HABITUAL OFFENDERS

Whether the habitual-offender sentencing law is racially biased is one of
those questions that frustrate simple yes or no answers.

For most people, the answer says more about their personal perspective than
it does about the question and its correct answer. Two points are worth
some public dialogue.

First, the charge that sentencing for drug violations is racially biased
deserves some attention. The punishment for crack offenses seems harsher
than for other cocaine violations, and crack has been the drug of choice
for many of those blacks who are involved in drugs.

Is that simple racial bias? If that question asks whether prosecutors
intentionally target blacks for habitual-offender sentencing, the answer is
surely no. How blacks gain habitual-offender status so often is a complex
socioeconomic question with no easy, one-word answer.

Forsyth County District Attorney Tom Keith puts it this way: "It is not a
big conspiracy to put black people in prison. If you are a professional
criminal, we are going to put a stop to it. We are going to protect the
black community."

Noble sentiments, and not without considerable truth. But if you were to
look behind the raw data on prosecution and incarceration, you could still
make a strong case that racial bias was a root cause of the
disproportionate percentage of blacks in prison. That's point No. 2.

Yes, the causes are social and economic. Blacks in prison tend to come from
lower-income families. Those families may have only one parent living at
home. Education may be undervalued. Jobs are hard to find. But why do these
conditions so often characterize neighborhoods whose populations are
largely black?

Despite long, hard and sincere efforts to provide equal opportunity to all
Americans, and recognizing many substantial achievements, inequality
remains. But the question is not whether inequality is a result of racial
bias. That's a question that kindles heat rather than shedding light. It's
a question whose answer is more apt to nourish victims than new successes.

The fix for this unequal representation of blacks in the criminal-justice
system must occur before, not after, the system is entered. The trick is to
identify the young people most likely to succumb to the temptations of a
life of crime and to show them in compelling detail that options do exist,
that the criminal life is too often short and violent, that hope is not
just for other people.

The goal of limiting the number of people who run afoul of the
criminal-justice system ought to be attracting more effort, time and money
than it appears to be doing. Doing so is cost effective.

What works has been tested and is well known by those who work in social
services. The chance that someone will become a productive member of
society decreases dramatically, once the justice system is entered. This is
not that hard.

The problem, of course, is that you can't prove a negative. If someone
stays out of trouble, how can you know that social programs were
responsible, except statistically? Meanwhile, disillusioned, tough young
people are terrorizing neighborhoods and need the attention of law enforcement.

What seems an inescapable conclusion from all this is that we need not so
much to answer the question of whether racial bias contributes to the
disproportionate number of blacks treated as habitual offenders. Rather we
should seek, by keeping our children out of the system, to make the
question irrelevant.