Counting on Bill Bennett

Former Secretary of Education William Bennett created a stir with his “hypothetical” assertion that if the U.S. really wanted to lower the crime rate, it could abort all Black babies. His attendant disclaimers about how immoral that would be notwithstanding, one could argue that had any group been aborted – including those that make stupid statements – presumably, the crime rate would decrease. But make no mistake about it: Bennett didn’t by chance select African-Americans. He was playing into an old stereotype that Blacks are more prone to violence than Whites.

Let’s examine what the numbers really say. According to the FBI, Whites are arrested for crime at more than twice the rate of Blacks, 6.7 million to 2.6 million in 2003. In other words, Whites represented 70.6 percent of those arrested in 2003 (60.5 percent of violent crimes). By contrast, Blacks represented 27 percent of all arrests and 37.2 percent of people arrested for committing a violent crime.

But the deeper an African-American goes into the U.S. criminal justice system, the greater the racial disparity. For example, according to the National Criminal Justice Commission, African-Americans are 12 percent of the population, 13 percent of all monthly drug users yet represent 74 percent of all those sentenced to prison for drug possession. The issue is one of selective prosecutions.

If Bennett was interested in, say, getting rid of mass murderers, he might have proposed -- ”hypothetically,” of course – that all White males be aborted. Then, we would not have had Charles Manson, the Boston Strangler (Albert De Salvo), Timothy McVeigh, Ted Bundy, the Son of Sam (David Berkowitz), the Unabomber (Ted Kaczynski), the University of Texas Sniper (Charles Whitman), Jeffrey Dahmer or John Wayne Gacy. Unlike Bennett’s pronouncement, we know the crime rate would drop were this to have happened.