Wonderful divalog. The nice liberal professor lady and a real, fact based conservative journalist who actually has some social science knowledge.
I think their conversation would be more interesting and mutually productive if there were more brachia and less polite exchange of 3 minute speeches. Still, they reply quite directly to one another’s points.
Vesla, an assistant professor at Virginia, argues that putting all these black dudes in jail is turing them off politics and depriving the revolution of some of its otherwise most faithful voters.
She refers to all this evidence that blacks are being locked up in spite of not committing a lot of crimes, or that their incarceration rates are not explained by their higher propensity to commit crimes. She says that most people have committed crimes. She makes the point that she has committed crimes. therefore, there is no reason to be jail’in on black folks. heather comes back with numbers that blacks are 81 times more likely to get shot and they get shot overwhelmingly by other blacks. How could both of these things be true? I think that Vesla shades a bit. She says “has committed crimes.” That means that she is treating the noun criminal to mean anyone who has committed a crime and by that definition the differences between blacks and white are probably much less than heather’s evidence, which counts each crime as the unit of analysis.
They get into the causes of crime and Heather points out that blacks have a higher rate of OWW. All the time she is going on about the Vesla has a little smile on her lips like she is about to come out devastating question. The question turns out to be “and how much do you think that higher black incarceration rates has to do with these out of wedlock
If I thought that investment in government programs to end poverty would actually work to reduce poverty and lower crime I think that the Great Society programs would be cheap at the price. I think they would have been cheap at twice or maybe even 10 times the price. I just don’t think that.
It is starting to get better as Vesla gets pissed off about halfway. The question of victims leads her to saying that conservatives don’t really care about victims because they are not willing to spend more on social programs.
You don’t tell these people that have been victims of Jim Crow and tell them to lift themselves up. “Shut up and take your $100 a week job and pass on the $5000 drug dealing job. I am tired of that conversation.” She needs to have the conversation with more interesting conservatives, or at least some more empirical economists. Steve Levitt’s article, “If Drug Dealing Pays So Well Why do So Many Drug Dealers Live With Their Mothers?”
The McDonald’s job pays a lot better, about $280 a week to start with, and a lot more with EITC and other benefits thrown in.
What if crime was caused by economic depravation? If I lived in a poor neighborhood I would want the criminals locked up. Whatever the cause of crime getting rid of it is a first, necessary step to economic development and political participation.
Vesla says that black males are more often stopped without cause. Isn’t that a necessary consequence of sharing an observable characteristic with a group that commits crime more often? Males in general have a higher likelihood of being wrongly stopped for a criminal investigation.
Vesla says that she has a lot of people that had their first interaction with the police when they were 8. She says that that can’t be explained by cultural factors. But isn’t that exactly what we would blame that on? Are 8 year olds looking out at the job market and saying, “Heck, I am not going to get a job so I think I will….” Isn’t criminality among 8 year olds evidence precisely of a culture of doing stuff that brings attention from the law?
I of course agree with Heather but it really does annoy me how long it takes her to ask a question. I think all of what she says is fair and interesting, but I find myself almost exploding waiting for her to shut up so I can hear the answer. She has an interesting little point asking Vesla why they she doesn’t mind barring felons from carrying guns, won’t that have a “disenfranchising” psychological effect? But she doesn’t get the question out and wait for the answer. She drones on heaping evidence on a point that is already made. It amazing me how people are not really as interested in the answers to their questions as they are in hearing what the other person thinks. Besides, Vesla has a good answer. She doesn’t much trust non-felons to carry guns so she is hardly being inconsistent when she has a rather low threshold for deciding that felons should not have guns.
at 59 minutes Heather finally points out that the majority of people even in poor neighborhoods do not commit crimes.
Vesla asks the correct question, the Rawlsian question, if you were going to be born in a bad neighborhood would you be any more likely to commit crimes. But she gets the question somewhat wrong. If you are going to grow up in one of those bad neighborhoods you are still probably not going to be a criminal and, at least it seems to me, that the rational answer is that, “Yes, I want the criminals around here locked up.” If I were going to be born black in a bad neighborhood I would still want Bratton and Gulianni locking up anybody that spits on the side walk.
Vesla goes back to the 8 year old getting in trouble with the law for dealing drugs on the corner. We need to give them a better story than “you did the crime, you do the crime.”
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