“without regard to racial background”

I support the goal here.

Doyle’s order also directed state agencies to use information technology systems to track and analyze data for racial disparities. It also means the state Office of Justice Assistance and the Transportation and Corrections departments must track traffic citations, arrests, charges, sentencing and parole revocations by race and jurisdiction.

The disparity problem runs deep, the governor said, and solutions should be sought without worrying about political correctness or sparing the feelings of any state officials. He called for cooperation at all levels of the justice system, saying people at each level make decisions that determine who gets incarcerated.

“We want to make sure in this state, each of those decisions is made without regard to racial background,” he said.

I want to make sure the law is applied regardless of a person’s race too.  The problem I have is that the racial disparity in incarcerations is being used as evidence of racial bias in the system.  That may or may not be true.  It’s possible that there are some racists in the justice system that results in more minorities being jailed.  It’s also possible that some races in Wisconsin commit more crimes than other races and the equal application of the law will result in a racial disparity in incarcerations.  The goal should be exactly what Doyle said - that the system operates “without regard to racial backgrounds.” The goal should not be to make the prison population mirror the racial proportions of the general population. 

1. The State will spend approximately $100K/year/staffer to assemble the reporting systems Doyle requested.

   Wanna bet on the over/under of “number of analyst/programmers” required, plus oversight?

   Posted by dad29 on May 15, 2008 at 0718 hrs




2. The goal should not be to make the prison population mirror the racial proportions of the general population.

   Well I of course agree with you, but I already know what the blue blood liberals are going to say…

   They are going to say that if the racial composition of prisons DOES NOT mirror the racial proportions of the general population that indicates that society is to blame and that ‘fairness’ means that we bring those proportions into line with the general population.

   If the hard facts are that sentencing guidelines are fair (and they may or may not be, I’ll leave that to another debate) but if sentencing is applied fairly without racial bias, and the racial composition of prison still doesn’t mirror the racial proportions in the general population THEN liberals will want to address why society has made it such that prisons are proportionately more minority than caucasion.

   They’ll begin to cite the socio-economic conditions that minorites face and blame those factors for propensity to commit crime and then blame society for those conditions and the ‘answer’ (as it always fucking is) will be to pump more money into the problem.

   What noone will be willing to address is that there is a marked moral and a cultural difference in these minority communities that NO amount of money will fix.

   Liberals may even agree that there is a moral and cultural difference but they’ll blame that on society and cite pumping more money and more programs as the answer.

   The part they don’t get is the “no amount of money will fix” part.

   Posted by on May 15, 2008 at 1001 hrs




3. I agree that the system needs to be applied evenly across racial lines, and wish that it were.  This will hopefully address the sentencing portion of the equation but that is only part of the problem. Also parts of the equation, starting AFTER who is actually committing the crimes is:  likelihood to have charges pressed (oh, he is normally a good boy, I think he will learn his lesson from this), likelihood to be arrested (this may actually work in favor of minorities, as many minority communities have a strong ethic of protecting their own), quality of representation, jury bias.  When all of those things can be fixed, and we can determine the racial makeup of the population committing the crimes, rather than the general population, then we will have something to match.

   Posted by on May 15, 2008 at 1024 hrs




4. From statistics that were thrown around at BadgerBlogger (by right-minded commenters):  African American males in Milwaukee are 7 times more likely to commit crimes, but are 42 times more likely to be convicted of a crime. 

   Barrett is doing the right thing by trying to address that disparity.

   Being 6 times more likely to be convicted of a committed crime is a problem, and likely could be a contributing factor to the much bigger problem of criminality rates in the African-American community.

   Posted by on May 15, 2008 at 1029 hrs