Posted by
Rocky Mountain Foundation on Sunday, March 01, 2009 12:21:59 AM
Perhaps in this day of failing news organizations, the headline is a bit unfair to the AP. However, news coverage that is a mile wide and an inch deep doesn't serve citizens well.
The AP story linked here is interesting, but the Pew Hispanic Center report on which it is based is even more so. The headline in the AP story is "New study: Hispanics account for 40% of sentenced Federal offenders." What it should have said is -- "Non-citizen Hispanics account for 29% of all federal offenders." Buried within the 27-page report is the fact that 72.5% of all Hispanic offenders in 2007 were non-citizens. If illegal aliens make up only about 30% of the total Hispanic population of 44 million yet account for 73% of all Hispanics in federal prisons, maybe that should set off some alarms.
Anyone who takes the trouble to look behind the news story and read the Pew report will be drawn to the striking differences between US citizen Hispanics and non-US Citizen Hispanics:
- Between 1991 and 2007, non-US citizen Hispanics accounted for 41% of the total growth in federal convictions.
In 2007, 72.5% of all Hispanic offenders in federal courts were non-US citizens, and only 22.5% were US citizens.
Only 11% of all federal convictions in 2007 were US citizen Hispanics --- less than the Hispanic share of the US population.
It is immediately clear on reading the Pew report that the growth in the Hispanic share the federal prison population is being driven by the growth in the illegal alien population, yet this fact was nowhere to be found in the AP story. Hispanic citizens are no more likely to be in federal prison than any other group, but illegal alien Hispanics are at least five times more likely to be there.
Table 1 on page three of the Pew report lists the top ten federal districts where Hispanics are sentenced. Texas-South is number one: 89% of offenders were Hispanic and 64% of the total were non-citizens. New Mexico was number four with.70.5% Hispanic offenders and 51% of the offenders were non-citizen Hispanics.
The AP story not only omits important facts, it is misleading in one important respect. It says that "three-quarters of the crimes were for reentering the county illegally," which implies they were not real criminals, only undocumented aliens who happened to get caught. That is not the case. The vast majority of people prosecuted for "felony reentry" are persons who were formally deported for serious crimes. Few people understand that when an illegal alien is caught and has no criminal charges, or when charges have been reduced to misdemeanors by a plea bargain, the alien is offered a "voluntary removal" option to expedite the process--- and that does NOT go on his record and does NOT subject him to felony reentry charges if caught again. So, those persons were prosecuted for the "immigration crime" of unlawful re-entry are some really bad characters who need to be separated from society and then deported again.
State legislators across the nation ought to be reading this report and asking some hard questions of their courts and law enforcement agencies. First, "Where does my state rank in this list of federal districts and what percentage of my state's federal offenders were citizens and non-citizens? Second, given that this is only FEDERAL COURT data, what are the numbers for my state courts? Citizens might want to know --- is it 10% or is it 30% of criminals sentenced in state courts who are non-citizens?
No one in the Colorado Attorney General's office or the Colorado Department of Public Safety can tell a state lawmaker what percentage of offenders sentenced in Colorado courts are non-citizens. The absence of such data is probably not an accident: Ignorance may not always be bliss, but it sure does help avoid embarrassing questions for jurisdictions that refuse to abandon their sanctuary city policies.