Professors for Empty Prisons

Professors who rail against the imprisonment of blacks rarely show as much interest in black victims of crime. “In 1980, there were 500,000 Americans in prison or jail,” Jason Stanley writes in The Chronicle Review. “By 2013, there were more than 2.3 million.”

“The explosion in incarceration has fallen disproportionately on the descendants of slaves. White Americans are 77 percent of the U.S. population, and black Americans 13 percent. Yet more blacks are incarcerated than whites.”

Stanley is a philosophy professor at Yale. His conclusions resemble those of 20 scholars who recently completed a study under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences.

Actually, the U. S. Bureau of Justice Statistics, in then-Attorney General Eric Holder’s Justice Department, found in 2013 that “In 2011 (the most recent data available), the majority (53 percent) of sentenced state prisoners were serving time for a violent offense, including robbery (14 percent), murder or non-negligent manslaughter (12 percent), rape or sexual assault (12 percent) and aggravated or simple assault (10 percent). About 18 percent were serving time for property offenses, 17 percent for drug crimes and 11 percent for public order offenses, such as weapon violations, drunk driving, commercialized vice and court offenses.”

“White prisoners comprised 35 percent of the 2011 state prison population, while black prisoners were 38 percent and Hispanics were 21 percent.”

Meanwhile, the FBI Uniform Crime Reports of 2012 showed that blacks made up about 44 percent of all murder victims, about 91 percent of whom were killed by other blacks.

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