OK all you men. Rise up! Organize! March! Demand justice! You are victims of gross sexual discrimination within the criminal justice system.

It’s obvious. Just look inside any American courtroom and gander at the line of defendants, dominated by men. You may find a token woman now and then, but guys invariably make up the overwhelming and disproportionate number of defendants.

While the male gender comprise nearly 50 percent of the nation’s population, they occupy 92 percent of all prison cells. The women are getting away with murder! Favoritism toward females is rampant. How can the system justify such a disparity?

Easy. Men commit 92 percent of the most serious crime in America. It has nothing to do with discrimination.

Enter the recent controversy at Asheville High School, where an alarmingly high percentage of black students have received long-term suspensions. Outraged minorities are calling it discriminatory discipline because 81 percent of those suspensions have been assigned to black students who comprise only 49 percent of the student body. They say black kids are getting suspended more only because they are black. Hmmm.

So the community is on edge and school administrators are jumping through their pants trying to justify the disparity in numbers when the answer is fairly obvious. If the same holds true with sexual and racial disparities within the criminal justice system, then the answer is simple: Eighty-one percent of the serious and suspendable violations have been committed by minorities. Not pleasant to hear, maybe, but it may be true.

Asheville’s rate of school discipline is consistent with the entire state, where 63 percent of long-term suspensions were meted out to minorities that make up 38 percent of the student body. That’s also close to the national picture. I can hear it now, fist-pumpers who say that Asheville is a merely microcosm of the entire state’s discriminatory policies.

I don’t think so.

At the expense of being wrongly labeled (an inevitable risk when any columnist takes a stand that disagrees with the African-American viewpoint), I should point out that this is not only the age of enlightenment. We’re also living in an era of social and ethnic paranoia, where people are afraid saying or doing anything that can remotely be construed as racist, where it’s hands off minorities unless your back is against the wall. I’ve been there, working as a Miami cop where city and county officials tip-toed ever so cautiously over any issue regarding race because the last thing we ever wanted to do was discriminate. No one wants another riot like the one that killed 18 innocent people in 1980. If anything, officials bent over backwards, often to the point of reverse discrimination, just to keep the peace.

Both inside and outside of the department, extreme measures were taken to provide fairness, equity and yes, even favoritism to minorities, whether it be in the criminal justice system or within the police agency itself. I’m sure the same holds true in schools. Those kinds of policies have mushroomed throughout the nation, including North Carolina.

So when I hear rhetoric about minorities challenging the disproportionate numbers of their kids being suspended, I think about those numbers in terms of offenses they’ve committed. And I cannot stop from wondering how much restraint was first exerted before each and every one of those kids were thrown out of school, black or white.

High school teachers are on guard every day, frequent victims of verbal assaults, they are also charged with the responsibility of handling physical disruption. School officials are often faced with no alternatives but to suspend offenders. Then they are the ones put on trial. Something is wrong there.
Buncombe County Education Board member, Roy Harris and Asheville High School Principal Jane Currin were right on target, charging parents with the responsibility of becoming more involved with their kids in and out of the school arena. Child conduct did not evolve from school hallways, it evolved from the home.

Then again, I could be all wrong here. Maybe those disproportionate number of suspensions should be distributed according to ethnic and racial percentages. If so, then I think we also better start rounding up the ladies and keep prisons 50-50, men and women, no matter who commits the most crimes.

Fair is fair.

( Marshall Frank is a retired Metro-Dade police officer and novelist who lives in Maggie Valley. His second mystery novel, Dire Straits, will be published in May. He can be reached at mlf283@aol.com)

 

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