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Welcome back to the Dershow Missed you always miss when we have a few days off the podcast and of course in a few days the world keeps spinning and spinning and spinning

Fear of nuclear confrontation fear of massive killings of civilians not a lot seems to be happening the only winner are

China and CNN and other media that are making a fortune a fortune of people watching

Day to day and remember the other day CNN had the unbelievable cuts but to talk about other people making contributions to Ukrainian civilians CNN or to be pouring an enormous amount of their profits into Ukrainian relief along with other media giants who are making much more money than they're used to making because people are just watching watching as they should

And we'll take some questions on Ukraine I've got a lot of questions some of which surprisingly were anti Ukrainian and pro Russian but nothing gets censored on the Dershow

But today I want to deal with the subject that's very very difficult to deal with one of these hot button hot button radioactive issues that people try to stay away from.

And that is the issue of the relationship between race ethnicity religion gender and crime.

And it's you know been an issue that's been under the radar but obviously in the mind of many people for many many years when when I took criminal at Harvard I went out of my way always to focus on controversial issues that people don't get in other classrooms

And so I did talk about race and crime obviously when I dealt with the death penalty I had to deal with race and crime because race was a significant factor I helped write some of the early briefs and make some of the early arguments I wrote a leading argument on the unconstitutionality of the death penalty along with my mentor

Arthur Goldberg in which we focused on racial disparities not only back in the day did black defendants get the death penalty for more often than white defendants but even more significantly people who killed white people got the death penalty and people who killed black people didn't get the death penalty.

There were racial disparities in both the victim and the perpetrator end of the spectrum.

And race is just too important to ignore a lot of my colleagues in teaching criminal law deliberately stayed away from it because for a teacher's point of view it's not when situation any position they take is going to be controversial and going to get some people to dislike them but my philosophy has always been

a quote attributed to a Confucius in fact many many many centuries ago in which he said the only bad question is one that not asked or the one that can't be asked and so I believe any question can be asked the issue of race and crime goes back forever I'm one of my favorite books is it's the nineteen I'm sorry the eighteen eighty six professional criminals of America and it's a list and picture

of the most prominent criminals in America listed listed by crimes and and you know bank burglars bank sneak these forges hotel and boarding house thieves sneak in house the store and safe burglars shoplifting receives a stolen goods etc etc and of course more serious criminals.

And what's so interesting is that back in 1886 when we saw a surgeon immigration immigration of Jews from Eastern Europe of Italians from Southern Europe Irish people from Northern Europe this book was filled with Jewish criminals Irish criminals Italian criminals very very very few

African American criminals the reason there was so many criminals among those ethnic groups as many of the ethnic groups sent their men there first to try to establish a home make a living and then send for their women and children and the one thing you can be sure if you send men alone anywhere there's going to be a high level of criminality and so you had a high level of criminality among groups like that the point I mean

that the point I'm making is that no serious social scientist will ever tell you that there is a genetic or inherent aspect of criminal behavior based on genes or race along it's obviously based on circumstances based on poverty based on occupation based on range of other factors

and today obviously the focus is on racial on racial differences we know two things that seem to be facts and I want to put these mostly in the form of questions for you and I'd like you to address them.

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