It's all Ratio

The Ragister's headline today was serious...

Iowa's black-white prisoner ratio is the highest in the nation.

How can that be changed?

Just brainstorming here, but how about...

Commit Less Crime!

And the scientific community is united in that fact.

It should come as no surprise that Ako Abdul-Samad or Wayne Ford, two blacks who represent Des Moines in the Iowa House of Representatives don't agree with my solution.

Abdul-Samad thinks...

the biggest areas to be addressed were the lack of availability of drug treatment through the courts, lack of job opportunities for minority youth, and racist sentencing practices in the state justice system.

Ironic considering his real (?) job, at $70,000 + per year, is running Creative Visions...

The purpose and mission of the agency is to engage youth and young adults in creating a safer community for the purpose of attracting quality jobs and encouraging entrepreneurial activity in the greater Des Moines community.

Ford would like to see existing agencies work together more to help convicts transition out of the corrections system, get jobs and build more productive lives.

Hello Wayne that doesn't address the ratio issue.

Personally, I think the black community needs to clean its own house before it points fingers at others.

I'm weary of the Blame Whitey and Kill Whitey attitudes because that's the easy way out.

Bill Cosby and Juan Williams agree and get labeled as Uncle Tom's.

Cosby chastises the African-American community for its rates of juvenile delinquency, its parenting, the coarse language of its youth. You can do better, he tells his fellow blacks. Don't let yourself be victims, and especially don't let the poorest in the community let themselves be victims.

Williams writes...

With 50 percent of Hispanic children and nearly 70 percent of black children born to single women today these young people too often come from fractured families where there is little time for parenting. Their search for identity and a sense of direction is undermined by a twisted popular culture that focuses on the “bling-bling” of fast money associated with famous basketball players, rap artists, drug dealers and the idea that women are at their best when flaunting their sexuality and having babies…

Last December I blogged on a story about the U.S. having the most prisoners in the world and this view rings true in this story too!

Kent Scheidegger, legal director of the Criminal Justice Legal Foundation in California, said the high prison numbers represented a proper response to the crime problem in the United States. Locking up more criminals has contributed to lower crime rates, he said.

"The hand-wringing over the incarceration rate is missing the mark," he said.

Scheidegger said the high prison population reflected cultural differences, with the United States having far higher crimes rates than European nations or Japan. "We have more crime. More crime gets you more prisoners."

PS: The cartoon pictured ran in the Hartford Courant in July 2003.