The Evidence Shows George Soros is Wrong on Crime | Opinion

George Soros writes in a recent Wall Street Journal op-ed that "black people in the U.S. are five times as likely to be sent to jail as white people," and that this is "an injustice that undermines our democracy." What would truly be unjust, however, is if those who commit crimes weren't punished under the law. Fortunately, statistics show that justice in America is far more colorblind than Mr. Soros is.

I ran the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS)—the statistical arm of the U.S. Department of Justice—from late 2017 to early 2021. BJS statistics make clear that Soros's claim of injustice is wildly off the mark.

For starters, Soros is wrong to say that black people are five times as likely as white people to be in jail. The actual ratio is 3.5 to 1, and it hasn't been 5 to 1 in 20 years. In fact, the jail-incarceration rate for black residents was lower in 2018 (1 in 169) than at any time since 1990. Then it fell another 21 percent from 2018 to 2020, as jails were partially emptied during the COVID pandemic.

Perhaps Soros meant the rate at which people are sent to prison, not jail. The imprisonment rate for black residents was lower in 2019 (1 in 91 black residents) than at any time in the past 30 years, and it fell another 14 percent in 2020. Black residents are, however, about five times as likely as white residents, per capita, to be in prison (5.1 times more likely, to be exact).

But is this actually evidence of injustice?

BJS' National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS), the nation's largest crime survey and one of the largest federal surveys on any topic, asks a representative sample of Americans whether they were the victim of a crime over the past year. If they were, it asks them about the nature of the crime and the demographics of the offender. In other words, it asks crime victims—not police—who committed crimes against them.

In a BJS report released last year, the bureau's highest-ranking statistician, Allen Beck—who served under seven presidents, from Ronald Reagan to Joe Biden—examined results from the NCVS. He found that, among serious (non-fatal) violent crimes that victims said they reported to police, 42.8 percent were committed by black offenders and 40.9 percent by white offenders. Given that white people made up 60.4 percent of the population and black people 12.5 percent, that works out to black people having been 5.1 times as likely as white people to have committed these crimes—according to victims. So, the demographics of prisoners match the demographics of perpetrators, which is obviously just. (The statistics are limited to non-fatal crimes because homicide victims can't answer surveys.)

It would be an injustice if some people were, or weren't, being prosecuted for crimes simply because of the color of their skin. A similar injustice would be to refuse to prosecute whole classes of crimes because they are disproportionately committed by people of one skin color or another. Yet that's exactly what Soros-backed prosecutors do. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis recently sacked one for enforcing only those laws that the prosecutor liked.

Soros also writes that we need "to protect people against violent crime" and not focus on other crimes. But ignoring lesser crimes leads to more violent crimes, as we learned both from the successes of decades ago and the cautionary tale of recent years. What's more, over half of all sentenced state prisoners are violent offenders, per BJS, while a higher percentage of black prisoners (64 percent) than white prisoners (50 percent) are serving time for violent offenses—including a higher percentage for murder (16 percent to 10 percent). It's hard to reconcile Soros' alleged concern about violent crime with his insistence that the racial composition of prisons be to his liking.

Soros is right that we "need to invest more in preventing crime with strategies that work." That's why we need to utilize exactly the sort of "broken windows" policing that he opposes. Such policing, which succeeded spectacularly in New York under Police Commissioner William Bratton, reduces crime, restores order, and revitalizes communities' quality of life.

Soros's claim of injustice doesn't hold up to scrutiny—unless, that is, one thinks that punishing individuals who commit crimes "undermines our democracy." In truth, our republic is undermined by lawlessness, including the scourge of selective prosecution. As Abraham Lincoln put it, "Let reverence for the laws" be "taught," "written," "preached," "proclaimed," and "enforced in the courts of justice. And, in short, let it become the political religion of the nation."

Jeffrey H. Anderson is president of the American Main Street Initiative, a think tank for everyday Americans, and served as director of the Bureau of Justice Statistics at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2017 to 2021.

The views expressed in this article are the writer's own.