In my post immediately below, Liberal Pap Plus Misunderstanding, I pointed to an impeccably credentialed liberal Columbia University law professor who grossly mis-stated the issue presented in an important and well-publicized case she claims to be following closely, Fisher v. University of Texas.
Here’s another howler, this one from a professor of criminology at the University of North Florida:
“Michael Hallett, chairman of UNF’s criminology department, who is white: ‘We have more African-Americans in jail today than we had as slaves. It’s a new Jim Crow.’”
Actually, we don’t. In 2008, according to ABC News, the nation’s prison and jail population was 2.3 million people. By 2010, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, it had fallen to 1.6 million, but let’s stick with the 2008 data because the NAACP’s Criminal Justice Fact Sheet also used the data from that year in its statement that “African Americans now constitute nearly 1 million of the total 2.3 million incarcerated population.”
1 million is a big number, apparently too big to be handled by the chairman of the criminology department at the University of North Florida, who is white, but it is not bigger than 3,950,546, the total slave population of the U.S. in 1860.
Adjusted for population the number of slaves would be somewhere around 22-24 million today. One thing that is true, however, is that African-American men kill each other at a much greater clip than the Klan ever did, even adjusted for population.