Mensch tracht, und Gott lacht

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

When Will It Stop? T.V. Writers and Dumb Statistics

My wife is a big fan of House, M.D., which I agree is an enjoyable program. If memory serves, our own S.T. Karnick gave it a nice review over at NRO.

I was watching this evening when the physician team was treating an African-American death row inmate played by L.L. Cool J. The docs, of course, had to talk about social justice, the death penalty, racism, etc.. Fine with me. One of the docs said he's against it in principle, but is unbothered when the switch gets pulled. Another, a female doc, said she was against it because it is racially motivated. Her statistical claim was that black murderers are ten times more likely than white killers to get the death penalty.

This is where my eyebrows tilted up. Not quite, lassie. As I recall the cases in law school where the question of racism in death penalty sentencing was considered, the race of the killer turned out to be statistically insignificant. Guess what was signifant? The race of the victim! Killers who murder blacks are less likely to get the death penalty than killers who murder whites. Very interesting. So, if there is racism, it is in the fact that killers of African-American victims should theoretically be less deterred than killers of whites.

Television would be more interesting if writers would take the time to do a little research.

For my part, I kind of agreed with what the African-American doctor character said when confronted with the (as I just established, fallacious) racism charge in death penalty sentencing. If that's true, "we just need to kill more white folks." Of course, the show isn't over and he may be dramatically converted by the end of the episode.

20 comments:

Matt Huisman said...

If you're analyzing the decision to put someone on death row, I don't think the first comparison makes much sense. Why would we assume that murder (or crime) was evenly distributed by race?

Wouldn't it make more sense to compare the racial make up of death row inmates against the total population of inmates who've committed murder? I have no idea what the results here are, but if you're looking for sentencing bias I would think this statistic would be more relevant.

Matt Huisman said...

So now that you know the system is hideously biased in two ways do you feel any differently about letting them kill people based on those prejudices?

I agree that the second statistic shows bias, and there may be a number of reasons for that - but does it automatically follow that because leniency is showed in some cases that the whole thing should be thrown out?

The evidence of bias is grounds for addressing the bias within the system. The case against the use of the death penalty would seem to be independent of that issue.

Hunter Baker said...

Matt is right. You can't draw any conclusions about the death penalty based on who is on death row. You would have to look at the universe of people who have committed capital crimes, been tried, and then received death or not. If within that universe you find that black members of the group get death more frequently, then you would have a racism argument.

Tom Van Dyke said...

The death penalty is most often meted out when the victim is a stranger to the murderer. This would help skew the stat.

By brute math, 69% of the strangers a Black person might meet (and kill) are white, which gets us closer to that 80%.

Social science might find the missing 11% statistically significant. I don't. Copkillers get the death penalty often, and perhaps the overall percentage of white officers is a bit higher. We all want more black cops, but the thought of more dead black cops to please the stats doesn't make me any warm & fuzzier.

Matt Huisman said...

Let's put it this way, if everything else was equal do you think any race would statistically kill more people than any other race?

You are asking a different question here than the one of bias among deather row inmates. Hunter followed it up for me nicely.

But you also just indicated that the prison population should match the overall population and when it doesn't the prime suspect is some form of institutional racism (which granted may occur outside the actual justice system).

Unfortunately, it is impossible to avoid a certain degree of institutional oppression. Does that mean we should tolerate excessive levels of this oppression - no. But here's a newsflash, life is not fair - it never will be, it never can be. Some of us are not as smart as others, some are shorter, some have lousy parents and the list goes on. All of these injustices are grounds for understanding, sympathy and compassion - but they don't excuse bad behavior.

The death penalty might be justified in a perfect system, in anything less than that it cannot be because the harm is irreparable.

If execution is a warranted* punishment for a given offense, and you have reasonable grounds for expecting that it will be enforced - then you have no right to complain when it is rightfully administered. If someone else is able to dodge the full penalty of the crime they committed, kudos to them. It has nothing to do with what your understanding of the rules are/were.

* There may be a host of other reasons for objecting to execution.

Kathy Hutchins said...

Hunter, since you're apparently not a complete House addict you may not be applying the proper context. The deliverer of the "ten times more likely" line was Dr. Cameron, whose role in the show is to provide the over-emotional, too-empathetic, psychological basket-case foil to House's Descartes-robot personality. It would have been interesting if Sela Ward, who plays the hospital attorney, had been in on the scene to deliver a counterposing line, but at that point the social justice angle was probably being overplayed anyway.

I thought the entire show did a nice job of illustrating the assumptions we make about who deserves life and why. And this is not the first time this topic has been explored -- in another episode House lies to the transplant committee to get a new heart for a patient who would otherwise be ineligible for the list due to psychiatric problems. I have written before that House is probably the most pro-life show on TV right now, despite the fact that the closest any of the characters comes to explicit faith is Dr. "I Hate Nuns" Chase, the failed Catholic seminarian.

Tom Van Dyke said...

Besides which stating the argument in such a way cannot explain the 3.5x over representation of blacks on death row.


Um, the number of murders committed?

Blacks commit about half the murders in the US, which I make is about 4.2X their population representation. Sorry, these are the numbers glossed over by the anti-death penalty sites you're culling from.

I suppose handing out more death sentences for black-on-black murder would even things up a bit. Seems that blacks are a tad underrepresented on death row.

As for your other objection, which has some merit but is by no means comprehensive---it certainly makes sense to go to another neighborhood to rob and murder.

Just like Tookie Williams did, if you'll recall.

Hunter Baker said...

Tlaloc, you're asking me, all things held equal, whether any particular race would commit the crime of murder more frequently than another race or all other races?

If I understand your question correctly, I suppose you mean that if between races there were no disparities of income, education, family composition, etc., then we would not African-Americans committing a disproportional number of murders.

Given that I believe all of those factors effect the likelihood that a person would commit a crime, then I would say that I would expect equality of education, family solidity, economic achievement, etc. would produce less difference (or even no difference) in homicide rates.

If you would then infer racism from the fact that blacks commit more murders, I would say that is one of the possibilities. My guess is that the higher crime rates among African-Americans are more clearly pronounced after the War on Poverty than before. I suspect that AFDC and other programs freed many men (including a disproportionate amount of African-American men) from typical family obligations and led them to engage in less productive endeavors.

I think that if we had followed the benign neglect advice of former Senator Moynihan with regard to the race problem, we would be significantly farther along. Government support of almost anything, including religion and non-parenting, usually has bad effects.

Hunter Baker said...

T, that is not a very convincing response, especially from an anarchist. The breakdown of the black family post the war on poverty is well-documented and is now a virtual truism. If you don't think that has an impact on crime rates, then you haven't picked up a sociology journal in, well, forever. Doesn't matter the color, kids from broken (or never formed) homes have a far higher chance of committing crimes. It doesn't take a genius to know the relationship here is causal rather than mere covariation.

Hunter Baker said...

I'm making the war on poverty connection with regard to the breakup of black families and our query about the death penalty. I think it is impossible to argue (as you seem to be) that the phenomenon of the fatherless black family did not occur in direct response to the existence of AFDC, food stamps, etc.

The fact that white families (indeed, just about all families other than Asian-American families) have eventually also fallen prey to divorce, etc., is probably attributable to the later occurrence of mass liberalization of divorce laws and changes in cultural attitudes.

And to reiterate, we know that broken-up and/or fatherless families are susceptible to a much higher rate of social pathology.

Hunter Baker said...

I agree with your points about class, but you are willfully blind about the family stuff.

On the point about family breakdown, I argued black family breakup began in earnest with the war on poverty. It's a fact. You can complain. You can say, show me, show me. But it's just true. This point is so well-accepted I simply refuse to put in the time to convince you. Causation is simple. You can fail to be a father and your wife and kids won't starve. Unsurprisingly, men, who have tended to want to abandon their families in the absence of major social pressure, started bolting again. It hit black families first, but we would observe the same tendencies in the large white welfare community, too.

As far as saying welfare did blacks in, but social trends got the white family, I think you could be a bit more charitable to my position. I actually indicated that in both cases, large scale changes in public policy were at issue. The War on Poverty and liberalization of divorce laws.

Tom Van Dyke said...

"Blacks commit about half the murders in the US"

Correction:
Blackas are ARRESTED for half the murders in the US. That's a very different thing.


Perhaps. But since the vast majority of crimes are intraracial, the truth of the first statement is proved by victimization figures, with which you are apparently unacquainted. The legal system certainly has a racist dimension, but it knows how to count dead bodies.

I admit it takes more work to find the stats---we as a nation are skittish about the cold hard facts about the tragedy of black crime.

But you have asserted a causality (racism) based on a very crude set of correlative statistics. The scientific-minded are well aware correlation does not equal causality.


(I do heartily agree that corporate criminals who have caused corporeal harm either by action or inaction should be exposed to far harsher criminal penalties. It is a failing of current law that such things are relegated to civil court where the exchange of money is the only justice.)

Hunter Baker said...

T, you'd probably have to some research more formidable than google to get the facts on this one. The basic assertion was agreed on by Clinton and Gore advisers, Elaine Kamarck and William Galston, so I don't think I'm out on a limb.

Tom Van Dyke said...

"But since the vast majority of crimes are intraracial, the truth of the first statement is proved by victimization figures, with which you are apparently unacquainted."

By all means present them.


OK.

S. T. Karnick said...

Gee, Tom, it's interesting that you had to go all the way to the highly obscure U.S. Department of Justice to find these statistics. Little wonder that someone arguing the opposite point could remain ignorant of them.

Hunter Baker said...

This is an interesting point. I have heard that defense lawyers are sometimes surprised by the vehemence of supposedly liberal urban African-Americans in their desire for the death penalty. Tom's figures explain why quite well.

Tom Van Dyke said...

The DOJ figures contradict far more than your misreading of "intraracial."

Our gentle readers will have observed that Blacks unfortunately do commit (over) half the murders in the US, and at 41%, are actually underrepresnted on death row.

Charges of racism are supported only by a sophistic jiggling of the figures.

Matt Huisman said...

Here's an 'arrested for' data source - still 50%.

Put up a better source or drop this one, Tlaloc. This argument looks like a loser.

Tom Van Dyke said...

As Bernard Goldberg wrote in another context, Mr. Huisman, it's like arguing with a taco.

Your counterarguments, no matter how authoritative (see above), will be ignored and the same mistatements of fact will be restated. I do hope that folks around here stop giving him the time of day. He has squandered it.

Matt Huisman said...

You are missing the point Matt.

OK. So then you'll concede that the death penalty is not prejudicially administered to convicted murderers (as many liberals claim).

It has nothing to do with whether you commit the crimes, it has to do with whether the system will punish you for them.

So here you have two arguments:
1) Blacks don't get adequate legal representation.
2) Certain crimes (WR Grace-like offenses) carry different penalties based on prejudices.

In the first scenario, what does the system owe its members? The system owes them the opportunity to be innocent until proven guilty. In other words, it should be extremely likely that innocent men go free. However, this does not mean that we owe everyone the same opportunity to 'beat' the system. That territory belongs to the rich and/or the smart.

The second argument you made has received some sympathy around here (primarily in the form of toughening up existing weaker penalties). Your argument is that the system 'picks' on one type of criminal over another, and that fairness demands that we treat offenders equally. I'm all for fairness (within reason), but why does it necessarily mean that the sentence should be reduced? Why shouldn't we just escalate the penalty on the other offense?

The reality for offenders is that there's no merit in crying over the penalty if it is relatively proportional to the offense and is reasonably understood to be enforced. Fairness applies to the victims just as much as it does to the offenders.