Despite investing weeks of time in the production of this week’s lengthy reports decrying racism in the state of New York’s prison administration and parolesystem, the New York Times is unable to demonstrate that racism was the reason for the result in any specific case. You needn’t take my word for it. As the Times’ own investigative team puts it, “[I]t is not possible to know whether race is a factor in any particular parole decision.” That’s after scrutinizing thousands of them.
Nevertheless, in agitprop that barely pretends to be straight news reporting, the Gray Lady flatly accuses the state of systematically using race as the factor that determines which prisoners are detained and which are sprung from confinement. The endemic racism is apparently a secret even to the racists themselves. Drawing on vignettes that are comical in their revelations of incompetence and disinterest on the part of parole commissioners, the Times suggests that the commissioners barely know the race, or much else, about the inmates whose cases they decide. But why let that spoil a good narrative?
In this instance, the narrative is built on the social justice warrior’s favorite artifice: the “disparate impact” theory of discrimination. The idea, of course, is that even though it cannot be proved that racism occurred in any particular case, we can infer that race – and only race – is the dispositive factor if the aggregated outcomes are worse for one race than another. In the disparate impact scheme, two rules are observed at all times: (1) ignore the fact that racial discrimination is an abomination precisely because it is a conscious act, an operation of the mind that does not happen inadvertently; and (2) take as a given that our society is pervasively racist, such that it is irrelevant whether any single one of us harbors racial animus – especially those of us whose allegedly racist decision-making is being analyzed.
Since those are the operating assumptions, is it any wonder that the reader must wade through a full 23 paragraphs before finding the most salient bit of information in the Times’s parole story:
The Times did not have access to the full range of information the [parole] board took into account. This includes inmates’ time in county jail, full arrest histories, complete prison disciplinary records and whether required prison programs were completed.
That’s right. Common sense would suggest that, to find the explanation for any disparities in parole determinations involving felons whose offenses appear similar, one should look first at the factors well known to influence parole decisions heavily: Is one guy’s rap sheet worse than the other’s? Has one guy behaved himself better while in custody and thus shown himself less likely to recidivate if released? But the Times, we learn (after 23 paragraphs), does not have this rudimentary information.
For most people, lack of access to the essential data would be cause to refrain from writing or publishing a high-profile news report – after all, any conclusion would necessarily be unreliable. For social justice warriors and their paper of record, though, it’s an opportunity to scream, “Racism!” Who could pass that up?
