Friday, September 30, 2016
Patterns of Offending
Andrew C. McCarthy:
First, she explains the elephant in the room that no one (including Donald Trump last night) wants to confront: Mrs. Clinton's "systemic bias" libel ignores that the statistical overrepresentation of blacks in the prison population (compared to their percentage of the overall population) is caused by patterns of offending.
Not only does crime reporting by victims bear this out. It is common sense. Outside of academia, the legal profession is second to none in its leftward bent and racialist worldview; and its conservative members believe in equal protection under the law. Participants in the system, particularly the judiciary, would not tolerate a situation in which black defendants were, as Clinton alleges, being given more severe sentences than white defendants for the same criminal conduct. Federal sentences (and sentences in most states) are computed under race-neutral guidelines that factor in both offense conduct and criminal history. The more crimes one commits, the heavier the sentence for any one crime. This is a recidivism thing, not a race thing.
