Examining your assumptions...

[denny]

helenic has been doing some reading up for a forthcoming Police State UK article about the DNA database. She's been posting highlights into an IRC channel we're both in. I am ashamed to say that I was taken completely by surprise by this paragraph:

In spite of the over-representation of black people in the CJS, there is evidence to suggest that black people have lower offending rates than white people: 42% of white people commit an offence in their lifetime, compared with 28% of black people; 21% of white people commit a serious offence in their lifetime, compared with 14% of black people.

I had always assumed that the reason the criminal justice system is heavily biased against young black guys is that young black guys are slightly more likely to be involved in crime - i.e I assumed it was an injustice of scale only. I am really ashamed of myself for never having found out what the reality was behind that institutional bias - not only is there not a positive correlation, there is in fact a substantial negative correlation. Nobody taught me that in cultural conditioning school, huh?

Posted to remind myself that I should examine my assumptions more often, and also FYI in case you had the same assumption.

Comments

[merrythebard]

Good grief, yes, I had that same assumption too. I thought that young black guys had good solid economic reasons for being more likely to commit crimes, but I still thought that there was a positive correlation.

Thank you very much for sharing this. Examining assumptions = good, and I too should do it more!

[oedipamaas49.livejournal.com]

Thanks for posting this; I had no idea. My assumptions would have been similar to yours; certainly I would never have expected such an immense gap in the crime rate.

I'd ask for sources, but I guess I should wait until Helen posts her article.

[zotz]

I'd be surprised, simply because you're proportionately more likely to be poor if you're black, and poverty's a known issue here. Those figures look to come from the Runnymede Trust, but where did they get them from? The paper I see doesn't cite any source for them.

Ah. It seems to come from the Offending, Crime and Justice Survey. I'll have a look.

[denny]

I'm wondering if the disjunction lies in the difference between %age of criminals and %age of crimes commited - i.e. higher incidence of repeat offenders.

[denny]

No great secret :) As zotz identifies, we got it from the Runnymede Trust document here: http://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/policyResponses/KeepingTheRightPeopleOnTheDNADatabase.pdf

[zotz]

Possibly.

The thing that jumps out at me, though, is that it's a self-report survey. Really the figures are for the numbers of people prepared to tell interviewers of past offences, and they do note that the response rate was lower (about 50% rather than about 75%) for the black group. It's difficult to say for sure that the extra nonresponders would have made a difference, but it's possible.

Notably, 3% of the black group report having been arrested in the previous year, as opposed to 2% of the white group, but other Home Office figures on arrest rates state that if you're black you're three times as likely to be arrested. The figures for ever having been arrested don't match what I'd expect from other studies either.

[(Anonymous)]

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