Does race determine potential criminality?

Well, blacks do have a higher crime rate (see 2003 from FBI stats, for example, where the number of offenders is almost evenly broken between whites and blacks in number [almost all male, by the way] but recall that blacks make up only around 12% of the population. You get the idea.) But is it just as simple as that? Of course not! I bring it up because of the following recent event.

Bill Bennett, speaking on a call-in radio program, made the now-famous statement that aborting all the black babies in America would lower the crime rate. Since what we're really interested in here is the correlation involved (race to crime rate), we'll avoid delving into the finer points of rhetoric, the advisability of using reductio ad absurdum arguments on talk radio, etc., and just focus on the statistical element of what he said.

Freakonomics co-author Steven D. Levitt already did the legwork for this stat while writing the aforementioned book, and explains in his post on the Bennett kerfuffle:

It is true that, on average, crime involvement in the U.S. is higher among blacks than whites. Importantly, however, once you control for income, the likelihood of growing up in a female-headed household, having a teenage mother, and how urban the environment is, the importance of race disappears for all crimes except homicide. (The homicide gap is partly explained by crack markets). In other words, for most crimes a white person and a black person who grow up next door to each other with similar incomes and the same family structure would be predicted to have the same crime involvement.

This does, of course, inspire us to talk about the correlation between race and poverty (among the other indicators listed above), but we'll leave that for another day. Till then, we continue to chant our mantra: correlation is not causation.