I never do this, but I am republishing this whole piece. The stats in it are incredibly important but since WSJ is hidden behind a pay wall, few will get to see this stuff. So, as much for myself as you, the reader, I am reposting this here so that I can reference it later.Just a reminder to anyone coming to this site, this site is not a money maker for me, so I am not making $$ of someone else’s work, here. But this info is just too important to lose behind a pay wall.
The most shocking revelation in Mr. Latzer’s piece is that only 1.2 percent of America’s African American population are incarcerated. This makes the lie that blacks are being “warehoused” in prisons. That makes the lie to the Black Lives Matter movement, too.
Finally, this article makes the lie to the push for “sentencing reform” being pushed by both Barack Obama and Speaker of the House Paul Ryan.
The Myth of Mass Incarceration
-By Barry Latzer
Wall Street Journal, Feb. 22, 2016
Violent crime, not drugs, has driven imprisonment. And drug offenses usually are for dealing, not using.
It has become a boogeyman in public discourse: “mass incarceration.” Both left and right, from Hillary Clinton to Rand Paul, agree that it must be ended. But a close examination of the data shows that U.S. imprisonment has been driven largely by violent crime—and thus significantly reducing incarceration may be impossible.
Less than one-half of 1% of the U.S. population is incarcerated, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), so “mass” is a bit of hyperbole. The proportion of African-Americans in prison, 1.2%, is high compared with whites (0.25%), but not in absolute terms.
There’s a lot of historical amnesia about the cause of prison expansion, a mistaken sense that it was all about drugs or race and had very little to do with serious crime. This ignores the facts. Between 1960 and 1990, the rate of violent crime in the U.S. surged by over 350%, according to FBI data, the biggest sustained buildup in the country’s history.
One major reason was that as crime rose the criminal-justice system caved. Prison commitments fell, as did time served per conviction. For every 1,000 arrests for serious crimes in 1970, 170 defendants went to prison, compared with 261 defendants five years earlier. Murderers released in 1960 had served a median 4.3 years, which wasn’t long to begin with. By 1970 that figure had dropped to 3.5 years.
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The Myth of Mass Incarceration”