3/20/2009

The continued debate over racism in the criminal justice system

After Loury's initial claims here and my response, Professor Bruce Western tried to come to Loury's defense here. My response is here. Feedback on all this is appreciated.

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posted by John Lott at 11:08 AM

2 Comments:

Blogger Unknown said...

I don't know if you have considered this but I think one reason we incarcerate so man citizens is that we can. It takes a truckload of money to put people away, and we just fell off a huge wealth boom that financed more prisons. Perhaps every nation would feel more comfortable pointing the finger at other people and taking them out of society, if they only could.

If there is any truth to this we're going to have an exodus of offenders back to the street in the next three years. I wouldn't bother arguing against it though - budgets won't listen, but it should be good for your effort to put a thirty-eight in the waistband of every citizen.

3/20/2009 1:33 PM  
Blogger Martin G. Schalz said...

Prof. Glen Loury has written a very lenghty piece that subtly blames the disparities of incarceration by race, as a racial problem itself, and not one of criminal conduct.

Here's an excerpt from Prof. Loury that I find as a possible supportable theory.

"Put directly and without benefit of euphemism, the racially disparate incidence of punishment in the United States is a morally troubling residual effect of the nation’s history of enslavement, disenfranchisement, segregation, and discrimination. It is not merely the accidental accretion of neutral state action, applied to a racially divergent social flux. It is an abhorrent expression of who we Americans are as a people, even now, at the dawn of the twenty-first century."

An excellent starting point, yet Prof. Loury fails to expand upon it. It simply stands as an excuse, and not as a basis for a solution.

I myself see that when segregation and Jim Crow Laws fell by the wayside, they were replaced by Welfare Programs that provided a similar repression by means of monetary control.

At the end of Prof. Loury's blog, he mentions that Socialism as practiced by Europeans and then brought about in the United States is a good thing, yet fails to even mention the ills brought about by such socialist programs. Instead, it is a racial problem, and not one of personal achievement, or lack thereof.

Prof. Loury's blog, to I, is nothing more than a racial diatribe that complains much, yet offers no solution to the problem that is the subject(?) of his blog


Dr. Lott approaches this in a statistical fashion, whereupon actual numbers themselves are the crux of the argument that forms the basis of the refutation of Prof. Loury's blog.

No suprise here, as this is what Dr. Lott does for a living.

However, neither Dr. Lott nor Prof. Loury have engaged in any discourse as to the cause and effect of these high incareration rates. Punishment for possesion of crack cocaine laws as a response to destruction of inner cities is not cause and effect.


On to Prof. Bruce Western...

More rhetoric, and no substance I see. Buy my book in a link or two, and some references to papers posted online.

Here's another lost opportunity to discuss the cause of the problem...

"Glenn Loury’s essay on mass incarceration rightly observes that incarceration has become commonplace for young African American men, particularly those with no college education. This is new. We need only go back thirty years to find a time when prison was not a routine life event for black men with little schooling."

Prof. Westerm identifies the start point, yet fails to expand upon it? WHY?

Could it be that was when Segregation, and Jim Crows were replaced by welfare as a new form of social control?

Before Welfare, one had to work and keep the family intact so as to survive.

Thanks to enlightned liberals, we now have a system where unwed mothers are rewarded, and fathers get in the way of recieving so called aid for mothers and children. If dad is in the home, mommy gets less money. Bye bye daddy.

So much for a healthy family structure, eh?

I too look forward to feedback.

3/21/2009 5:07 AM  

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