Liberals like to obsess over how many people America incarcerates. They say that the number of inmates is simply “too high” or “excessive” without acknowledging the benefits of prison—benefits that accrue especially to the most likely crime victims: poor blacks. The relevant issue is not how many people we imprison per se but whether our higher arrests and conviction rates and longer prison terms affect behavior, wrote John Lott:
Many blacks have their lives disrupted by the criminal justice system, but the lives and property of many blacks are also protected by that same system. . . . Blacks overwhelmingly commit crime against other blacks. For example, in 2007, 90.2 percent of black murder victims were murdered by blacks. To go even further, poor blacks commit crime against poor blacks. Is it less racist to care about the victims or the criminals?”25
The reality is that locking up lawbreakers has worked better than going easy on them, and has worked best for law-abiding black people. After incarceration rates began to rise in the 1980s, crime plummeted. “The rate of reported crimes in the United States dropped each year after 1991 for nine years in a row, the longest decline ever recorded,” wrote Franklin Zimring, a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. “And crime dropped all over the United States—in every region, in the country as well as the city, in poor neighborhoods as well as rich neighborhoods. By the start of the twenty-first century, most serious crime rates had dropped by more than 35%.”26
The homicide figures are particularly noteworthy. Between 1964 and 1974 the homicide rate more than doubled, and in the late 1980s was at 1974 levels. Then in the 1990s it fell consistently. “Even with more than 2,800 killings from the attack on September 11, 2001, the homicide rate that year was more than 30% lower than the periodic peak rates that were the top portions of the 20-year cycle that began in the mid-1970s,”27 wrote Zimring. According to the Justice Department, the 1990s also saw declines of between 23 percent and 44 percent in rape, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, auto theft, and larceny. Again, the benefits of less crime are not spread evenly throughout the population. Zimring explained:
The crime decline was the only public benefit of the 1990s whereby the poor and disadvantaged received more direct benefits than those with wealth. Because violent crime is a tax of which the poor pay much more, general crime declines also benefit the poor, as likely victims, most intensely. And impoverished minority males in big cities also benefited from less risk of both victimization and offense.28
The professor added that the sharp decline in crime that big cities like New York, Dallas, Baltimore, Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Philadelphia experienced in the 1990s “could not have happened if crime was an inherent byproduct of urban disadvantage.”29
For all the talk on the left that unemployment drives crime, the recent recession has not reversed trends. Between 2008 and 2010 the jobless rate doubled to about 10 percent, yet “the property-crime rate, far from spiking, fell significantly,” according to the Wall Street Journal.
For 2009, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported an 8% drop in the nationwide robbery rate and a 17% reduction in the auto-theft rate from the previous year. Big-city reports show the same thing. Between 2008 and 2010, New York City experienced a 4% decline in the robbery rate and a 10% fall in the burglary rate. Boston, Chicago and Los Angeles witnessed similar declines.30
Factors other than incarceration rates can impact lawbreaking, of course. Criminologists agree that, for instance, the age structure of the population also matters, since young people commit more crimes. But there is no doubt that putting more people in prison for longer periods of time has contributed significantly to lowering crime rates in the United States. There is also no doubt that proactive policing and tough-on-crime policies that the left derides have led to fewer black deaths. In 2013 a federal judge in New York City declared the police department’s use of stop and frisk unconstitutional, and appointed a monitor to reform the practice. The move was supported by Attorney General Holder. “To be clear, I’m not ordering an end to the practice of stop and frisk,” wrote the judge, allowing that the Supreme Court has found the practice permissible. “The purpose of the remedies addressed in this opinion is to ensure that the practice is carried out in a manner that protects the rights and liberties of all New Yorkers, while still providing much-needed police protection.” For the judge, however, as well as the ACLU, the NAACP, the Obama administration, and others on the left who cheered the ruling, the measure of whether a police stop is permissible is whether it comports with population data, not crime data. The judge didn’t like the fact that blacks were stopped more often than whites and Asians. During the trial, police testified that they stopped people when they witnessed suspicious behavior and suspected criminal activity. They said that the disproportionate number of stops in black neighborhoods reflected the amount of crime in those neighborhoods, not anti-black bias. The judge was unpersuaded, ruling that police were conducting stops in a “racially discriminatory manner” that amounted to “indirect racial profiling.”
It did not matter to critics that police cited stop and frisk as an important crime-fighting tool or that crime rates bore this out. Beginning in the 1960s, New York’s murder rate rose steadily, peaking at 2,245 deaths in 1990. By 2012 the number had dropped to 419, a forty-year low. Former mayors Rudy Giuliani and Michael Bloomberg and police commissioner Ray Kelly credited stop and frisk and other kinds of proactive policing as a major reason for the decline. Again, the biggest beneficiaries of this trend were blacks, who comprised 60 percent of murder victims in the Big Apple in 2012. “No police department in the country has come close to achieving what the NYPD has,” wrote Heather Mac Donald. “New York’s crime drop has been twice as deep and has lasted twice as long as the national average since the early 1990s. Today, 10,000 minority males are alive who would have been killed by now had New York’s homicide rate remained at its early-1990s levels.”31 To the extent that soft-on-crime rulings like this result in less effective policing, blacks will suffer most.
The black civil rights leadership is fully aware that black criminality is, at root, a black problem that needs to be addressed by black people reassessing black behavior and cultural attitudes. But the civil rights movement has become an industry, and that industry has no vested interests in realistic assessments of black pathology. The NAACP responded to the Zimmerman verdict by announcing a series of national legislative initiatives. Ben Jealous, the head of the group at the time, said its goal was to “end racial profiling, repeal stand your ground laws, form effective civil complaint review boards to provide oversight of police misconduct, improve training for community watch groups, mandate law enforcement to collect data on homicide cases involving non-whites, and address the school to prison pipeline.”32 The NAACP, in other words, is way more interested in keeping whites on their toes than in addressing self-destructive black habits.
“The purpose of today’s civil-rights establishment is not to seek justice, but to seek power for blacks in American life based on the presumption that they are still, in a thousand subtle ways, victimized by white racism,” wrote Shelby Steele of the Hoover Institution in the aftermath of the Zimmerman verdict.
The civil-rights leadership rallied to Trayvon’s cause (and not to the cause of those hundreds of black kids slain in America’s inner cities this very year) to keep alive a certain cultural “truth” that is the sole source of the leadership’s dwindling power. Put bluntly, this leadership rather easily tolerates black kids killing other black kids. But it cannot abide a white person (and Mr. Zimmerman, with his Hispanic background, was pushed into a white identity by the media over his objections) getting away with killing a black person without undermining the leadership’s very reason for being.33
In the days following the Zimmerman verdict, Bill O’Reilly used his Fox News program to call attention to “the disintegration of the African America family,” which he identified as the ultimate source of “so much violence and
chaos” in black communities. So long as 73 percent of black children are born to single mothers, said O’Reilly, blacks will find themselves overrepresented among delinquents. To his credit, Don Lemon, the black host of a program on CNN, applauded O’Reilly’s remarks, and then added that O’Reilly “didn’t go far enough.” Lemon went on to make five simple suggestions for black self-improvement: pull up your pants, finish high school, stop using the n-word, take better care of your communities, and stop having children out of wedlock. The NAACP’s agenda is about deflecting blame away from blacks and maintaining the relevance of the NAACP. Lemon’s agenda is about personal responsibility. The social science, of course, overwhelmingly supports what both O’Reilly and Lemon are saying, even though many liberals want to ignore it and attack the messengers.
“The most critical factor affecting the prospect that a male youth will encounter the criminal justice system is the presence of his father in the home,” concluded William Comanor and Llad Phillips after examining data from a national longitudinal study of young people. Black boys without a father were 68 percent more likely to be incarcerated than those with a father. James Q. Wilson put an even finer point on what’s at stake:
If crime is to a significant degree caused by weak character; if weak character is more likely among the children of unmarried mothers; if there are no fathers who will help raise their children, acquire jobs, and protect their neighborhoods; if boys become young men with no preparation for work; if school achievement is regarded as a sign of having “sold out” to a dominant white culture; if powerful gangs replace weak families—if all these things are true, then the chances of reducing by plan and in the near future the crime rate of low-income blacks are slim.34
The stark racial differences in crime rates undoubtedly impact black-white relations in America. So long as they persist, young black men will make people nervous. Discussions about the problem can be useful if they are honest, which is rare. Liberals don’t help matters by making excuses for counterproductive behavior. Nor does the media by shying away from reporting the truth.
04
MANDATING UNEMPLOYMENT
The AFL-CIO is the nation’s largest labor organization. A federation of fifty-six national and international unions representing more than twelve million workers, it was formed in 1955 when the American Federation of Labor joined with the Congress of Industrial Organizations. Since it typically backs Democratic presidential candidates, no one was especially surprised by the group’s official endorsement of Barack Obama on June 26, 2008. What did cause something of a stir, however, was a speech given five days later at a steelworkers’ convention in Las Vegas by the AFL-CIO’s secretary-treasurer, Richard Trumka, who urged members not to stay home on Election Day just because Obama is black.
In his address, which later was posted on YouTube and garnered more than a half-million views (that’s nothing if you’re Beyoncé, but nothing to sneeze at if you’re a gruff, middle-aged union boss), Trumka told of visiting his hometown of Nemacolin, Pennsylvania, just before the state’s Democratic primary election and running into an elderly woman he had known as a child. When he asked the woman which candidate she was supporting, she said Hillary Clinton. Trumka asked her why, and the woman, after some coaxing, eventually said that it was due to Obama’s race. “There’s a lot of folks out there just like that woman, and a lot of them are good union people,” says Trumka in the video, assuring everyone that dues-paying bigots are welcome in the labor movement. “They just can’t get past the idea that there is something wrong with voting for a black man. Well, those of us who know better can’t afford to sit silently or look the other way while it’s happening.”
“There is no evil that has inflicted more pain and more suffering than racism,” continues Trumka, who would become president of the AFL-CIO the following year. “And it’s something that we in the labor movement have a very, very special responsibility to challenge.”
Watching the video, I perked up at this point, curious where Trumka might be headed. Union leaders may be dismayed by remnants of overt racism in the rank and file, but it’s hardly surprising, given the history of the American labor movement. As Paul Moreno, the author of Black Americans and Organized Labor, noted, “Organized labor was largely hostile to the antislavery movement, and most abolitionists opposed unions.” Moreno wrote that “white workers feared competition from emancipated slaves, and white workers in the North especially feared an influx of southern freedmen.”1
After the Civil War black leaders continued to be skeptical of unions. In his 1874 essay “The Folly, Tyranny, and Wickedness of Labor Unions,” Frederick Douglass argued that there was “abundant proof almost every day of their mischievous influence upon every industrial interest in the country.” W. E. B. Du Bois called trade unions “the greatest enemy of the black working man.” Booker T. Washington, who was born a slave and opposed unions his entire life, wrote in the Atlantic Monthly in 1913 that “the average Negro who comes to town does not understand the necessity or advantage of a labor organization which stands between him and his employer and aims apparently to make a monopoly of the opportunity for labor.”
It was Washington’s view that for all of the suffering endured under slavery, that institution had left blacks with many of the skills necessary to rise economically—“not only as farmers but as carpenters, blacksmiths, wheelwrights, brick masons, engineers”—if only unions would let them. T. Thomas Fortune, a leading black journalist and Washington confidant, expressed a similar sentiment in a 1903 essay. “In the skilled trades, at the close of the War of the Rebellion, most of the work was done by Negroes educated as artisans in the hard school of slavery,” wrote Fortune, who like Washington was born a slave. “But there has been a steady decline in the number of such laborers, not because of lack of skill, but because trade unionism has gradually taken possession of such employments in the South, and will not allow the Negro to work alongside of the white man. And this is the rule of the trade unions in all parts of the country.”
Economist Ray Marshall, President Jimmy Carter’s pro-union labor secretary, made a name for himself in academia by documenting how labor unions have discriminated against blacks. In his 1967 book, The Negro Worker, which includes a chapter titled “The Racial Practices of National and Local Unions,” Marshall wrote that “in 1930 there were at least 26 national unions which barred Negroes from membership by formal means,” and ten of them were AFL affiliates. After the Supreme Court’s 1954 school desegregation ruling, anti-integrationist unions formed, and actively recruited members of the Ku Klux Klan. Official policies toward black workers began to change when the AFL merged with the CIO, which was more committed to racial equality, but Marshall cautioned:
The decline in formal exclusion by international unions does not mean that discrimination has declined, because local affiliates of these unions, as well as others which never had formal race bars, exclude Negroes by a number of informal means. These include agreements not to sponsor Negroes for membership; refusal to admit Negroes into apprenticeship programs or to accept their applications; general “understandings” to vote against Negroes if they are proposed . . . [and] refusal of journeyman status to Negroes by means of examinations which either are not given to whites or are rigged so that Negroes cannot pass them.2
This history is not well known today. And unlike their predecessors, the contemporary black elite tend to argue that the interests of Big Labor and the black underclass are more or less aligned. Labor unions give generously to black organizations like the NAACP, the National Urban League, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and Al Sharpton’s National Action Network. In return, black leaders parrot the union line. But when Trumka told his audience that the labor movement has a “special responsibility” to challenge racism, I thought for a moment that he was about to pay some lip service to this ugly past.
Silly me.
It turned out that the reason Big Labor has a unique obligation to confront rac
ism has nothing at all to do with the movement’s own history of discrimination. Rather, it’s because unions “know, better than anyone else, how racism is used to divide working people,” Trumka said. “We’ve seen how companies set worker against worker. They throw white workers a few crumbs. They discriminate against black workers or Latino workers. And we all—we all—end up losing.” In Trumka’s telling, the labor movement has been a force for racial equality, and the real enemy of blacks is corporate America. As for that Hillary Clinton supporter he encountered? “I don’t think we ought to be out there pointing fingers and calling them racists,” he said. “Instead we need to educate them.”
Trumka did not educate his audience that day with any examples of how corporate racism has been more detrimental to blacks than the union variety, maybe because there is so little evidence pointing in that direction. Yet there is plenty of evidence that many public policies supported by the AFL-CIO and other labor groups today leave the black underclass worse off. The problem is not that today’s labor leaders are motivated by racial animus. Rather, it’s that so much of what they advocate in the name of expanding the middle class is in practice preventing many blacks from joining its ranks.
Minimum-wage laws, which determine the lowest price for labor that an employer may pay, are one of the more obvious examples of this phenomenon. But to understand why these laws make it harder for blacks to find jobs, it first helps to look at how minimum-wage laws impact labor markets in general. And it turns out that economists, a famously argumentative lot, tend to agree that minimum-wage laws destroy jobs. In fact, polls have shown that more than 90 percent of professional economists contend that increasing the minimum wage lowers employment for minimum-wage workers. Even highly respected economists such as David Card and Alan Krueger, who are skeptical of the consensus view, concede that the minimum-wage hypothesis “is one of the clearest and most widely appreciated in the field of economics.”3 Why? Because a basic tenet of economics is that a rise in the cost of something tends to lower demand for it. Put another way, an artificial increase in the price of something causes less of it to be purchased. When that something is the price of labor, the result is a labor surplus, also known as unemployment. “It’s simple,” wrote Gary Becker, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1992, “hike the minimum wage and you put people out of work.”4
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