Pubdate: Sun, 07 Apr 2013
Source: Minneapolis Star-Tribune (MN)
Copyright: 2013 Star Tribune
Contact: http://www.startribunecompany.com/143
Website: http://www.startribune.com
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/266
Author: Katherine Kersten
Note: Katherine Kersten is a senior fellow at the Center of the 
American Experiment. The views expressed here are her own.
Page: OP3

OF RACE, CRIME STATISTICS AND VICITMHOOD

The Twin Cities Legal Community Is Dancing Around the Truth

Sometimes you just can't make this stuff up.

The latest cause celebre for prominent lawyers and judges in 
Minneapolis is the rights of a new, disenfranchised class of victims 
who, we're told, can't vote, serve on juries, or - in some cases - 
live in public housing.

Who's this new victim class? Murderers, robbers, rapists, and dealers 
and users of illegal drugs - in short, convicted felons.

People incarcerated for felonies are disproportionately black, the 
argument goes, so laws that deprive felons of certain civil rights 
that law-abiding citizens enjoy are the racist equivalent of poll 
taxes in the Jim Crow South.

Does this sound like the musings of a fringe sociology professor? 
It's a crusade by the Hennepin County Bar Association, the 
professional association of lawyers in Minneapolis and its suburbs. 
In February, the HCBA urged all its members to read a book entitled 
"The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," 
by law Prof. Michelle Alexander. In March, it conducted a Continuing 
Legal Education Seminar on the book's thesis, led by Judge Pam 
Alexander (recently reappointed to the bench by Gov. Mark Dayton). 
Now the HCBA is promoting April discussion groups on the topic for its members.

Michelle Alexander's book claims that America's justice system has 
imposed a new racial caste system. Overt discrimination has become 
socially unacceptable, she writes, so white voters and officials are 
recreating a racial hierarchy by labeling people of color "criminals" 
and discriminating against them "in nearly all the ways it was once 
legal to discriminate against African-Americans."

The primary vehicle for perpetuating the new racial hierarchy is the 
war on drugs and the stiff penalties it imposes for drug offenses, 
according to Alexander.

Those at the seminar on "The New Jim Crow," which I attended, 
displayed a striking lack of skepticism toward these overheated 
claims. I saw no lawyerly cross-examination, just lots of heads 
nodding in agreement. Yet Alexander ignores the facts about the black 
crime rate, rewrites history on the war on drugs and obscures the 
real causes of disproportionate black criminal conduct.

Are America's jails and prisons filled with penny-ante drug 
offenders? You might get that impression reading Alexander's book. 
Yet "drug offenders constitute only a quarter of our nation's 
prisoners, while violent offenders make up a much larger share: one 
half," points out James Forman, a black Yale Law School professor who 
has written a powerful critique of Alexander's book.

Likewise, the war on drugs was not a conspiracy by racist whites. 
Black leaders were among those pushing hardest for stiff penalties in 
the 1980s and '90s, when a violentcrime surge - spurred by the crack 
cocaine epidemic - devastated their communities.

If "mass incarceration" were really the "New Jim Crow," we'd expect 
black-controlled jurisdictions like Washington, D.C., to adopt more 
lenient sentences and rely much less on incarceration than other 
cities. Yet incarceration rates in America's capital city mirror 
those in other cities, writes Forman. In fact, local officials there 
"have recently pushed for tougher criminal penalties."

The tragic truth is this: America's disproportionate black 
incarceration rate is a function not of a biased judicial system but 
of a skyhigh black crime rate. In 2011, the black arrest rate for 
most crimes was between two to three times blacks' representation in 
the population. Blacks made up 56 percent of all robbery and 34 
percent of all aggravated-assault arrests, and 29.5 percent of all 
property crime arrests.

About 50 percent of all murders are committed by black people, though 
blacks are only 13 percent of the population. And African-Americans 
are disproportionately victimized by crime: Ninety percent of all 
black homicides are committed by other blacks, while 75 percent of 
all crimes against black victims are carried out by black perpetrators.

The decay of the social fabric in low-income black communities is a 
primary cause of the crime rate. In 1964, when the Civil Rights Act 
was passed, the black out-of-wedlock birth rate in America was 20 
percent. In 2010, in Hennepin County, the rate for U.S.-born black 
residents was 84 percent. (For whites and Hispanics, it was 18 
percent and 59 percent, respectively.) Many black children are 
growing up in violent, disordered neighborhoods where few fathers are 
present. The results are predictable.

You're not likely to hear uncomfortable facts like these at Hennepin 
County Bar Association seminars. Yet unless we find ways to repair 
the devastating social breakdown in low-income black neighborhoods, 
substantially lowering the black crime rate will be an uphill battle.

Can we find better ways to help people with felony convictions 
reintegrate into society, if they have truly changed their ways? Very 
likely. But we won't get far if the best we can do is portray felons 
as the new victim class.
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom