Is the Criminal Justice system racist?

I have a piece here responding to something that Glenn Loury has written. I think that the whole piece is pretty enlightening.

Charges of racism flow freely in Professor Loury’s recent book and this essay. He makes it seem that we lock up blacks because whites are afraid of them or that we simply dislike them and want to keep them locked up and away from the rest of society. But Loury forgets an important fact: for violent and property crime there is always an individual victim who gets hurt — for black criminals that victim is overwhelmingly black. Nor does he recognize how extremely progressive criminal penalties are. He also neglects acknowledging that we can’t determine if the number of people in prison is “too high” without discussing the benefit from prison — without discussing how many crimes were deterred.

Many blacks have their lives disrupted by the criminal justice system, but the lives and property of many blacks are also protected by that same system. Looking at only the cost of imprisonment seems a very strange way to answer the question of whether we should change the current system.

Why Focus on the Race of the Criminals and Not Also the Race of the Victims?

Who are the victims of crime? Blacks overwhelmingly commit crime against other blacks. For example, in 2007, 90.2% of black murder victims were murdered by blacks. [1] To go even further, poor blacks commit crimes against poor blacks. [2] Is it less racist to care about the victims or the criminals? If we punish black criminals a lot, isn’t it possible that the reason we are doing it is because we care about the black victims? . . . .

UPDATE MAY 24, 2009: Here is something related that I found by Heather Mac Donald.