It’s an article of faith among Democrats/socialists/communists (D/s/cs) that minorities, particularly black people, are far more harshly treated by the Criminal Justice System than whites. The “evidence” usually cited for this, apart from “because we say so,” or “experts say,” is disparate impact. If black people are arrested and convicted in greater numbers than their percentage of the population, that’s prima facie evidence of racism and disparate impact. Why else could so many black people become “justice system-involved individuals?”

The invaluable Heather Mac Donald notes in the largest 75 counties, blacks are 15% of the population, but 60% of all murder and robbery defendants. They also commit murder at eight times the rate of Hispanics and whites combined.

But what about the treatment of blacks in the criminal justice system? A new study reveals they’re treated little, or not at all, differently than white criminals:

Image: Office Of Military Government, United States. Wikimedia Commons.org. Public Domain.

An analysis of twenty years of academic literature found that there is little or no evidence that minorities are mistreated by the criminal justice system when it comes to punishment, despite assertions to the contrary by policymakers, media, and academics.

“In recent years it has become common belief within the scholarly community as well as the general public that the criminal justice system is biased due to race and class issues. We sought to examine this with meta-analysis. Our results suggest that for most crimes, criminal adjudication in the US is not substantially biased on race or class lines,” professors Christopher J. Ferguson and Sven Smith of Stetson University found in a study to be published in the criminology journal Aggression and Violent Behavior and obtained by The Daily Wire.

Studies also tend to overlook the criminal records of black defendants, which can, and should, figure heavily in the severity of sentencing.

As a meta-analysis, the study did not create a new dataset on criminal sentencing and race, but rather examined 51 studies conducted by others looking at the question since 2005. The numbers suggesting no or marginal racial bias in punishment were therefore collected by the existing studies, but those authors often claimed to have found racial bias in their writings, even when their numbers did not back it up.

“We express the concern that evidence for racial bias in the U.S. criminal justice system has been consistently weak, and that scholarly narratives have too often ignored this in favor of the systemic racism narrative,” Ferguson and Smith wrote.”

By “scholarly narratives,” they mean outright lies, narratives of racism believed before a study begins, and sustained even if the data don’t prove it.

Some of the studies found no evidence of racism in criminal sentencing and said so clearly, but their findings were simply ignored by the media, politicians, and other academics, who at times did not acknowledge a single paper dissenting from their hypothesis in their citations.

“At present, we believe that the evidence on racial bias in criminal justice adjudication has been poorly communicated to the general public and policymakers. In many cases, it appears that data calling into question beliefs in structural racism in the criminal justice system are simply being ignored, both by scholars in the field and by policy makers,” the new paper said.

When combining the 51 studies, the numbers “did not reach evidentiary standards to support the hypothesis that race or class are predictive of criminal adjudication” when it comes to all crime types, violent crimes, or juvenile crimes. For drug crimes, “small disparities were found… suggesting that race/ethnicity is associated with between 1.6 to 1.8% of the variance in criminal adjudication” among blacks and Hispanics facing drug charges, versus whites–a percentage so small that policy discussions focused on it are unlikely to solve any problems.

The authors of the meta-study concluded:

“Overall, the criminal justice system appears to be remarkably neutral, at least as relates to these issues, either when compared to the historical US criminal justice system, or historical systems throughout history,” the authors of the new study found.

Their findings confirm my observations during my police career. I was often concerned about lax sentencing of career criminals, but never detected any real difference between the sentences afforded white and minority criminals. I never saw a harsh sentence given a minority that was not justified by the law, the aggravating factors of the offense and the criminal’s record. Far too often, they, and whites, got far less than they deserved.

When elections, government policy, academic and media careers depend upon racialist narratives, the oppressor/oppressed narrative will always find a warm welcome. The destructive effects of such lies don’t seem to matter to politicians like Joe Biden, who spoke for D/s/cs when he said: “we believe in truth over facts.”

Mike McDaniel is a USAF veteran, classically trained musician, Japanese and European fencer, life-long athlete, firearm instructor, retired police officer and high school and college English teacher. His home blog is Stately McDaniel Manor.