Race, Crime, Punishment, and Unintended Consequences

The mysterious underground statistician known as La Griffe du Lion flexes his super-numerate cerebra in explication of the empirical realities
lurking behind the widely publicized racial disparities of America’s
prison population.  The equations are birdscratch to me, but the
central explanandum stems from the ironic finding that "contrary to
expectation, the
highest disparity ratios turned up mostly in politically progressive
states,
while the smallest ratios were mostly found in conservative
states." 

La Griffe’s conclusion?

…variations of disparity ratios among the states are well described by a
model in which racial groups have characteristic, geography-invariant,
Gaussian distributions of criminality. Incarceration data for the fifty
states and the District of Columbia have been made to yield criminality
distributions for both whites and blacks. The model predicts the
disparity paradox, showing it to be the unintended result of setting
high incarceration thresholds.

In
other words, more liberal incarceration policies tend to exascerbate
the very inequalities they’re ostensibly devised to correct.  And this
isn’t merely a statistical artifact, but a predictable consequence
informed by underlying racial differences in criminality. 

Tune in your left brain and read it twice.  You’ll see.