Listen to the black community - comment on article by John DiIulio in this issue, p.3

Public Interest, Fall, 1994 by Glenn C. Loury

JOHN DIIULIO'S ESSAY provides a useful summary of the appalling disparity between the rates at which black and white Americans are victimized by violent criminals. The statistics are staggering; the moral and political problems raised by them are profound. While this situation is not new, DiIulio shows that "America's black crime gap" has grown worse in the last decade. He reports, for example, that the homicide victimization rate for black youth, already three times the rate for white youth in 1986, doubled in the five years between 1986 and 1991, while the white rate remained unchanged.

DiIulio offers two principal explanations for the racial crime gap. First, poor people cannot afford to purchase safe environments for themselves and their families, and they cannot rely on the police to keep them safe where they live. Second, inner-city black communities are exposed at a vastly disproportionate rate to the predation of the violent, repeat offenders when these offenders are not kept in jail. Accordingly, he recommends that public policy aim at securing the streets, schools, and housing projects of inner-city communities, and at keeping the bad guys behind bars for longer periods of time. He also suggests that youngsters, at risk of becoming career criminals due to their pathological home environments, be removed from these circumstances early enough to prevent the intergenerational transmission of social deviance.

This last prescription is radical, as DiIulio recognizes. I will comment on it in due course. His suggestion that we invest public resources in the kind of security for the poor that middle-class Americans take for granted is justified on the grounds of fairness alone in my view. Just how effective this would be is another matter, though. DiIulio speculates that significant benefits would follow a dramatic increase of police presence in high-crime areas but has no real evidence to support this speculation.

Thus, the heart of his policy argument is the case for longer incarceration for violent and career criminals. I find this argument to be compelling: repeat offenders commit a large number of violent crimes while awaiting trial and when out on parole. Because these offenders are much more likely to be residents of poor inner-city communities, their law-abiding neighbors bear the brunt of this burden. Keeping known bad guys in prison for a longer period of time would repay society far more than it would cost, with the poorest among us benefiting the most.

WHY, THEN, DO advocates for poor blacks so strenuously resist this policy proposal? Answering this question is, I believe, critical to reducing the racial crime gap. Indeed, DiIulio actually identifies two black crime gaps in his essay. Blacks are much more frequently the victims of violent crimes--call this Gap #1. But blacks are also much more often the perpetrators of violent crimes--call this Gap #2. Debate about crime policy in this country is substantially shaped, implicitly and explicitly, by Gap #2, while Gap #1 seems virtually invisible.

Why is it so salient in the American political imagination that building prisons means incarcerating even more young black men--an image associated by many with racial oppression, and yet it requires a genuine act of will to see that building prisons also means fewer rapes, robberies, and killings of innocent black men, women, and children? Why is the killing of a young black man national news when the perpetrator is white but a barely discernible blip on the media horizon when the perpetrator is black? Why does the "racial justice" issue in debates on a crime bill get defined in terms of discrimination in the application of the death penalty but not in terms of the differential extent to which police resources are allocated to the protection of black and white communities in the nation's most violent cities? Why is crime such a powerful political issue in suburban districts where crime rates are low and falling, while in inner-city districts where crime rates are high and rising ultra-liberal incumbents feel no pressure to modify their positions?

It is important to take up these questions because significant movement toward "incapacitating the criminally deviant," as DiIulio advocates, is unwise to undertake and unlikely to occur absent some greater measure of black authorization than seems now to be available. Longer sentences, less plea bargaining, and tougher parole standards mean substantially increased incarceration rates for black perpetrators. This will certainly be fought by black and liberal politicians in Congress and in the state legislatures, and it could ultimately be resisted by rank-and-file blacks in the streets. DiIulio cites the interesting observation of Harvard Law Professor Randall Kennedy to the effect that many controversial issues in criminal justice policy involve not only interracial conflict but also intraracial conflict, since the interests of different groups of blacks are differentially impacted by proposed policies. He fails, however, to appreciate fully Kennedy's point, drawn out more completely in his longer comment in the April 1994 Harvard Law Review, that law-abiding black Americans are deeply ambivalent about these issues.