S is for Statistics

Back in 2006, I posted a review of sentencing of men vs women by our courts entitled H is for Happy (it was the New Year). I like sentencing stats - they reflect the actual functioning of the courts, and hint to us at the injustices that might be happening in other parts of the process.

My intent was to discover if the evidence of our eyes was true, and if women in general were getting a whole different kind of justice when they went to court.

The numbers were shocking - across the board, women were recieving much shorter sentences - about 40% shorter than what was doled out to men. And it of course leads you to wonder what kind of biases are occuring in the arrest, trial and probation phases.

Well, I thought it was time to re-visit this question, and I found a nifty and huge government database to work against:

United States Department of Justice. Bureau of Justice Statistics. Federal Justice Statistics Program: Defendants Sentenced Under the Sentencing Reform Act, 2007 [United States] [Computer file]. ICPSR24232-v1. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2009-02-23. doi:10.3886/ICPSR24232

Apparently they turn one of these out every year or did up to '07. You can download your copy here, (registration required) but the dataset is kind of large, and unless you have a recent copy of excel and/or are pretty good with databases, this isn't fun. Happily, I love this kind of thing and so:

I took the data, which is at an individual level, and first determined the average sentence length by gender: The average woman was sentenced to a 59% shorter sentence than the average man, with the average sentence (across all offenses) for a man being 57 months, and the average sentence for a woman being 23 months.

If men and women are really committing the same crimes, this already givs us significant evidence of bias, but let's compare apples with apples. The database gives us the primary offense, and we can break the data down by that:

The following list outlines, per the data that you can download and work with yourself, the percentages less (or more) that women are sentenced for the exact same crime as men:

51% 1 Murder
43% 2 Manslaughter
37% 3 Kidnapping/Hostage
68% 4 Sexual Abuse
34% 5 Assault
57% 6 Bank Robbery
24% 9 Arson
47% 10 Drugs: Trafficking
50% 11 Drugs: Communicatn facilities
81% 12 Drugs: Simple possession
54% 13 Firearms: Use & possess
(21%) 15 Burg/Breaking & Entering
14% 16 Auto Theft
57% 17 Larceny
45% 18 Fraud
46% 19 Embezzlement
49% 20 Forgery/Counterfeiting
40% 21 Bribery
14% 22 Tax offenses
40% 23 Money laundering
62% 24 Racktring (includes extortion)
100% 25 Gambling/Lottery
41% 26 Civil rights offenses
51% 27 Immigration
43% 28 Pornography/Prostitution
32% 29 Offenses in prisons
60% 30 Administration of justice
117% 31 Environmental offenses
34% 32 National defense offenses
100% 33 Antitrust violations
(253%) 34 Food and drug offenses
63% 35 Traffic violations

And now it is possible to calculate how much less, on average, by crime, a woman is sentenced to than a man: 40%. Note that there are only two (2) areas in which women's sentences exceed men's.

Now perhaps the sentences being meted out to women are appropriate, and those given to men are out of line. With this nifty database to hand, I can calculate how many excess years are being doled out to men per primary offense, and the number is.... for 2007...

(drum roll please)

142,036.17 years.

Think of that, 142,036.17 years of productive male effort flushed away in the US court system just in 2007, - because men are not viewed as being as worthy of mercy as women.

Think what you could achieve with an army of 142,036 men working for you for a year! Even if these are difficult, or slothful men, a lot could be done! But it is necessary to lock them away, because, as you know,

...they just aren't women....

Your comments and thoughts are always welcome, - and do please hit the ‘Donate’ button, if you can.

My Best To You In Your Struggles

-M


p.s.

While I was in the neighborhood, and with the HBD/VDare/BNP/Bio-Cons and the like in the back of my mind, I wondered what the stats would say about Blacks as opposed to Whites in the courts.

And those who are Black do suffer from bias in some big-ticket items - murder (your average White gets a 7.3 year sentence according to the data, but your average Black gets 23 years), Manslaugter (Whites get a 23% discount), Arson (51% discount), and Drug Posession (75%!).

But the balance tips the other way for white-collar crimes, and the sentencing balances out around 4% in favor of the Black Man if you average across offenses. Whites are beaten up for Embezzelment -75%, Gambling -296%, Civil Rights Offenses -181%, and the like.

I guess that judges and prosecutors get 'fed up' with certain crimes in certain communities and races and sentence those extra hard, thinking that that will make a difference. Or perhaps certain crimes occurr more predominately in different communities, and repeat offenders get whacked. The data is there to parse that out if anyone is interested.

It's also fair to note that the things that blacks are being sentenced with carry much longer terms than what whites get sentenced with, but, you know, I am running a Men's Rights blog here, not a generic Civil Rights blog. If some Civil Rights guy wants to dig down on this data, and isn't technical enough to mince the data properly, I'd be glad to help.

Heck, maybe a grant could be written. :)

There might be grant money for studying how the court system screws BLACK men.
(Bitter? Me? Nooooooooooooooooo)

pps - had a brain spasm and typed 'years' instead of 'months' as the units for the average sentences in the 7th paragraph above. This has been fixed. In years (for those who can't divide by 12) it is 4.8 years for average male sentence, and 1.97 for average female sentence. The ratio remains the same, of course, with women getting a 59% discount on average. The other numbers (like the excess years men serve) did not suffer this problem.

W is for Worried

Another couple interesting elements in the emergent Men's Interests world are the Bio-Cons and HBD aka 'Human BioDiversity'.

If I understand the Men's Interests argument of the former (the Bio-Cons), it is that there was something biological or 'natural' about the old social constructs - they gave 'beta males' - that is, the average dudes out there (and that means all of us at one point or other, in my opinion) - a way to succeed. One woman was bound to one man, and needed that man to make her routine work.

Overturning the basic social framework with easy divorce, sex-without-responsibilities, abortion on demand, government supports for single motherhood, and governmental divorce structures that leave men destroyed and women empowered disrupts our society. Suddenly the nuclear family is less common, and men are avoiding marriage as women are running for their marriage exit and alimony/support check.

OK, all of that is from my/a Men's Rights worldview, but try this definition on for size: (Source)

Bioconservatism (a portmanteau word combining "biology" and "conservatism"), is a stance of hesitancy about biotechnological development especially if it is perceived to threaten a social order.
Strong bioconservative positions include opposition to the genetic, prosthetic and cognitive modification of human beings in particular. Whether arising from a conventionally right-leaning politics of religious and cultural conservatism or from a conventionally left-leaning politics of environmentalism, bioconservative positions oppose medical and other technological interventions into what are broadly perceived as current human and cultural limits in the name of a defense of "the natural" deployed as a moral category.
Bioconservative skepticism toward biomedical and other particular technological developments often is, but need not always be, part of a more general technophobic perspective or critique of technological society. Bioluddism represents a more radical and sweeping anti-biotechnological perspective.

So whichever of those you go with, or some cross-pollination of the two, fine. And see here and here for more on Bio-Conservatism.

But what worries and scares me is the HBD movement - Human BioDiversity - which is linked with Bio-Conservatism and which claims that the major differences between folks are not so much individual differences, but racial or genetic differences between major groups and genders.

And even if that was true, the formation of a movement around this idea worries me.

Because I think that HBD may often be a cover-word for racism - in fact, when you drill down on the bloggers involved, like Steve Sailer and Chris Brand you start seeing that they are participants in VDare, and the BNP and the like. (For more reading see here, and this post, (hm, <- this blogger also reads Roissy - and studies game))

Now I love my race like I love my gender, but even if we have good evidence that different races and genders are practically different, I don't want them treated differently by our country, and I worry that this is where focusing on this will get us.

Our founding fathers here in the states insisted that every citizen be treated equally, and that is because that is the only practical way to govern a democracy, and the only way to recognize and honor the spirit placed in us by our creator. It is also a capitalistic and legal principle that allows the truly talented to actually benefit from the work of their hands.

I want to fight for elimination of bias of all sorts - favoritism by gender, race, faith - our government should have no part of bias, and a revolution that enshrines our differences and tips the tables in favor of those who are seen as 'better' would create a new slavery, a new oppressed class, and set the stage for yet more revolution, chaos and bloodshed.

Anyway, I'm worried. I'm worried because our country, and our world is in a period of stress, and some of these new social movements that are popping up and being linked to the Men's movement on the web concern me.

I think men need to stay focused on fighting for their personal and group rights - if that means going ghost, fine - if that means going Galt, great (interesting how alike they can be) - if that means working together to break the logjam of of abusive anti-male government legislation - wonderful.

But let's not get distracted by the evil-ly tempting specter of racism and bias, and those who would look to slide them into our movement.

Your comments and thoughts are always welcome, - and do please hit the ‘Donate’ button, if you can.

My Best To You In Your Struggles

-M