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Columbia Prof. John McWhorter has this review in the New Republic of Amy Wax's book, Race, Wrongs, and Remedies: Group Justice in the 21st Century.

The weakness--and sadness--of this fine book is that it has no prescription. Wax makes a series of arguments--stop focusing on the past, think about culture rather than structure, criticize failure and emulate success--but she does not tell us how to accomplish these goals. The task is certainly huge. The focus on culture that Wax champions would be one in which a black family would be deeply ashamed of the man with two "baby mamas" who works only "odd jobs" and largely gets by selling drugs. But the implacable present-day fact is that in his actually existing community today that man is considered less than ideal but still quite normal. Hence as Wax notes, Tavis Smiley could produce a whole volume called The Covenant With Black America, urging blacks to "hold leaders to account" and include a mere two lines about out-of-wedlock child-rearing. The black radical is considered, even if "a little crazy," as "having something to say." Many black church audiences are now eager to get an earful of Jeremiah Wright.

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Wax usefully asks: "Is it possible to pursue an arduous program of self-improvement while simultaneously thinking of oneself as a victim of grievous mistreatment and of one's shortcomings as a product of external forces?" To the extent that our ideology on race is more about studied radicalism than about a healthy brand of what Wax calls an internal locus of control, her book provokes, at least in this reader, a certain hopelessness. If she is right, then the bulk of today's discussion of black America is performance art. Tragically, and for the most part, she is right.

The title of the post is the headline of this story by Christopher Hope in the London Telegraph.

England and Wales has one of the worst crime rates among developed nations for rapes, burglaries and robberies, a major report has found.

However, offenders are locked up for shorter periods than in comparable countries - raising questions about claims made by Ken Clarke, the Justice Secretary, that too many criminals were being jailed.

The February issue of the Journal of Law & Economics arrived in hard copy this week. Crime-related articles include terrorism and human rights, effect of antiprofiling policies, and out-of-wedlock births as a root cause. Abstracts are after the jump.

The two entries prior to this one, both by Kent, discuss (1) the role of slippery language in discussions about criminal law, and (2) deceptiveness in a recent North Carolina study purporting to find racial discrimination in that state's application of the death penalty.  The two analyses are related in a way that might not seem obvious, but is a telling illustration of the truth of both.

North Carolina adopted a so-called "Racial Justice Act" to permit the use of statistics to illustrate that the state's death penalty is applied more harshly, and frequently, to blacks.  The recent Radelet study purports to show just that, but does so only by silently redefining what "racial discrimination" has previously been understood to mean.

Up to now, normal people thought that discrimination against black defendants meant singling them out for harsher treatment because of their race. But the Radelet study shows nothing of the kind, and does not even claim to so far as I have been able to find. (The failure to find it mirrors a similar failure in a Maryland study a few years ago).  Instead, it finds disparity based on the race of the victim.

Note to Professor Radelet:  The victim was not selected for capital prosecution.  The defendant was, and the only relevant question is whether that selection was racially biased.  It wasn't.

In other words, Radelet's study finds a disproportionality that is irrelevant to the purpose for which the research was ostensibly undertaken.  This is the fact the study's rollout is designed to obscure by its sleight-of-hand language.  If Prof. Radelet wanted to make the point that blacks disproportionately commit crimes, including murder, he's a few decades late.  But that is not the fault of the criminal justice system, and still less is it evidence of biased prosecutors or juries.

What race-of-the-victim studies at least arguably show is that the system does not adequately value the lives of black murder victims, because their killers are less frequently subject to the death penalty.  But that is hardly a reason to end capital punishment.  To the exact contrary, it's a reason to apply it more resolutely, broadly  --  and frequently.

 

 

 

One more item from today's WSJ is this article by Lera Boroditsky on how language can shape thought. The language a person speaks can shape his view of the world. Implications for witnesses and jurors are discussed about halfway down. Also discussed are Juliet's rose and Justin Timberlake's "wardrobe malfunction."

The August issue of of the Journal of Criminal Justice has an interesting article on the use of supermax in Florida.  From the article: Supermax Housing: Placement, Duration, and Time to Reentry:

[T]he study found that supermax inmates typically experienced multiple placements in supermax housing. For example, 55 percent of supermax inmates experienced three or more episodes of supermax confinement. The study also found that, some inmates spent but a few months, or a small percentage, of their total prison term in such housing, while others spent much more time in it. To illustrate, for 44 percent of all supermax inmates, supermax confinement constituted less than 15 percent of their total term of incarceration; even so, for 14 percent of supermax inmates, supermax confinement constituted over half of their total term of incarceration. The analyses also revealed that 28 percent of inmates were released from supermax housing within three months of their return to society and 44 percent were released from it within six months of their return.

Logistic regression showed that violent behavior was the strongest predictor of supermax confinement:

Remy Melinda at Live Science has an article on the diagnosis of Intermittent Explosive Disorder (IED) which features this quote from Professor Emil F. Coccaro of the University of Chicago:

IED is a behavioral disorder that is a medical condition in the same way that depression or panic disorder is -- it is not simply 'bad behavior,'" said Emil F. Coccaro, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral neuroscience at the University of Chicago. "Aggressive behavior is under genetic influence and IED runs in families.

All behavior is under the influence of genes, that's what it means to say that we are biological creatures.  But just because some defined behavior is under genetic influence does not mean it's pathological in any medical sense.  After all, some folks are impatient at red lights and drive too fast, but they do not need medical intervention any more so than those who experience displeasure at waiting in line at the bank.  No, these folks need to learn what every parent teaches a child: patience is a virtue."

Now some may argue that the very idea of IED is that the behavior is so out of the ordinary that it must be pathological: that we're not talking about tempestuous drivers but those who exhibit behavior that is so disproportionate to the circumstances that it's, well, pathological.  But, of course, this doesn't help because the marker between conduct that is unwise and pathological cannot be merely that it's pathological.

The real lure of IED is the idea that it involves impaired volition - an irresistible impulse.  And linking it to genetic influences simply furthers the notion that folks with immodest tempers simply can't help themselves because of their biology.  It's the new biological predestination which strongly implies that we can't blame people for their conduct because their genes (or brains) made them do it.  But our brains (and genes) are us.   

Krissah Thompson reports in the WaPo:

The first of several studies looking into the arrest last summer of Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., which attracted the interest of President Obama and became a national controversy, essentially clears the Cambridge, Mass., police department of the charge of racial profiling.

The report by the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, which was published Thursday in the Boston Globe, bases its findings on a review of the department's handling of disorderly conduct cases from 2004 to 2009.

Of the 392 adults arrested for disorderly conduct, 57 percent were white and 34 percent were black. That racial breakdown almost exactly mirrored the racial composition of the population that Cambridge police investigated for disorderly conduct, the center's analysis shows.

Note that is population investigated for the offense in question, not the general population. Rochelle Sharpe and Maggie Mulvihill explain in the Boston Globe:

Rasmussen has this video report of the crime survey previously noted here. The video focuses on the "fairness" questions of the survey.

The FBI has released the preliminary data for the 2009 Crime in the United States report:

Preliminary figures indicate that, as a whole, law enforcement agencies throughout the Nation reported a decrease of 5.5 percent in the number of violent crimes brought to their attention for 2009 when compared with figures reported for 2008. The violent crime category includes murder, forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault. The number of property crimes in the United States in 2009 decreased 4.9 percent when compared with data from 2008. Property crimes include burglary, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle theft. Arson is also a property crime, but data for arson are not included in property crime totals. Figures for 2009 indicate that arson decreased 10.4 percent when compared to 2008 figures.

In social science research, there are always variables you can't control, so you try to structure your study so that the things you can't control are random with respect to the variables you are trying to measure. Randomness plus large enough sample size plus a lucky rabbit's foot means these uncontrollables don't affect your results. You hope.

BBC reports on a British Science Museum study where the data are gathered through a survey. That is common in research, but we always have to worry that survey respondents sometimes lie to surveyors.

What is the variable of interest? Lying.*

So how do the researchers know their results aren't skewed by lying participants.**

The BBC story doesn't say, and I can't find a link to the full study. Maybe they have some clever way. They certainly can't assume that lying is random with respect to the variable of interest, though.

The researchers might say, "Nothing's wrong, I'm fine." That is the number one lie told by women and number two for men. If the participants are telling the truth about not telling the truth, that is.

From the current issue of Criminal Justice Review comes Merciful Justice: Lessons From 50 Years of New York Death Penalty Commutations:

This article examines the reasons offered by seven New York governors in justification of their decisions to commute death sentences in 159 cases between 1920 and 1970. In doing so, it scrutinizes the common assertion that, in marked contrast to contemporary death penalty cases, merciful considerations once were bountiful in sparing condemned offenders from execution. An examination of the New York governors' reasons for granting clemency and the legal context within which their decisions were made suggests that mercy accounted for few death sentence commutations during this time period and that other considerations predominated. To the extent that the New York experience resembles that of other states historically, the analysis suggests that the comparatively infrequent use of executive clemency in contemporary capital cases may owe more to the significant differences in death penalty laws and their administration during the different eras than to a diminished role for mercy.

During the 1990s a movement was afoot in the mental health field to change the nomenclature of the therapist-patient relationship.  Advocates urged a movement away from "patient" to the term "client" and then, dissatisfied with that, argued for the term "mental health consumer."  Somehow the new terminology never stuck with most doctors and therapists: it seemed to equate the therapist-patient relationship with the consumption of goods rather than signifying the professional nature of the relationship.  After all, we're not talking about movie popcorn here.  As it's often said, words do matter.  Which is why a new study in the current issue of the International Journal of Offender Therapy and Comparative Criminology seems oddly titled: Sex Offender Treatment: Consumer Satisfaction and Engagement in Therapy. 

The current issue of Psychiatric Services has several interesting articles examining the nexus between mental illness and crime.  Here are just a few (subscription needed):

From Characteristics and Experiences of Adults With a Serious Mental Illness Who Were Involved in the Criminal Justice System:

The findings of this study confirm that many individuals with a serious mental illness spend time in jail and are frequently rearrested. The characteristics of individuals who have elevated risks of misdemeanor arrests and of spending time in jail associated with these arrests are somewhat different than those of individuals who have elevated risks of felony arrests. Being male, being homeless, having an involuntary psychiatric evaluation, and not having outpatient mental health treatment in the previous quarter independently increased the odds of subsequent misdemeanor arrests and of additional days in jail. On the other hand, being black, being in a younger age group, having a nonpsychotic diagnosis, and having a co-occurring substance use disorder diagnosis were all independently associated with felony arrests. An involuntary psychiatric evaluation and the lack of outpatient mental health services in the previous quarter also increased the odds of a felony arrest, but the associations were not nearly as strong as they were for misdemeanor arrests. Because felonies typically result in longer incarcerations, it is not surprising that, with the exception of psychiatric diagnosis, all variables that increased the risk of felony arrest also increased the risk of additional days in jail.

From The Impact of Mental Illness Status on the Length of Jail Detention and the Legal Mechanism of Jail Release: 

Overall, the lengths of jail stays were found to be strikingly similar among persons with a diagnosis of a serious mental illness and those without such a diagnosis. Regardless of mental illness status, at least 50% of persons were released from jail within 30 days of entering. Furthermore, nearly half (49%) of those with serious mental illnesses had relatively unpredictable releases. Many such releases occurred after shorter incarcerations, typically with little or no notice, and an additional 8% left the jail for state sentences or incarceration in a state or other county facility.

The issue has many other good articles as well.

Did California really have zero rape-murders in the entire state in 2008? That sounds too good to be true, but that is what the official Homicide in California publication, recently released, says.

I asked the folks in charge of the numbers, the Criminal Justice Statistics Center, if that was really accurate. Linda Nance responded:

The data is accurate as reported by law enforcement to the Criminal Justice Statistics Center.

 

The attached excel table displays the reporting of rape as a contributing factor or precipitating event in homicides over time.  Also included are counts on the number of unknown circumstances.  As you will see, the number of precipitating events reported as rape have been fairly low for the past few years.  The number of cases where the precipitating event is unknown has increased.

The table is after the jump.