The Crime Of Being Black

By Malik RussellNNPA The feelings emerging in my mind upon hearing former Education Secretary and former Drug Czar William Bennett’s comments the “abortion” of all African-American children as a means of decreasing crime, ranged from anger to distress to rage. They often say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I would add to an additional adage that one man’s crime is another’s job. Most pundits and media sources accept hands down that African-Americans and Latinos are disproportionately incarcerated for the simple reason that they commit more crime. This is a myth. Equally wrong are those who point to issues of socioeconomic status, and racism, and the lack of opportunity as reasons for African-Americans being more “criminal.” These factors play more of a role in the type of crime committed as opposed to the frequency of crime committed by certain groups. Most measures of crime are geared towards “street level” crimes, which are crimes that the poor normally have access to commit. These are the crimes for which the police were created for and the ones that our statisticians track regularly. Unfortunately, this excludes the entire genre of “corporate” or “white-collar” crime, which is not counted by the FBI in crime rates-and is overwhelmingly committed by educated, wealthy White American males. Unfortunately for those seeking to use African-Americans or the impoverished as a negative reference group for what ails America, some people are actually tracking this invisible or should I say “White” genre of crime. According to CorporatePolicy.org, a Web site monitoring corporate crime, the Certified Fraud Examiners estimated white-collar crime in 2004 to have cost the US $660 billion annually. To put that in perspective, in 2001, the FBI placed the total loss from burglary, robbery, larceny-theft, and motor vehicle thefts at $17.2 billion. Put another way, that was less than a third of what corporate giant Enron cost investors in the same year. Rarely do the Enrons of this country suffer the same fate as African- Americans convicted or charged with crimes. In California, one individual ended up getting a life sentence for his “third-strike” by stealing some batteries. How many corporate criminals who caused an estimated 70,000 annual deaths because of product-related accidents according to David O. Friedrichs author of “Trusted Criminals: White Collar Crime in Contemporary Society,” end up not with life imprisonment-but in jail? White males make up the overwhelming majority of property crime offenders (70.3 percent), Embezzlement (70.0 percent), Counterfeiting (75.8 percent), Bribery (84.9 percent), and Fraud (70.6 percent). Therefore, based on Bennett’s sick logic, we’d alleviate more crime in America by getting rid of people like him-wealthy educated White males. This would be a much easier argument for people such as Bennett, if the disparate incarceration of African-Americans were solely attributable to how this society defined crime and its failure to “criminalize” white-collar criminals. Unfortunately, this bias in perception and definition extends into the criminal justice system at every level. African-American youth with no prior incarceration are 48 times more likely than a similar White youth to be sentenced to juvenile prison for a drug offense. Even when the White youth is sentenced, it’s generally for less time than an African-American youth. While White youth generally use, sell, and purchase illegal drugs at rates similar to or greater than African-American youth, African- American youth are arrested for drug offenses at about twice the rate of whites. If Bill Bennett wants to abort something, he should help abort the unfair ways people are perceived, based on their color. Malik Russell is the communications director of the Justice Policy Institute, a think tank, and policy organization promoting alternatives to incarceration and reducing society’s over reliance on incarceration. For more info visit www.justicepolicy.org