Changes to criminal-justice laws in New Jersey now require an analysis of their impact on racial and ethnic minorities, making the state among only a handful in the nation to do so.
A bill mandating the analyses, which outgoing Republican Gov. Chris Christie signed Monday, requires the state's Office of Legislative Services to prepare so-called racial-impact statements for policy changes that affect pretrial detention, sentencing and parole.
To justify such legislation, the soft-on-crime crowd trotted out its favorite warhorse, the Fallacy of the Irrelevant Denominator.
New Jersey has the largest disparity between white and black incarceration rates in the country, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that advocates reducing the prison population.
The state's prison population is 61% black, 22% white and 16% Hispanic, data show. The state's general population is 14% black, 69% white and 18% Hispanic, according to census data.
What is the relevance of the general population figures? Most of the general population, across all racial and ethnic groups, consists of law-abiding people. Prison is for felons, not law-abiding people. The relevant first-order comparison would be prison population versus felons. If the ethnic distribution of prisoners is out of line with the distribution of people committing the kinds of crimes for which prison sentences are regularly imposed, that would at least raise a suspicion that something might be amiss and warrant further investigation. Comparing prison population with general population, though, indicates absolutely nothing.
Let's say a state has a law setting the maximum punishment for forcible rape at five years. (See Cal. Penal Code ยง264 (1976).) Persons of sense would uniformly recognize that as too low. That maximum sounds more like a minimum. Some deserve much more. We should promptly move to amend it. But wait. A gender-impact statement notes that increasing the penalty for rape will fall almost entirely on men, since nearly all rapists are men even though men are less than half the population.
Disparate impact! Subconscious sexism! Should all of us non-rapist men come together in masculine solidarity with our rapist brethren and oppose this unbalanced impact? Hell no.
We are law-abiding people first and men second. All law-abiding people of all groups and both sexes are in this together against the predators and thugs of all descriptions. Whether a person respects the rights and integrity of others or simply takes what he wants in disregard of others is a far more important distinction than any demographic characteristics. People who commit serious crimes should get the punishment those crimes deserve. The demographic distribution of the perpetrators is irrelevant.
Over 50 years after the Civil Rights Act, we should be in a post-racial society where we treat everyone as an individual. Group labels should be in the dustbin of history. Yet people who fancy themselves as pro-civil-rights accentuate and perpetuate racial divisions with nonsense like this.
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