I'm so glad William Bennett shared one more virtue (race extinction) with all of us immoral, unenlightened folk. I'd like to help him with his argument. Read on...
- It is true that, statistically speaking, blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime, those crimes being measured by the FBI's annual Uniform Crime Reports (UCR).
- It is also true that, as a percentage, more blacks than whites live below the poverty line. Don't think I need a citation to prove that.
- The crimes measured by the UCR are:
a) murder
b) forcible rape
c) robbery
d) aggravated assault
e) burglary
f) larceny-theft
g) motor vehicle theft
h) arson
4. Crimes that are not measured by the UCR are:
a) securities fraud
b) wire fraud
c) mail fraud
d) tax evasion
e) anti-competitive practices
f) large-scale pollution
g) campaign finance law violations
and many other crimes that fall into the white-collar/corporate category.
- Since uniform reporting is unavailable for most (but not all) white-collar crimes (embezzlement does fall under the theft-larceny category), one can only speculate about the prevalence of these crimes, especially since most white-collar offenders never get caught. However, many criminologists have have hypothesized that white-collar crime occurs just as often as other crimes. Some even hypothesize that the richer the person is, the more likely they are to offend in the white-collar crime category.
- What does all this strongly suggest? That people of all income brackets will commit crimes, and the type of crime they commit depends on what they have access to. Tax evasion and security fraud is much easier to pull off if you have an army of accountants and attorneys to protect you. Most poor people won't ever have a chance to commit securities fraud because they will probably never come near securities in their entire life. So how do some poor people try to get ahead? Theft and burglary. How do some rich, greedy people get even richer? Tax evasion, securities fraud, etc.
Very intelligent people have devoted many years of their lives to researching and explaining this subject, so I am in no way claiming to be the final authority on this subject. So for anyone to offer one or two simple cause-and-effect explanations for such a complex subject as crime only demonstrates his or her paucity of understanding of the entire subject.
Life and all its complexities can rarely be distilled to just a few talking points, Billy-boy.