Front Page Distorts Obama's Message

In an interview published December 10th in the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times, Barack Obama stated that one of his top priorities as president will be to put an end to racial discrimination in the criminal-justice system. This pledge is consistent with his oft-repeated campaign promise to “eliminate disparities in criminal sentencing,” most notably “the disparity between sentencing [for] crack and powder-based cocaine,” which Obama said was “wrong and should be completely eliminated.” At a presidential primary debate in January 2008, Obama asserted that blacks and whites “are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, [and] receive very different sentences…for the same crime.” On another occasion he sounded a similar theme: “We have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from.” Though neither the media nor the McCain campaign dared to challenge any of Obama’s presumably sacrosanct pronouncements about racism in the justice system, the fact remains that every one of those pronouncements was an unadulterated falsehood.

Long ago, the injustices which Obama references certainly existed, particularly in the South. But it hardly seems appropriate for a supposedly forward-looking President—who founded his entire campaign on a platform of “change” —to continue fighting yesteryear’s battles again and again. Simply put, black offenders do not receive stiffer penalties than white offenders for equivalent crimes—not today, and not at any time in recent decades. The most exhaustive, best designed study of this matter—a three-year analysis of more than 11,000 convicted criminals in California—found that the severity of offenders’ sentences depended heavily on such factors as prior criminal records, the seriousness of the crimes, and whether guns were used in the commission of those crimes. Race was found to have no effect whatsoever. In fact the researcher, Joan Petersilia, was forced to admit that these results contradicted conclusions she had drawn from an earlier study—in which she had not taken prior convictions and the use of firearms into account.[1]