Why the fate of criminals should matter more than the fate of crime victims is a question that went largely unasked, let alone answered, during last week’s bipartisan celebration of past President Obama’s decision to release dozens of individuals from prison and push for looser sentencing guidelines.
If the president is to be believed, it is not the prevalence of thugs that turns black ghettos into living nightmares for residents. Rather, the police, prosecutors and judges who pursue lawbreakers are the bigger cause for concern.
“A growing body of research shows that people of color are more likely to be stopped, frisked, questioned, charged, detained,” said Mr. Obama in his recent address to the NAACP. “What is that doing to our communities? What’s that doing to those children? Our nation is being robbed of men and women who could be workers and taxpayers, could be more actively involved in their children’s lives, could be role models, could be community leaders.”
Higher black incarceration rates reflect higher black crime rates, but like many liberal critics of “mass incarceration” the president would rather focus on the behavior of police and prosecutors, not the behavior of the young black men responsible for so much lawbreaking. Not surprisingly, the poor and working-class blacks who are the primary victims of black criminality tend to have different priorities. In “The New Jim Crow,” Michelle Alexander’s attack on the criminal justice system, the author notes (disapprovingly) that “some black mayors, politicians, and lobbyists—as well as preachers, teachers, barbers and ordinary folk—endorse ‘get tough’ tactics and spend more time chastising the urban poor for their behavior.”
Occasionally, an honest liberal, like the one who taught Mr. Obama at Harvard Law School, will state the obvious. “The most lethal danger facing African Americans in their daily lives,” wrote Prof. Randall Kennedy in these pages 21 years ago, “is not white, racist officials of the state, but private, violent criminals, typically black, who attack those most vulnerable to them without regard for racial identity.”
Mr. Riley, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow and Journal contributor, is the author of “Please Stop Helping Us: How Liberals Make It Harder for Blacks to Succeed” (Encounter Books, 2014).