Gregory Kane: Conclusion first, money second, facts last
By: Gregory Kane
Examiner Staff Writer
September 3, 2009
Today's lesson in "Fleecing The Taxpayer" comes to us from the state of New York, where the legislature recently awarded a grant to study the racial impact of legislation.
The award of $10,000 will go to the Center for NuLeadership on Urban Solutions, which is part of the City University of New York's Medgar Evers College. CNUS, according to its Web site, is the "first and only public policy, research, training, advocacy and academic center....designed and developed by formerly incarcerated professionals."
I'm sure Washington Examiner readers are astute enough to translate the phrase "formerly incarcerated professionals" into the simpler, more common and much more linguistically efficient word "jailbirds."
But I don't really have a problem with that. I'm all for ex-convicts repenting, redeeming themselves and re-integrating themselves into society's mainstream. What I do have a problem with is those folks who want to use taxpayers' money to fund studies about which they've already reached conclusions.
And I have the sneaking suspicion that the CNUS faculty has already concluded that New York's laws have a disparate impact on racial minorities, in general, and black folks, in particular.
Divine Pryor, the executive director of CNUS, would probably disagree. Here's his take, as reported in the Aug. 17 New York Post: "A racial impact study is a new concept. We're going to be looking at legislation that has the potential to have negative impact on racial minorities."
In another passage of the Post story, the reporter, quoting Pryor indirectly, wrote "Pryor said the study, among other things, will look at how legislation covering education, housing, employment, labor and criminal justice impacts minorities."
Pryor is black, as is New York state Sen. Eric Adams, who requested the grant. I'm sure the intentions of both men are noble. But, as I said, too often in the public policy world, applicants to "study" things often have already reached their conclusion.
So a word of advice to both men: Why not just conclude that New York's laws already have a disparate impact on racial minorities and save the taxpayers that $10,000? Or, better yet, put up the money yourselves?
Hey, it's only 10 G's. Pryor and Adams could raise that at a swap meet. But I have to give them credit: At least they're letting New York taxpayers off easy. Remember the $225,000 Maryland taxpayers got hosed for to fund the Paternoster Study?
Six years ago Raymond Paternoster, a criminology and criminal justice professor at the University of Maryland College Park, released his research on how capital punishment is administered in the state.
Paternoster found not one iota of evidence indicating racial bias when it came to the race of defendants in capital trials. But death-penalty opponents were determined to find racial bias somewhere. Otherwise, why go to the trouble of having Paternoster do a study?
So they dredged up two forms of bias. One was geographic: Baltimore County sent more people to death row than any other subdivision in the state. Little mention was made of the fact that the subdivision with the most homicides, Baltimore City, was the same place where prosecutors seldom, if ever, sought the death penalty.
The other so-called "bias" was in the race of the victims of felony murder, the crime defendants must be convicted of, after mitigating and aggravating circumstances are weighed, to get the death penalty in Maryland. The study found that nearly all of the men on Maryland's death row had murdered whites.
Opponents of capital punishment felt they had their "Aha!" moment, while the rest of us felt we'd just been chumped for our money. We knew the revelation was far from an "Aha!" moment, and we also knew three things.
First, the so-called "bias" only proved that the death penalty was all but dead in Baltimore City, where the overwhelming preponderance of black murder victims were killed.
Second, nationally, whites are the majority of felony murder victims, and blacks the majority of felony murder perpetrators.
Third, no one in this country will ever, ever, ever fund a study to get to the bottom of the racial disparity described in item two.
Maryland taxpayers got taken to the cleaners again, when Gov. Martin O'Malley formed the Maryland Commission on Capital Punishment, whose job it was to reach the conclusions about the death penalty O'Malley had already reached.
In the future, I wish these characters would just reach their preferred conclusion and spare the taxpayers the expense.
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