I appreciate Prof. Askin's message, and I did reread those
paragraphs.  It turns out, though, that I did look at them when
composing my first post, but I set them aside because they, too, don't
compare arrest or incarceration rates to actual criminality rates.

	They say the arrest and incarceration rates are disproportional
to the racial makeup of the population.  They also point to evidence
that blacks may be stopped or searched based partly on their race.  Such
profiling may thus lead to arrest rates for blacks that exceed actual
criminality rates (or it may not, if the profiling, even if
unconstitutional, is indeed based on empirically justifiably hunches
about who the drug criminals are).  But at the same time, as I mentioned
earlier, there are other policing tactics (including tactics that may
themselves be bad) that may lead to arrest rates for blacks that are
*less* than actual criminality rates:  The chief example would be the
relative underpolicing of black neighborhoods; since most crime in such
neighborhoods is black-on-black, underpolicing may lead to an arrest
rate that is less than the actual criminality rate.

	Prof. Askin's claim was that "minorities are investigated,
prosecuted, convicted and sentenced (and thereby disfranchised)  out of
proportion, as all studies show, to their propensity to commit crime."
That's why I asked for studies that in fact show that the felony
conviction rates are indeed *out of proportion to the actual criminality
rates*.  The Complaint, unfortunately, doesn't provide this evidence.

	Eugene Volokh

-----Original Message-----
From: owner-election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu 
[mailto:owner-election-law_gl@majordomo.lls.edu] On Behalf Of 
Frank Askin
Sent: Tuesday, February 08, 2005 5:32 PM
To: Volokh, Eugene; election-law@majordomo.lls.edu
Subject: RE: NY Times and Felons


  I would suggest that you read paragraphs 34-36 more 
carefully.  They provide substantial detail as to the 
admissions by all three branches of New Jersey government 
that racial profiling leads to greatly disproportionate 
investigation and arrest of minority citizens.  Obviously 
these figures are limited to drivers of motor vehicles, since 
that is the only area where there is some concrete data.  But 
Paragraphs 37-39 also provides figures on the disparate 
impact of the so-called war on drugs, which over 20 years 
vastly increased the percentage of minorities in New Jersey 
prisons.  FRANK