That’s right, folks, in Alabama the Ku Klux Klan, led by white-robed Republican judges, have instituted a reign of terror against the state’s beaten-down blacks. And just in case readers missed the racist “theme” that should make Alabama a pariah state, Nason lays it on with the loaded comment that

Long after the world watched Martin Luther King make Alabama the decisive battleground in the war against segregation, the same old themes dominate. Only now, instead of going to the back of the bus, the blacks go to jail.

Yep, racist Republican judges are imprisoning men purely on the basis of race. His proof: 60 per cent of prisoners are black even though blacks “are just 26 per cent of Alabama’s population”. To paraphrase the great Disraeli: There are lies, damn lies –– and journalists. Setting out to paint as racist a picture as he can, Nason tells us that

Over the past 25 years, prisoner numbers have more than quadrupled while Alabama’s population has increased by just 20 per cent. In four of the past five years, Alabama’s incarceration rate has been in the top five states.

And why? Because of a

zero-tolerance legislation so draconian that it allows life without parole for non-violent offenders. With only a couple of wrong moves, small-time criminals can find themselves branded habitual offenders and be sent down the river for stretches of 10 years and more.

There you have it, Alabama’s prisons are bursting with blacks who have been given heavy sentences for minor offences –– and all because of their race. What can I say, other than Nason is a liar. Alabama’s Habitual Felony Offender Act, as it is called, was passed in 1977 and is not the draconian legislation that Nason would have us believe. An offender who is sentenced under this law must already have been convicted of three felonies on three separate occasions. He then has to be convicted of a fourth felony, and it must be Class A, before the statutory provision kicks in.

Assume, for example, that a habitual offender with three separate felony convictions was caught by the police stealing fittings from an unoccupied house. For him to fall under the Act he would have to be armed, which would make it a Class A offence. Therefore, irrespective of Nason’s nasty insinuations and absurd assertion that the law is based on zero-tolerance legislation, one has to be a serious and habitual offender to receive a particularly heavy sentence. In other words, offenders have to be professional criminals.

Mr Nason, however, has a peculiar idea of what constitutes habitual. Turning logic on its head, he argued that “small-time criminals can find themselves branded habitual offenders” by the law, despite the fact that it is their habitual lawbreaking that brings them into conflict with the law.

Intent on demonstrating his powers of reasoning, Nason goes on to assert (like a good many of his colleagues, he does a lot of asserting) that the Habitual Felony Offender Act brings about “social breakdown” and “will further entrench a poor, black criminal class…” According to this perverse logic we mustn’t be too hard on professional criminals because it will create a “black criminal class”.

(Note the Freudian slip: he didn’t say criminal class but “black criminal class”. Dear oh dear, it looks like his racist slip is showing. Could it be that our ever so liberal Mr Nason secretly harbours the belief that blacks must be singled out for special treatment because he thinks they cannot measure up to the white man’s inherently high moral standards?)

Nason not only has trouble with logic, he also appears to find difficulty in dealing with simple statistics. Black males makeup about 70 per cent of the prison population even though they are only 12 per cent of the general population. This means that in Alabama the ratio of black prisoners to the non-black population is 1.23 while for the country it is 1.26. These ratios do not suggest that Alabama is so racist after all. Unless you think the US is a racist nation that’s got it in for blacks. (I guess I know which way Nason would swing on that one).

As a journalist Nason should have tried to give his statistics some depth. Why didn’t he? Could it be that to do so he would have had to admit that about 80 per cent of violent crimes against blacks are by other blacks and that there is an epidemic of violence in the black community?

If Nason is right and harsher sentencing brings about social breakdown and more crime then the reverse should also be true. Fortunately the jury is in on this one. The 1960s saw more lenient sentences and greater emphasis on “prisoners rights” with the result that

Crime rates skyrocketed. Murder rats suddenly shot up until the murder rate in 1974 was more than twice as high as in 1961….The number of policemen killed also tripled during the decade of the 1960s…The arrest rate of juveniles for murder more than tripled between 1965 and 1990, even allowing for changes in population size. (Thomas Sowell’s Vision of the Anointed, Basic Books, 1995).

Of course, the 1960s also saw he beginning of the war on the black family. In 1960 the illegitimacy rate among blacks as 22 per cent. The Dems misnamed War on Poverty programs managed to raise that to about 70 per cent today. Trendies like Nason can argue that black problems are the legacy of slavery. If that were so why was the illegitimacy rate so much lower 45 years ago? Furthermore, the historical evidence does not support the slavery excuse. As Walter Williams pointed out:

A study of 1880 family structure in Philadelphia shows that three-quarters of black families were nuclear families, comprised of two parents and children. In New York City in 1925, 85 percent of kin-related black households had two parents. In fact, according to Herbert Gutman in The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom: 1750-1925, “Five in six children under the age of 6 lived with both parents.”

Therefore, if one argues that what we see today is a result of a legacy of slavery, discrimination and poverty, what's the explanation for stronger black families at a time much closer to slavery – a time of much greater discrimination and of much greater poverty? I think that a good part of the answer is there were no welfare and Great Society programs. (Also see Vision of the Anointed).

These are the kinds of statistics that Bush-hating lefties like to avoid. They much prefer to make dark comparisons with the activities of today’s black gun-toting criminals and “the 16th Street Baptist church, where 14-year-olds Addie Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley and Carole Robertson, and 11-year-old Denise McNair were murdered by Klan dynamite in 1963”.

Two different worlds dealing with different problems ––but not to David Nason. To him black killers are just as much victims as Mae Collins, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson and Denise McNair. I gotta hand it to him: it takes quite an imagination to put heavy prison sentences handed out to murderers on par with the murder of innocent children.

As someone who likes to dwell on the past, especially if it makes the US look bad, I couldn’t help but notice how he neglected to point out that one of the victims of the Klan bombing had been a good friend of Condi Rice. Now if she had been friends with Hillary Clinton….

Perhaps Nason would like to tell us why he didn’t report that the segregation language and laws he rightfully condemns were produced by Democrats. I think he should also explain to us why he and his mates have never reported that Senator Robert Byrd from West Virginia had been a Klan recruiter. Imagine the response if Nason were to discover that a prominent Republican Senator had been Klansman?

As Nason is so hot on what seems to think are wacko judges, how come he missed the very recent case of the Vermont judge who thinks, as Nason seems to do, that crime and punishment don’t mix? A pervert had been raping a girl from when she was about four-years old until she was ten or twelve. Any normal person (I’m not that sure about Nason) would treat this abominable conduct as an extremely serious crime. Not our progressive judge. According to this guardian of the law:

I don’t believe in punishment anymore. I’ve been on the bench 25 years, and I used to believe in it but I don't believe in it anymore….Putting this guy in jail for three years is not where he’s going to get the help needs.

Strange, isn’t it, that Nason didn’t see fit to quote this lefty judge whose opinion on crime and punishment appears to mirror his own? Murdoch journalists smear President Bush over NSA spying program

Gerard Jackson is Brookes’ economics editor

Subscribe to BrookesNews Bulletin