Jason Richwine

Thanks to Ron Unz for his thoughtful (and prompt!) response to my critique. He said a handful of things that I would like to explore further, perhaps in a post at the Enterprise Blog. Here I want to correct a small but important error made originally by Ed Rubenstein and repeated by Unz in his response to me. In an otherwise insightful article, Rubenstein said:

"The Census lumps the prison population into a larger category -- people living in 'Group quarters'. But this category includes people in college dorms, nursing homes, and military bases."

This is not true. The Census has a subcategory within "group quarters" called institutionalization. Institutionalization includes only people in correctional facilities, mental hospitals, and nursing homes. It does not include anyone in college dorms or military bases, which are both part of a different subcategory. The point is important because I used institutionalization as a proxy for incarceration in my response to Unz, and he criticized my analysis by citing Rubenstein's inaccurate claim.

Of course, institutionalization is not a perfect measure of incarceration, but it's significantly better than as portrayed by Rubenstein and Unz. As I wrote in a footnote to my article:

"Given the pre-retirement age range I use, nursing homes should not be skewing the data. And if Hispanics disproportionately end up in mental hospitals, then frankly that's something we would want to know about anyway."

The March issue of The American Conservative features Ron Unz's long essay, "His-Panic: The Myth of Hispanic Criminality." His surprising conclusion, contrary to most of the technical literature, is that Hispanics in the U.S. do not commit crimes at higher rates than white Americans.

Unz's article is laudable for its straightforward, dispassionate discussion of a sensitive issue. His methodology, however, is problematic, and his conclusion is wrong. A proper analysis of the data indicates that Hispanics have a substantially higher crime rate than whites.

The key statistic here is the Hispanic incarceration rate divided by the white incarceration rate. Let's call this number HDW for short. So hypothetically, if four out of every 100 Hispanics are in prison, and two out of every 100 whites are in prison, then the HDW is two, meaning Hispanics are incarcerated at twice the white rate.

At first glance, the national HDW seems to be rather damaging to Unz's case. Table 13 in the 2005 Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) report, featured prominently in Unz's article, makes the HDW calculation straightforward. When we include prisoners of both genders and all ages in federal, state, and local confinement, HDW is 2.62.