So whites would get more prison time, blacks and Hispanics less (and Asians? Who knows?) for the same crime. This may, unbelievably, be the idea behind a new bill making its way through the California Legislature. So much for equality under the law.
BPR has the story:
Proof that social justice is a far cry from actual justice, a California lawmaker and member of the state’s reparations task force is pushing legislation to “rectify racial bias” by making it a factor in sentencing criminals.
Democratic Assemblymember Reggie Jones-Sawyer is one of the members of the California Reparations Task Force, charged by Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) in Sept. 2020 with the task of compiling a report with recommendations on monetary and other handouts for residents in a state that never permitted slavery.
Based on those proposals that could cost California taxpayers as much as $800 billion, Jones-Sawyer has also sought to reform the penal code and provide skewed sight to a justice system only ever intended to be blind.
“It is the intent of the Legislature to rectify the racial bias that has historically permeated our criminal justice system as documented by the California Task Force to Study and Develop Reparation Proposals for African Americans,” California’s AB 852 reads in part.
First introduced in February, the legislation had passed the House 58 to 13 with nine members voting absent and continued, “This bill would state the intent of the Legislature to rectify racial bias, as specified. The bill would require courts, whenever they have discretion to determine a sentence, to consider the disparate impact on historically disenfranchised and system-impacted populations.”
The aforementioned $800 billion “reparations” price tag includes, the task force estimated, a “minimum dollar amount in harm that California has caused or could have prevented [that] totals at least $1 million per eligible Black Californian,” Fox News adds.
“In terms of criminal justice specifically,” Fox continues, “the task force determined that qualifying Black residents could be owed over $115,000, or around $2,352 per year of residency in California from 1971 to 2020, as compensation for over-policing in Black communities, excess felony drug arrests, and disproportionate prison time during the so-called war on drugs. The final report also included proposals to end cash bail and the prosecution of low-level crimes.”
One problem here, among other things, is that the above reparations payments are based on false premises. For example, there is no “over-policing” in black communities; rather, there’s a level of policing congruent with the (high) level of crime.
Black Americans apparently agree, too, as evidenced by a 2020 Gallup poll finding that 81 percent of blacks “want police to spend [the] same amount of or more time in their area.” And why wouldn’t they? An inordinate amount of crime is non-white-on-non-white, after all.
Just consider the Big Apple as an example. “In New York City in 2019, 319 people were murdered,” related the New York Post in 2020. “Fully 88 percent of them — 280 people — were black or Hispanic. And 93.2 of them were murdered by other people of color.”
“Almost 96 percent of all shooters and shooting victims in the Big Apple in 2019 were people of color,” the paper adds. This is despite non-whites being only about 65 percent of the city’s population.
With some variation, these skewed proportions hold across other violent crimes, too, the Post also informs.
As for the California bill, it’s actually based on a rather old idea. For instance, in 2009 I wrote about a Tucson Unified School District social engineering plan that had the effect of meting out punishment based on racial quota. The school board had insisted, reported The Arizona Republic’s Doug MacEachern, “that its schools reduce its suspensions and/or expulsions of minority students to the point that the data reflect ‘no ethnic/racial disparities.’” (It wasn’t reported whether the students cooperated and started committing infractions based on racial quota, too.)
This was then taken national. That is, ending these “disparities” was part of Barack Obama’s $4.3-billion Race to the Top initiative in 2010, with noncompliant schools facing loss of federal funds and expensive litigation. And how was “this seemingly alluring ‘racial fairness’ to be accomplished?” American Thinker rhetorically asked at the time.
“The answer is not on a case-by-case basis by scrutinizing millions of outcomes to detect bias,” the site continued. “Instead, bureaucrats will use the ‘disparate impact’ approach — i.e., it will be assumed that racially disproportional punishment inherently equals racial discrimination. Thus, if African-Americans constitute 30% of the student body but half of all expulsions, racial discrimination is demonstrated.”
“Disparate impact,” do note, was also the rationalization used to eliminate stringent police and fire-department exams so as to make it easier for women and minorities to pass. In a nutshell, the theory states that if certain groups perform worse under a given measure, it is by definition unjustly discriminatory and must be scrapped.
This said, none of this is actually driven by principle. After all, there are criminal-justice disparities other than the black/white one. Just consider, for example, that “85% of people arrested are male, around 75% of those prosecuted are male and 95% of people who go to prison are male, meaning women only make up 5% of the total prison population,” writes ReviseSociology. Moreover, whites are more likely to be incarcerated than are Asian-descent Americans. But do the social engineers propose to do anything about these disparities? Do they even mention them?
This different treatment of outcome differences reveals a truth, too: Race hustlers such as the California bill authors are not actually responding to prejudice. They are driven by it.
