>from today's SLATE Magazine: >The NYT off-lead, by the paper's national
>crime reporter, Fox Butterfield, a story nobody else fronts, is that a
>new
>comprehensive study purports to show that black and Hispanic teenagers
>are
>treated more severely than their white counterparts in the juvenile
>justice
>system. Findings include: "Among young people who have not been sent to a
>juvenile prison before, blacks are more than six times as likely as
>whites
>to be sentenced by juvenile courts to prison." And: "Similarly, white
>youths charged with violent offenses are incarcerated for an average of
>193
>days after trial, but blacks are incarcerated an average of 254 days and
>Hispanics are incarcerated an average of 305 days." The story says that
>although in the past, when studies have found racial disparities in say,
>the number of inmates, critics have said the cause was simply that
>minorities commit a disproportionate amount of crime, this study is
>different in that it finds disparities at each stage of the juvenile
>justice process. This would be important and disturbing news, which is
>why
>it's important journalism to run down some issues the story seems to
>leave
>untethered. For instance, as regards that trans-racial comparison among
>people who have not been sent to juvenile prison before, has it been
>adjusted for equal numbers of prior convictions and for equal seriousness
>of the crime? If not, then it may be the prior number of blown chances
>and
>the gravity of the crimes that are pushing the offender into prison for
>the
>first time, not his/her race. A similar point can be made about violent
>offenses--they come in degrees of gravity and if one group's offenses
>cluster around one degree of gravity and another's cluster around
>another,
>then the difference in jail time served may be an artifact not of race
>but
>of the type of violent crime committed. Even the study's claim that
>"minority youths are more likely than their white counterparts to be
>arrested" needs more exegesis than the Times gives it here. If somebody
>isn't arrested, how do we know he's in any relevant sense a "counterpart"
>of the person who is? Maybe he's law-abiding, in which case his not being
>arrested isn't prejudice, it's justice. <
>I'm no expert on these statistical issues, but I'd like to here from
>someone who is.
>Jim Devine
I am no expert on stats too, but two questions need to be clarified here.
1. Which study is SLATER magazine referring to? Who did the study?
2. Minority people are likely to be more "arrested" because of the racist
justice system that "racializes", so to speak, race. Race is already part
of this racial system, so the argument that race has no importance in
criminal issues obscures rather than challenges racism . When SLATER says
race does not matter, but "the difference in jail time", it denies the
ideology of racism which associates crime with race. It is more of a
liberal trick SLATER is doing here!
Mine Doyran
SUNY/Albany
