Category: Social Factors

Why Do We Have a “School to Prison Pipeline”?

by · Mar 8, 2021 11:44 am

For the most part, we don’t.  A recent report from the Pew Foundation, linked here at Sentencing Law and Policy, shows that the the number of people housed in prisons and jails in the USA is just over one-half of one percent of the population (that is, 1.8 million out of 330 million).  This sliver of one percent is what the “justice reform” crowd ceaselessly and dishonestly refers to as “mass incarceration.”

But to the extent we do have a “school to prison pipeline” in some jurisdictions, the following article reporting on conditions in Baltimore tells us why:    “City student passes 3 classes in four years, ranks near top half of class with 0.13 GPA”

Continue reading . . .

Crime, Race, and Cancel Culture’s Poisonous Game of Dare

by · Feb 16, 2021 4:31 pm

Glenn Loury, a black man, is a professor of economics and faculty fellow at the Watson Institute at Brown University and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute.  He is also a man of tremendous courage and insight  —  one of the few in academia, or anywhere, who would write the following truth:

Common sense and much evidence suggest that, on the whole, people are not being arrested, convicted, and sentenced because of their race. Those in prison are, in the main, those who have broken the law—who have hurt others, or stolen things, or otherwise violated the basic behavioral norms which make civil society possible. Seeing prisons as a racist conspiracy to confine black people is an absurd proposition. No serious person could believe it. Continue reading . . .

“Disparity” Debunked

by · Jan 15, 2021 1:58 pm

For many years on this blog I have denounced claims that a “disparity” between the percentage of a given racial or ethnic group subject to some criminal justice action and the percentage of the group in the general population supports an inference that bias in the system is the reason. I call this the Fallacy of the Irrelevant Denominator. The makeup of the general population is irrelevant because the general population is mostly law-abiding people, while serious criminal justice consequences are for people who have committed serious crimes.

Yesterday, the Bureau of Justice Statistics released a study that confirms what I have been saying as applied to violent crimes. Continue reading . . .

“2020’s Spike in Urban Homicides Should Not Be a Mystery”

by · Jan 13, 2021 7:24 pm

It’s not news by now that last year saw a dramatic surge in murder across the country.  As recounted by this National Review article: “In 2020, homicides increased by 35 percent from 2019 across the 50 largest urban areas, reaching levels in many cities not seen for more than 20 years.”  But why?  “Some in the media suggest the spike is simply another downside of the pandemic. But this would appear to gloss over the likely link to unintended consequences of the nationwide demonstrations after George Floyd’s death in the custody of Minneapolis police.”

Unintended consequences indeed.  As the author explains, when you legitimate rage at society, you can’t be surprised when the outcroppings of rage arrive on your doorstep.

Continue reading . . .

Life in Progressive New York City

by · Dec 18, 2020 11:15 am

Progressive social and criminal justice policies are running the show, or perhaps I should say running amok, in New York City.  Such policies are said to aim to help the poor and those who must rely on public services.  Just now I received a small but valuable insight from the brilliant Rafael Mangual who lives in the City.  Judge for yourself how much “help” is being provided.

Continue reading . . .

The Criminal, Not Just as Societal Victim, But as Hero of the Resistance

by · Oct 19, 2020 5:52 am

I’m normally not a big fan of Andrew Sullivan, but he has a thought-provoking essay out titled, “Why Is Wokeness Winning?”  This passage in particular struck me:

BLM’s critical race activists do not support reforming the police, they want to abolish them entirely. In fact, they demonize all cops as “bastards”, and they justify violence and exonerate crime as legitimate resistance to the far greater crime of white oppression.

This crystalizes a thought I’ve had for a while about our opponents’ thinking:  The reason we should go soft on criminals is that we have the theory of moral culpability, not merely misunderstood, but backwards.

Continue reading . . .

Suppressing Inconvenient Truths

by · Oct 14, 2020 10:23 am

For anyone who digs a little to find the facts, the truth about the death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri is not hard to find. The case was investigated by the Civil Rights Division of the Obama Administration’s Department of Justice. That was a group whose bias ran against the police, not in favor of them. Even so, they concluded that the evidence showed that the “hands up” story was a lie. Michael Brown was shot when he attacked Officer Wilson for no good reason. See this post from last year.

But most people don’t read government reports. The truth will only be widely known when it is disseminated in mass media. The good news is that there is a movie, written and narrated by Shelby Steele and directed by his son Eli, scheduled for release on Amazon. The bad news is that Amazon has placed the movie on “content review.” Jason Riley has this column in the WSJ on the controversy. Continue reading . . .

Murders Surge in DC; City Leaders Point to the Answer

by · Sep 2, 2020 2:30 pm

In Washington, DC, and New York, among some other major cities, murder has spiked this year.  Thus, as the Crime Report tells us in this story from mid-August:

A weekend mass shooting that wounded 21 and killed one signaled a 45 percent increase in shootings in Washington, D.C., this year over the same period last year, including 46 shootings in the past week, the Washington Post reports.

But fear not.  Washington’s leadership has an idea. Continue reading . . .