What’s The Bigger Threat To Blacks? Incarceration Or Violent Crime?

An infographic produced by the Manhattan Institute takes on the left-wing narrative of “mass incarceration” as a particularly acute threat to blacks in America. Given neo-Marxist agitation from Black Lives Matter and like-minded allies in the shared world of politics and media, the free market think tank’s Heather Mac Donald examined what she described as the left’s internecine conflict over the “crime bill” of 1994.

Relative to their share of the total population, blacks are overrepresented as prison inmates. While this fact is hyped by the left as evidence of nebulous forces such as “systemic discrimination” and “institutional racism,” ignored is the fact that blacks are similarly overrepresented as victims of crime.

The Manhattan Institute’s infographic projects that had rates of violent remained constant after 1994, 15 million more blacks would been victimized by violent crime. Building on the premise that the 1994 “crime bill” contributed to a precipitous decline in violent crime over following decades, disparities between counterfactually projected rates of violent crime and actual statistics over a 20-year period are illustrated in graphs.

Had rates of violent crime remained unchanged following 1994, “15 million more violent crimes would have been committed against the black community.”

The projected increases in black victims of violent crime had 1994 violent crime rates remained constant for the next 20 years included the following numbers:

129,874 more homicides of blacks.

334,583 more rapes/sexual assaults of blacks.

7,335,003 more robberies of blacks.

7,264,911 more aggravated assaults of blacks.

Mac Donald’s analysis implies that the left’s call for racial jurisprudential quotas would yield more black victims of violent crime. Hillary Clinton, Senator Bernie Sanders, President Barack Obama, and their allies on the left regularly call for racial quotas in criminal convictions to yield parity between black and white criminal population numbers in prisons.

For a fuller deconstruction of neo-Marxist narratives casting the criminal justice system as stacked against blacks, see Mac Donald’s “The Decriminalization Delusion” and “Is The Criminals-Justice System Racist?”

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