Dogwash

Wandering around the Web, I happened upon this piece from last September at Liberal Conspiracy by "Left Outside", in which he reflects upon the stereotypes used to channel hostility towards recent immigrants. Much of what he says is a fair description of common reactions, some of which I would say might be fuelled by reasonable and genuine fears and concerns while other reactions might indeed be straightforward xenophobia, often whipped up by demagogues and rabble-rousers. On the whole, though, I'm not entirely convinced by his overall underlying attitude that it'll all come right in the end with the new arrivals all becoming economically prolific gorblimey coconuts.

But the OP is not what interests me on this occasion. Rather this comment from "Donut Hinge Party", (whose writing style, restrained enough here but more commonly startlingly and vacuously abusive, sounds very much like the tedious and smug Daniel Hoffman-Gill, a regular commenter at LC, but that's a conspiracy theory for another day). Responding to another commenter who had alluded to the UK's disproportionately numerous non-White prison population, "DHP" writes


"White British = 85.67%", he avers. At a casual glance, that certainly lines up nicely with his quote that "White males made up 84% of the male prison population of British nationals ... in 2002". But wait a minute. That 85.67% figure seems suspiciously low. On Internet fora and in the media, pro-immigrationists are for ever reminding us how vanishingly small is the ethnic minority population, and a different figure is burned into my consciousness. Ah, here it is: at the time of the 2001 census, 92.1% of the population was White. So where's he getting the 85.67% from? I can't immediately find this precise number, but this gives a clue: "87% of the population of England ... give their ethnic origin as White British". Presumably then the 85.67% figure represents "White British" across the UK as a whole. A further 6.4% of the population must therefore have been "White Irish" or "White Other".

So DHP is comparing "White British" in the overall population against "White of all origins", or more precisely "White of all origins with British nationality", in the prison population. Naughty.

It gets worse. Our eminent statistician now parlays the 14.33% (non-)(White British) into 14.33% (non-White)(British) and plugs this into the prison stats, where we find that 11% of the prisoners in 2002 are indeed Black. Wait a minute: "Black", not "non-White" but "Black". A further 5% or so are classified as "Asian", "Chinese" or "God knows".

So DHP would have us believe that in 2001/02, 11% of the prison population was Black, which I suspect he wants us to sloppily read as non-White (after all, all them Darkies look the same to us, innit?), as against 14% in the wider community, so "proving" that Blacks, non-Whites, whatever, are more law abiding than the White population.

A more honest analysis suggests that, on 2001/02 figures, the non-White 8% of the population contributed 16% of the prison population. Furthermore, looking at the census breakdown by ethnicity, Blacks as such represented only 30% of the wider "ethnic" population, suggesting that they are overrepresented in our prisons by a factor of approximately 4.

Of course, the prison figures relate only to "British nationals". How many of our prisoners are yer actual foreigners and how the ethnic breakdown pans out is, to re-use my earlier phrase, a conspiracy theory for another day.


Amazing what you can do with statistics and selective citation, innit?