Part #3 of “The Crime Bill Myth”— one of the most dangerous myths to Joe Biden and all Democrats. In 2016 it was weaponized by Trump (TV ad and 1st presidential debate) and by Russia against Hillary Clinton (who had almost nothing to do with the crime bill). Biden was its primary author.
For those of you just joining us, Part 2 showed that believing that “the 1994 crime bill was about restoring Jim Crow” implicates not just Joe Biden and Bill Clinton but also the majority of Blacks and a majority of the Congressional Black Caucus. It means 2/3 of the Black Caucus voted for a new and more vicious form of Jim Crow legislation. (Also Bernie Sanders and all Democratic Senators.)
But that makes no sense. The Black Caucus was sophisticated and they were not the kind of people that could be duped or bullied by White racists. So Part 2 ended by showing that incarceration did increase by about 400% over thirty years and asking the question: “So if it wasn’t about Jim Crow, what was going on?” Here we look at one aspect of the answer that is generally suppressed.
From Chapter 6: The Crime Bill Myth (#3)
What About Crime?
Could the crime bills have been about crime or drugs and not about suppressing Black votes? That’s a novel idea. Prohibition was a kind of 13-year drug war that had nothing to do with racism, but it did criminalize having a beer. Overreaction to drugs and crime is nothing new in America. [But yes, “tough on crime” was part of Nixon’s racist Southern strategy. It’s just far from the whole story.]
You might think that a book about why so many people are incarcerated would include statistics on how many people commit crimes. Most such books are full of them. But not The New Jim Crow. It’s a bit like telling us that Ricky Ray Rector was mentally impaired and not mentioning how that happened [See Part 1].
Alexander notes that “African Americans are incarcerated at grossly disproportionate rates throughout the United States.” This is true. As the NAACP reported in 2018, “African Americans are incarcerated at more than five times the rate of Whites.” But Alexander does not mention that on average from 1980 to 2008, the homicide rate for Blacks was 7.6 times higher than for Whites [1].
I’m not saying the crime-rate difference is the whole story. And I’m certainly not saying there isn’t racism in the criminal justice system! But covering up the crime rate is actually a way of covering up (unintentionally in Michelle Alexander’s case) the main impact of racism—a tragic mix of unemployment, crime, and broken families in the Black community.
A frightening 30-year crime wave also explains a lot about the popularity of tough-on-crime legislation. As that wave crested between 1985 and 1993, the surge in violence by boys ages 14 through 17 was unprecedented. For Whites, the homicide rate more than doubled in just those eight years, and for Blacks, it more than quadrupled.
This was associated with the crack cocaine epidemic, which Alexander discusses at length without mentioning the violent crime wave or the use of children by drug cartels. All this was headline news at the time.
[1] Homicide Trends in the United States, 1980-2008, Dept. of Justice, Table 1: Victims and offenders, by demographic group, 1980–2008, page 3. Rate per 100,000, Offenders: 34.4 Black / 4.5 White. Dividing gives 7.64. I used the homicide rate because it is by far the most accurate crime statistic. It is obviously one of the less frequent crimes, but it represents a disproportionate number incarcerated because of the long sentences, and it is correlated with other long-sentence crimes. Mostly, it just makes the point that ignoring crime rates gives a badly distorted picture.
As best I can tell, most of the impact of racism on Black incarceration comes through the Sanders/socialist explanation of long-run economic deprivation leading to crime, little of it comes from systemic (de jure) bias in the judicial system, but a significant part comes from the systematic bias exhibited by individuals, one surprising group in particular — we’ll get there shortly.
P.S. Some will react negatively to mentioning the black crime rate. But think about. According to a socialist analysis (and Sanders made this point repeatedly and emphatically on the Senate floor in 1994), unemployment, bad jobs and low wages are the main causes of crime. So to deny that inner-city blacks have a high crime rate is to call Sanders flat out wrong on one of his main points. I don’t think he was.
And think about this. Almost all Democrats, and certainly all who believe the crime-bill myth, believe that bad economic conditions in the black community are the result of racism today and our long history of racism. So hiding the high black crime rate is actually a way of downplaying the negative effects of racism and making racism look less insidious than it is.
As we will see, Black communities were actually hyper-aware of their crime problem, and that explains much of what really happened in 1994. Republicans also had a lot to do with it. Stay tuned.
P.P.S. I spent three years researching and writing a book on what’s so wrong with the Democrats that we cannot beat the worst president the country’s ever seen. I’m selling it on Amazon. But after all that work, I want as many people to read it as possible. So I’m giving away the PDF that the book was printed from (except the PDF has color illustrations). [Full disclosure: I gave away a previous book online and it sold very well. So there is method to my madness.]
And you can get it here for free: RippedApart.org.
It’s completely free, I don’t even ask for your email. Read it before it’s too late.
