Excellent Op-Ed piece in the Boston Globe on August 5th by Jeff Jacoby. He takes a stab at report called, "No Exit: The Expanding Use of Life Sentences in America" by a group called the Sentencing Project. The following is an excerpt from the editorial challenging some of the statistics and facts used to corroborate the Project's argument to abolish life sentences and the death penalty.
[Nowhere in “No Exit’’ is there any breakdown of the crimes that led to the 140,000 life sentences now being served. Yet the report devotes almost obsessive attention (including five statistical tables) to the alleged racial disparity those sentences reflect. About 48 percent of lifers are black, 33 percent are white, and 14 percent are Hispanic. “These figures are consistent with a larger pattern in the criminal justice system,’’ the report notes, “in which African Americans are represented at an increasingly disproportionate rate across the continuum from arrest through incarceration.’’
Yet the report mentions only in passing another striking disparity: Nearly 97 percent of inmates serving life terms are men. If it is noteworthy that blacks, who account for 12 percent of the general population, make up 48 percent of lifers, shouldn’t it be even more significant that men, who comprise less than half the population at large, represent nearly all those sentenced to life?
The explanation, of course, is that men commit the vast majority of serious crime; that fact, not sexism, explains the disproportionate incarceration rate.
Likewise the racial disparity: Though blacks account for just one-eighth of the US population, they are six times more likely than whites to be murdered, and seven times more likely to commit murder. That hard fact, not racism, explains the high proportion of lifers who are black. But such inconvenient facts appear nowhere in the Sentencing Project’s report. “No Exit’’ brims over with information and statistics - but only those that reinforce its sponsor’s preconceived views.]
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