If crime revives as an issue, it will be through liberal complaints about something that has reduced the salience of the issuethe incarceration rate. And any revival will be awkward for Barack Obama... Last July, Obama said more young black men languish in prison than attend colleges and universities. Actually, more than twice as many black men 18-24 are in college as there are in jail. Last September he said, We have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, nonviolent offenders for the better part of their lives. But Heather Mac Donald of the Manhattan Institute... notes that from 1999 to 2004, violent offenders accounted for all of the increase in the prison population... Obama sees racism in the incarceration rate: We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from. Indeed, in 2006, blacks, who are less than 13 percent of the population, were 37.5 percent of all state and federal prisoners. About one in 33 black men was in prison, compared with one in 79 Hispanic men and one in 205 white men. But Mac Donald cites studies of charging and sentencing that demonstrate that the reason more blacks are disproportionately in prison, and for longer terms, is not racism but racial differences in patterns of criminal offenses... James Q. Wilson, Americas premier social scientist, notes that the typical criminal commits from 12 to 16 crimes a year (not counting drug offenses) and Wilson says that 10 years of scholarly studies have shown that states that sent a higher fraction of convicts to prison had lower rates of crime, even after controlling for all of the other wayspoverty, urbanization, and the proportion of young men in the populationthat the states differed. A high risk of punishment reduces crime. Deterrence works. It works especially on behalf of blacks, who are disproportionately the victims of crimes by black men. George Will
