U.S. Sentencing Commission Armed Career Criminal Study
(Sept. 12, 2021)
This is one of the subpages to the Criminal Justice Disparities page of jpscanlan.com. That page and its subpages principally explain that contrary to the belief promoted by federal agencies and numerous entities purporting to have expertise in the analysis of demographic differences, generally reducing adverse criminal justice outcomes tend to increase, not reduce, (a) relative racial differences in rates of experiencing the outcome and (b) the proportion Blacks make up of persons experiencing the outcomes.
In March 2021, the U.S. Sentencing Commission issued a report titled “Federal Armed Career Criminals: Prevalence, Patterns, and Pathways,” discussing patterns of sentencing of federal offenders pursuant to the Armed Career Criminal Act between 2010 and 2019. The report provided data that were pertinent to the pattern described in the prior paragraph in two respects.
First, page 6 of the report explains that during the ten-year study period the number of persons sentenced yearly as armed career criminals decreased from 590 to 312. End note 52 (at page 79) indicates that, as numerate observers should expect to happen, during the period of general declines in the number of persons sentenced as armed career criminal, the proportion Blacks offenders made up of persons sentenced as armed career criminal increased (rising from 63.8% in 2010 to 73.7% in 2019).
Second, while I have not found data on the race of all persons sentenced to federal prisons over that period, Bureau of Prisons data indicate that in September 2021, Blacks made up 38.2% of all federal prisoners. Despite the inexactness of comparison of that figure with the figures in the prior paragraph, it should be evident that limiting the prison population to persons sentenced as armed career criminals would cause the proportion Blacks make up of the federal prison population to increase, just as would happen if all first time offenders were released. Compare the California Prison Population subpage of the Discipline Disparities page and discussion of diversion programs in “A Criminal Justice Reform Premise That Is Statistically Flawed,” Law360-Access to Justice (Apr. 5, 2021), and “The misunderstood effects of the Baltimore police consent decree,” The Daily Record (Feb. 15, 2018).