Originally posted on Quora May 15, 2023
The space “controversial chat” removed my completely uncontroversial, factual, statistically and logically correct answer to this question so I might as well post it to the parent question they don’t control.
Any particular black or white infant isn’t more or less likely to become a career criminal. That is not how statistics work. It is when you extend this prediction over the entire population of black and white infants that you find the difference. Statistics measure population parameters not individual outcomes. Concluding that an individual must be more/less likely to have a trait because the group is more/less likely to have it is the fallacy of division: a common blunder for people who don’t understand basic statistics. And you can do this with any two groups. For instance, older people are less likely to commit violent crime than younger people and females far less likely to commit violent crime than males. Does this tell us about the likelihood or propensity of any individual within those groups to commit violent crime. Nope, it only tells us one group is more frequently associated with a certain trait or action than another. The differences really only exists within a subset of outliers in those groups. About 1% of the population is responsible for 63% (nearly 2/3) of violent crime and 4% for almost all violent crime.
Source: The 1% of the population accountable for 63% of all violent crime convictions
Even in New Orleans, which has the highest homicide rate per capita in the U.S. on par or worse than cities in the third world, out of a population of 375K no more than a few thousand are responsible for most of the violence that has occurred there in the 21st century and likely no more than a couple hundred in any given year.
The primary risk factor is being raised in a single income household by a single parent (usually the mother) not poverty. Poverty is just 4x more likely when you have one income instead of two. 48% of black children are raised by a single parent compared to 21% of white children and only 37% are raised by both of their biological mother and father compared to 67% of white children. If we compare similar family dynamics across we see similar risks/odds for things like childhood poverty, later criminality, and even college graduation.
And those are risk factors not causes. It’s predictive capability only extends to an adequate sample of black and white children not individuals. Adults of all ethnic groups have free will and moral agency. Nothing causes them to become criminals; it’s a choice.