California Watch

Digging into data on incarceration and crime rates, Ron Unz, publisher of the American Conservative magazine, finds little hard evidence to support the notion that Hispanics are more violent than other segments of the population.

In a report released this week, Unz walks readers step-by-step through the methodology used to come to his conclusion. As a starting point, the analysis uses 2008 crime data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics and finds "the total Hispanic incarceration rate...is almost 150 percent above the white average."

The analysis attempts to adjust for circumstances that might skew national incarceration rates and see if the large gap still holds up.

Adjusting for age differences between the groups pulls the Hispanic crime gap down, from 150 percent above the white incarceration rate, to 13 to 31 percent, depending on age.

Drawing on state-level incarceration data, the numbers continue to drop when immigration violations are taken into account:

As a recent front page New York Times story pointed out, over half of all federal prosecutions these days are for immigration-related offenses, and since a huge fraction of illegal immigrants are from south of the border, the 10 percent or so of U.S. prison inmates who are in federal custody might significantly distort our ethnic imprisonment statistics.

While many might assume that the application of justice is relatively equal from state to state, Unz argues that great variance exists in "the harshness of the local courts and sentencing guidelines." These differences, in turn, can have a dramatic impact on criminal justice statistics.

Once state-by-state variations are factored in, the analysis finds incarceration rates for Hispanics "moves into close parity with white incarceration rates."

After delving into the incarceration data, the analysis moves on to look at crime rates in comparison to census demographics, and again finds a mixed bag.

Even more striking, the average crime rates for the two most Hispanic cities on our list – Santa Ana and El Paso, each 80 percent Hispanic – are actually below our white urban average, and below the very low crime figures for 86 percent white Lincoln, the single whitest city in the nation. So although some heavily Hispanic cities have higher crime rates than some heavily white ones, the pattern seems very mixed.

As a result, Unz writes, when conservative pundits such as Glen Beck assert that America is facing "an illegal alien crime wave," they may not have the statistics on their side. "Such an argument may have considerable emotional appeal, but there is very little hard evidence behind it," says Unz.

While this article may put him at odds with the likes of Beck and Lou Dobbs, Unz has often shown a willingess to go against the Republican grain.

In 1994, Unz attempted to unseat incumbent California Gov. Pete Wilson. The bid ultimately failed, but not before Unz captured 34 percent of votes in the Republican primary. He also attacked Wilson's hostility toward the immigrant community and spoke out against Proposition 187, a 1994 initiative which sought to deny virtually all social services to illegal immigrants.

Unz entered into the ballot-initiative game again, in 1998, when he sponsored Proposition 227, which aimed to abolish the state's bilingual education programs in favor of English-immersion education. The measure passed with 61 percent of the vote after Unz spent more than $600,000 of his own money promoting the initiative.