The Free Satpal Campaign website publishes an article entitled Criminal Justice Under The Microscope. Written by the man himself, this is his analysis of what he perceives to be wrong with British justice.
According to Ram:
“Racism within the Criminal Justice System has also been instrumental in criminalizing a disproportionate number of Black people who are in Prison today. Black people constitute 7 per cent of the population at large, as opposed to 18 per cent of the prison population. This reflects the level of bias that exists within the system. Evidence of further discrimination within the Criminal Justice System can be substantiated by analysing the official statistics for stop & searches carried out in the Capital in the year 1994/95; out of the 189,000 searches conducted by the Metropolitan Police 120,000 of them were young Black people...This in itself suggests a concerted systematic attempt at criminalizing Black people solely on the basis of preconceived prejudices which target specific sections of the community.”
The “anti-racist” lobby is fond of churning out these sorts of figures. The dogma of political correctness is based largely on such figures, and the manipulation thereof. As the man said, there are lies, damned lies and statistics, and while figures don’t lie, liars can figure. Like statistics, facts are often misleading or even totally devoid of meaning unless they are placed in the correct context.
Fact: Mr Smith meets regularly for secret discussions with well known criminals. (Innuendo: don’t buy a used car from this man).
Context: Mr Smith is a solicitor advising his clients; their discussions are subject to legal professional privilege.
And so on.
Ram’s assertion that racism, whatever is meant by that nebulous word, is responsible for the apparent disparity between whites and blacks in prison in Britain, is totally meaningless. There could be many explanations for this phenomenon: perhaps black criminals are more stupid than white ones; perhaps blacks are more violent, more dishonest, and so on.
As these possible explanations are also deemed racist, it’s a case of heads they win, tails you lose. But two can play the numbers game.
The Daily Mirror for November 16, 2000 (1) carried a big feature on the death penalty in Texas. At that time, (now President) George W. Bush, an overt advocate of capital punishment, was Governor of the Lone Star State. A staggering one hundred and forty-nine people had been executed since he took office, and the hundred and fiftieth (a man with a mental age of six) was about to be executed, although he was reprieved at the last minute. The Mirror managed to obtain photographs of most of the condemned. A fair number were either black or non-white, but only two were women, and both of these were white. (2)
Of the 6,180 people sentenced to death in the United States between 1976 and April 1998, four hundred and fifty were executed, four hundred and forty-eight of them men. (3)
In January 2001, when Wanda Jean Allen was executed in Oklahoma, she became “the first African-American woman to be executed in the United States since 1954”. The same source reports that “Hitherto, there had been only 44 women executed in the US since 1900”. (4)
According to “anti-racists”, black women are in every sense at the bottom of the barrel, suffering from the twin evils of racism and sexism. Yet using the same logic as Ram (and his ilk), in the United States at any rate, black women are a privileged minority. Perhaps this means that the United States is really controlled by an ultra-secret cabal of black women?
Like the statistics Ram spouts, such figures are meaningless when viewed in isolation and devoid of context. In the first instance, Ram’s figures may or may not be accurate. On what basis were they compiled? What criteria were used for assessing who is black and who is not? Technically a mulatto is half-white, is he classified as black?
Like human beings, crime and crime figures are not homogenous entities. In some localities, villages for example, crime may be all but unknown. Does this mean that people who live in cities are more violent, and if so does this propensity to violence and/or dishonesty have an environmental or a genetic basis?
Ram’s own words give the game away: “out of the 189,000 searches conducted by the Metropolitan Police 120,000 of them were young Black people”.
It is a fair bet that the police stopped and searched a much lower percentage of elderly black women than of young, able-bodied white men. Street crime, which is what stop and search is largely directed at, is mostly a young man’s criminal pastime. It is hardly the fault of the police that a “disproportionate number” of those engaged in this activity are either young or black or both.
Whatever interpretation one places on such figures, it is a fallacy to extrapolate from the general to the particular. Ram is not in prison because of racism, he is serving a life sentence because of the fatal combination of drink, a short temper, and a sharp knife. The overwhelming majority of people of all races don’t engage in street crime, nor do they attack innocuous strangers in Indian restaurants with lethal intent.
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