Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed

by Jason L. Riley

Critics insist that blacks are overrepresented among those arrested because police focus on black communities, but data consistently show little if any difference between the rate at which victims report the racial identities of their attackers and the rate at which police arrest people of different races. As Mac Donald noted, “No one has come up with a plausible argument as to why crime victims would be biased in their reports.”17 Nor is there any evidence to support the claim that prosecutors are overcharging blacks—or that judges are oversentencing blacks—for the same crimes committed by nonblacks. Mac Donald wrote: Backing up this bias claim has been the holy grail of criminology for decades—and the prize remains as elusive as ever. In 1997, criminologists Robert Sampson and Janet Lauritsen reviewed the massive literature on charging and sentencing. They concluded that “large racial differences in criminal offending,” not racism, explained why more blacks were in prison proportionately than whites and for longer terms. A 1987 analysis of Georgia felony convictions, for example, found that blacks frequently received disproportionately lenient punishment. A 1990 study of 11,000 California cases found that slight racial disparities in sentence length resulted from blacks’ prior records and other legally relevant variables. A 1994 Justice Department survey of felony cases from the country’s 75 largest urban areas discovered that blacks actually had a lower chance of prosec...