just south of Watts. Judy was desperate to work; she liked the money she earned. But one day the employer called Priscilla to complain that Judy was repeatedly late to work. Although it was not part of her job, Priscilla visited Judy’s home.
What she found out shocked her. Judy had never had to get up on time for anything before. Her family had never had to get up on time for anything. They all just got up when they woke up. They had never disciplined themselves to get up at a certain time. Priscilla bought Judy an alarm clock, and presto, Judy turned up at work on time. This little intervention produced a change in Judy which saved her job. But the intervention was crucial. The generational habit would have remained unchecked but for the intervention. The last Priscilla heard of Judy she was running her own business in South Los Angeles, a successful child care center. But Priscilla was unable to find jobs for many women despite considerable efforts.
Priscilla, a black woman herself, was shocked because she had lived a relatively sheltered life in what was then a middle class neighborhood. Her grandmother, who raised her along with her mother, prohibited her from going anywhere east of the Harbor Freeway. So one weekday afternoon I took Priscilla to Watts to show her where I had worked. When we reached Watts, Priscilla commented on the large number of people on the streets on a weekday. She suddenly realized it was because no one had a job.
This generational dependence on welfare and the lifestyle it produces are not limited to blacks and Latinos. The same problems exist among poor whites.
These are anecdotal stories, but they are my and my partner’s experiences. I still live among the poor. Most of the people in the apartment complex in which I live receive benefits of one kind or another. I am very fond of my neighborhood and, indeed, most of the people who live in South Los Angeles. I remain hopeful that poverty can be eradicated.
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October 29, 2009, 9:35 pmJmaie says:
I don’t know if they want to or not, but class mobility did decline over the last 29 years.
I’d be interested how class mobility is defined and measured. A source would be appreciated.
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October 29, 2009, 10:18 pmJmaie says:
Niel — I think you’re mistaken if you think Laura is some flaming liberal. Andrew’s finishing comment was an attempt to demonize, and offensive as well.
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October 29, 2009, 10:21 pmRichard Aubrey says:
Visitor.
After the 67 riots in Detroit, the auto companies made an effort to hire from the ‘hood.
They decided, pejorative implications be damned, that the new hires needed a mentor who would drive to their home and wake them up if necessary.
The rookies never had had to before.
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October 29, 2009, 10:38 pmgeokstr says:
Actually, I’m quite aware that nurture is very important in anyone’s development. But we’ve heard over and over and over that our Community Organizer in Chief was apparently unaffected by his immersion in Marxist philosophy his entire life and is really just a moderate.
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October 29, 2009, 11:06 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
TWO THINGS
1. So LAURA,
If you disagree with Obama, you are a “racist” and if you disagree with some others as Andrew has, it means he “hates” them?
With logic like yours, you must be a liberal.
Liberal ideas, are what MOST rational &
intelligent people GROW OUT OF as they gain in experience and knowledge.
—————
2. Finding means of Reducing Crime and Incarceration IS SIMPLE! (As well as being relatively easy)
STOP arresting and incarcerating people for doing things which NEVER should have been illegal in the first damn place!
A. LEGALIZE PROSTITUTION
Or course, the religious robots will have to overcome their baby and childhood programming to understand this one.
In countries where Prostitution IS legal, they have LESS STD rates! And they also not only have LOWER sex crime rates, they have LESS crime overall.
They have Lower Unwanted pregnancy rates and thus, less unwanted children. Unwanted Children equal less crime as many them later go on to lives of crime.
FYI Some 14 years after the passage of Roe/Wade, all the crimes committed by teenagers took a very significant drop & has remained lower than it was before Roe / Wade.
B. LEGALIZE MARIJUANA!
The ONLY reason Marijuana was made
illegal in the first place was due to a conspiracy
involving an assistant director of the “revennoors” (Prohibition agents) who did not want to lose his power and three rich guys who wanted to earn more millions than they were already earning. (Greedy Bastards)
The “Gov. man” was Harry Argersinger
who became chief of what is now DEA. The rich guys were Hurst, De Pont and Mellon.
You see, damn near EVERY THING used
to make paper, ropes sails & cloth were made out of Hemp. Du Pont chemical had found a way to make paper out of trees. Hurst had MANY very paper hungry
Newspapers and magazines.
Guess who Hurst’s and Du Pont’s banker
and who would earn LOTS of money by
keeping their business?
It was Mellon.
When Du Pont told Hurst how he could both save a lot of money by using paper and ean money by buying lots of trees to then sell do Du Pont and others who would
use the Du Pont process to make paper.
ONLY hemp was still legal, So Hurst launched an “yellow Journalism” attack on it.
Telling lie after lie after lie about it. They use racism against Mexicans and Blacks and even got anti-hemp movies made.
Plus, they got to some Congressman . There was perjured testimony by the chairman of the sub-committee lied by saying AMA supporting the criminalization of it when the AMA was against making it illegal.
So as a result we have all kinds of people who lives have been ruined and others killed all due to this very stupid law. And we have some 400,000 people in jail which cost us many millions, if not billions of dollars each and every year.
Marijuana has been studied for over 450 years. There is NO WAY marijuana is as bad for people as cigarettes, pipes cigars chewing tobacco or liquor! ALL of which are legal.
Some 900 people a year die from taking aspirin while NO one dies as a direct result of smoking and/or eating marijuana. In fact, there is NO recorded case in the history of the world where anyone has died from it.
And it is ILLEGAL? TOTALLY STUPID!
Bottom Line?
Anyone who thinks marijuana should be illegal is either ignorant to sufficient facts and information about marijuana or they are just too stupid bo be able to fully comprehend what the facts mean.
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October 29, 2009, 11:09 pmloki13 says:
This is a GREAT way to WIN friends and INFLUENCE people.
(on a personal note, if Laura is a liberal, then, geez, I must be somewhere to the left of a hippie in a Che t-shirt playing hacky sack at a “save the whales” rally. i think i need to scrub my brain.)
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October 29, 2009, 11:24 pmDave G says:
“The burdens of crime and incarceration are not evenly spread; instead, they are highly concentrated by race and class.”
Are they concentrated by gender? Are men and women equally likely to be the victims, or perpetrators, of crimes? If not, shouldn’t this also be a disparity for the government to rectify?
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October 30, 2009, 12:48 amRicardo says:
I’m pretty sure Irving Kristol and David Horowitz were exposed to Marxist philosophy for many years. Then there’s William Murray, son of Madalyn Murray O’Hair, who is an outspoken believing Christian these days.
If you are a Marxist, you really don’t hire Larry Summers (who once worked in the Reagan administration and helped advise Russia on its conversion to a capitalist economy in the 1990s) as one of your advisers.
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October 30, 2009, 1:40 amLeo Marvin says:
Good luck. I find that, not unlike “nature” and “nature,” some effects of “nutture” are indelible.
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October 30, 2009, 2:10 amNeil C. Reinhardt says:
Well “loki13”
I am, on very rare occasions, wrong and this may well be one of them. As I only read the one “Laura” post. It is the one I commented on.
SO LAURA, I am SORRY and I apologize to you for my error.
As far as my supposedly attempting to “WIN friends” just where did I say I was trying to do that?
IF I were interested in “winning friends” I could not be totally honest. I’d not tell people I am an Agnostic Atheist Activist.
Or say anyone who does not know the Iraq War is both fully justified & a very necessary part of our war on terror are too lazy to get the facts and/or too dumb to be able to understand them.
I would not call Obama “ODUMA” & say his 160 IQ proves:
“A persons IQ is like a mans penis because it is not how much you have, rather it IS how effectively you use it.”
Nor would I say, Oduma’s words and actions prove his judgement skills are terrible by the low life scum he choose to have as close friends. As they include a White and America hating Racist preacher, a felon as well as two TERRORISTS, he more than proves he has no integrity.
150+ documented lies prove Oduam is a liar!He’s dishonest as well as being slick talking con man who uses NLP on his audiences. And his own words in his own books prove he is a Racist.
Anyone who disagrees with what I said about Oduma, just prove they are just a fact denying, Uniformed, Loony Tune OBOT.
So Loki13, How is this for making friends?
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October 30, 2009, 3:53 amAndrew Lazarus says:
You could start here.
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October 30, 2009, 11:31 amMark Field says:
Here’s another study on class mobility. A summary of the findings is here.
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October 30, 2009, 12:20 pmMark Buehner says:
You really want to compare how much school spending has exploded over the last 50 years compared to prisons? It would be beating a dead horse to factor in results of same...
The problem with the ‘class mobility’ issue is the same problem with drawing a ‘poverty line’, ideologues want to use relative numbers instead of absolute. For instance, the question isn’t whether a child born in poverty has an X% chance of owning a home or getting a college education– the question has to be, what are his chances of gaining wealth relative to Bill Gates. Class warfare is everything.
What if an angel landed on your shoulder and offered to make everyone in America 20% richer, but the top 1% became 200% richer. Or, everyone in America could be 10% richer, and the top 1% become 20% poorer? Pick your answer and i’ll tell you which party you vote for. Redistribution isn’t about raising the lowly so much as stamping down the rich.
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October 30, 2009, 1:28 pmStrict says:
“As they include a White and America hating Racist preacher”
Ah, Reverend Wright. This guy hated America so much that he voluntarily served in the Marines and the Navy during the Vietnam era.
Besides, everyone associates with “racist” people in some way. It’s not that big of a deal.
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October 30, 2009, 1:28 pmChrisTS says:
Leo:
I have learned to put down any liquid refreshment before I read one of your comments. My nose and keyboard are both much happier. :-)
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October 31, 2009, 3:38 pmChrisTS says:
Visitor Again:
I think your anecdotes are pretty well evidenced by non-anecdotal data.
It is very difficult for any of us to see outside of our own ‘paradigm.’ I might recall being told I had to make and keep appointments when I was young, but I suspect I learned the lesson largely by example rather than by direct instruction. So, to me it just seems obvious that this is what one does, while it is not at all obvious to someone of a different background.
Similarly, it was unquestionable to me as a young person that all kids go to the dentist, but when I was in college I met a local girl who had never been to a dentist in her life. I met her in the emergency room, where she had turned up because an abscessed tooth had become too excruciating to ignore. Most of her teeth were rotten-looking. I was just dumbstruck that her parents had never seen to any dental care for her or her siblings.
Someone up thread noted that our society ‘acts’ too late to stop criminality. I was thinking this the other night, with reference to Mill. We have their whole younger lives to set them on the road to reasonable lives. But to a great extent, we prefer to jail them when they are adult and dangerous.
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October 31, 2009, 4:00 pmPat Hand says:
cubanbob says: Staying poor in adulthood is a choice.
Hahahaha. That’s a good one.
My friend Betty is 42, divorced, two kids, dead broke. Her “choice” was the scumbag husband she married. Oh, wait, he wasn’t a scumbag 15 years ago. But he lost his job & got depressed. Probably clinical but avoided talking to anyone. They split up. He’s supposed to pay support but doesn’t. Betty lost her job last year when her company folded. In our small city, there aren’t a lot of jobs right now; unemployment has more than doubled. She could move, but her ex is here and she’d have to give up the kids to him. Some choice. Bought a house in 2006. Didn’t lie but did stretch. Neighborhood is middle class bland but nice, good schools, good neighbors. I bet she’s underwater bigtime. So, couldn’t sell. She’s not extravagant. Kids don’t have the latest stuff. She’s running out of savings and there’s pretty much no place to cut back except to stop paying the mortgage.
I don’t see a lot of choices to be poor for her — it just happened. Unemployment ran out, though she might get on board with the extension. She doesn’t have a college degree but she’s not stupid. She is very attractive and frankly her best bet is to find a guy who’s not a scumbag who will take her along with the kids & other baggage.
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November 3, 2009, 1:31 pmNeil C. Reinhardt says:
POOR Strict
Displaying the typical OBOT lack of either knowledges or logic.
Benedict Arnold was an AMERICAN HERO before he bacame betrayed George Washingotn and the US.
Are you really so “F” ing stupid you do not know what that RACIST jerk said about Whites and the United States?
Try getting your head out of you butt!
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November 4, 2009, 7:19 pm