American culture defines success by monetary achievement moreso that attaining material success honorably. Thus, when the conventional and legal opportunities for success appear limited by racism, there is more motivation to achieve via illegal means. In failing, inner-city schools, for example, it may appear that the ways to get rich are becoming a musical star, basketball player, or hustler. Why? Because they don't see a lot of other Black people from their school making it. Controlling for poverty alone does not cut it, because impoverished White people are more likely to benefit from sharing a school with middle-classed taxpayers than Blacks or other minorities who live in ethnic ghettos. These ghettos have always experienced social problems including gangs, regardless of whether they are occupied by Blacks or Irish immigrants.
Generations ago they would have been correct that they cannot get rich via conventional means, but the generations of today are still paying for the enduring perception that this is still the case. Thus, misconceptions in their subculture become self-fulfilling, self-perpetuating prophecy.
As for the study, the methodology sounds suspect. However, since the article sounds like it was written for a non-academic audience, it is possible they merely did not fully explicate their methods. Some problems are noted below:
For most crimes, police are arresting fewer blacks
than would be expected from the percentage of
criminals the victims tell us are black (rape/sexual
assault is the only exception). In the most extreme
case, burglary, victims tell police that 45 percent of
the perpetrators were black, but only 28 percent of
the people arrested for that crime were black.
Their methods are not especially rigorous. For example, this test tells us nothing because there is more than one kind of criminal. Career criminals who believe they must engage in crime to live an acceptable lifestyle plan their crimes and have lots of experience with getting away with it, and maybe some experience with getting caught that they learned from. On the other hand, ineffective career criminals may be caught over and over. Somebody who has served time in prison has learned from other people who got caught and networked with this group of people whose number 1 rule is not to be a rat. On the other end of the spectrum, impulsive criminals, due to mental illness or deficiency, are very likely to get caught. It can be supposed that racial differences are going to result in social differences that cause a difference in the types of criminals found by race, confounding this study.
Another possible confounder is that police may be overwhelmed in urban areas, where you are likely to find a higher proportion of the population as Black, and thus a higher proportion of crimes in rural areas are prosecuted. Thus one would need to see data controlled by urbanity as well.
Finally, Figure 1 indirectly shows something else:
how much more likely blacks are than people of
other races to commit certain crimes. Although
blacks are 13 percent of the population, they commit
a far larger percentage of every crime included
in the NCVS. They are eight times more likely than
people of other races to rob someone, for example,
and 5.5 times more likely to steal a car.
You cannot arrive at that conclusion by looking at victimization rates. A chronic subset of repeat offenders could cause one race to be overrepresented, for example.
Emergency room admissions are a reliable, independent
indicator of who is using drugs; people
do not end up in HHSs statistics unless they are
taking illegal drugs, and there is no reason to think
drug-takers of different races are more or less likely
to need emergency treatment.
Also not true. We dont know if emergency room admission are always medically necessary or a byproduct of paranoia. A bad reaction to the effects of psychotropic drugs is modulated by the social context of use. People learn to appreciate the effects of a drug as positive (and not frightening) within a social context. This is especially true of drugs with hallucinogenic properties.
Their friends and associates are
likely to be black, and the people they meet in chance
encounters are likely to be black. A large number of
white victims suggests targeting of whites.
Of course smart criminals probably do profiling too. Figure 22 shows that robbery is a common interracial crime. Robbery is an economic crime, and it mostly shows me these criminals are not entirely stupid. You want to rob somebody who has money on them and is unlikely to know your momma. This is doubly smart because people who are not around other races have a harder time telling two members of another race apart. The people who say, All Orientals look the same, dont spend time in the Orient. Familiarity with the ethnicity lets you tell the subtle differences between individuals. Other Blacks are going to be able to tell you apart from other Blacks more easily than Whites.
The NCVS tells us that interracial multiple-offender
offenses are even more lopsidedly black than
interracial crime as a whole.
Obviously
Does that control for gang membership? Probably not.
After a black beat up
one of his friends, he decided to get a ni**er
any black would do. He met two blacks and invited
them to take drugs with him, and shot them. This
appears to be a legitimate hate crime.
There is no such thing as a legitimate hate crime. That is murder. Period.
There has been much debate
about what caused the drop, but the enormous
rise in prison populations is part of the explanation.
Bureau of Justice Statistics Correctional Population Trends Chart Bureau of Justice Statistics Violent Crime Rate Trends
Crime Rate Graphs - SecurityWorld.com
There is an existent but weak correlation to be sure (stronger for property crime, no correlation for drug crime), but they leave out that there may be more cost effective and humane ways to reduce crime than merely incarcerating as many people as your economy can handle.
http://www.sentencingproject.org/Admin/Documents/publications/inc_iandc_complex.pdf
The experience of the past several decades tells
us that putting more people in prison reduces crime.
I dont know if Id rely entirely upon two decades of inconsistent statistics from America. America does, after all, have the highest incarceration rate of all nations and high crime rates.
International Crime Rates. Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report.
