Racial differences make groups easier to follow, but that needs to be assessed within a common grouping, like economic status to determine the weight it has, i.e poor, rural blacks are different in too many ways for a direct reading of causal relationship when looking at their condition in a middle-class, urban environment.
The racial factor has to be isolated so that you can say that poor, rural blacks are at a disadvantage in a poor, rural environment when compared to poor, rural whites. In a middle-class, urban environment poor, rural people were discriminated against without regard to race, although race may have been a factor in assuming someone was poor and rural.
]]>Perhaps the most plausible explanation for the great crime wave [the threefold increase between 1957 and 1970 – SB] rests on demography. After World War II millions of blacks left the rural South for Northern cities – and along with their white fellow citizens, they also had a lot of children. As the baby boom reached adolescence, there was a large increase in the number of young males, and young urban black males in particular. It’s true that the actual increase in crime was much larger than the increase in the number of people in crime-prone demographic groups, but there may have been a “multiplier effect” because the demographic changes overwhelmed the forces of social control. The proliferation of crime-prone young males created new, dangerous norms for behavior. And the increase in the number of people likely to commit crimes wasn’t matched by any corresponding increase in the number of police officers to arrest them or jail cells to hold them. During the sixties the number of people in prison remained essentially flat even as crime soared – a sharp contrast with what happened in the nineties, when the number of people in prison continued to rise even as crime plunged.
Bryan, you may want to email him your snail-mail address so he’ll know where to send your check…
]]>The crime rate was already on its way down because of demographics and the fiscal responsibility of the Clinton administration gave people the courage to invest once something was being done about the deficit.
Giuliani had nothing to do with either event, he was just there.
]]>— Badtux the Disneyfied Penguin
]]>