High Incarceration Rate Of Blacks Is Function Of Crime, Not Racism

At a presidential primary debate this Martin Luther King Day, for instance, Sen. Barack Obama charged that blacks and whites "are arrested at very different rates, are convicted at very different rates, (and) receive very different sentences . . . for the same crime."

Not to be outdone, Sen. Hillary Clinton promptly denounced the "disgrace of a criminal-justice system that incarcerates so many more African-Americans proportionately than whites."