A Narcissist Misses Erin Pizzey's Big Story

The Atlantic, to which I have been a diffident subscriber over the years, recently ran a piece on Erin Pizzey, a British domestic violence advocate (h/t Janice Fiamengo). As it turns out, Pizzey is a complicated and interesting figure whose violent and verbally abusive mother sparked her subsequent political interests — ones which sometimes aligned with institutional feminism, and sometimes did not. That story, a much longer and better one, is told in her autobiography This Way To The Revolution, and also in the links Helen Lewis' Atlantic story provides. Particularly, her responses in this interview are enlightening:

Dean: So, you have recently, in the last year or so, published a book called This Way to the Revolution: A Memoir from Peter Owen Publishers. What can you tell me about that book, Erin?

Erin: I’ve always tried to tell the truth about the beginnings. I was one of the first people in England to get involved with the Women’s Movement and what I saw there, I knew perfectly well was going to be extremely destructive. And, when I began to stand up at these great big Collective meetings—and interestingly enough there were a lot of women from America who came over with initial instruction to show the British women how to be radical feminists. They’re a pretty frightening crowd and I got screamed at a lot partly because I said many women like myself, who are married, with or without children are perfectly happy to have the choice to be able to stay home. So, in the end last year actually … it took me 10 years to get this book published, it was turned down by every major publisher in this country. ...

Pizzey's father worked for the British Foreign Office in Tientsin at the time of the communist revolution, so she had an up-close look at their methods:

[The communists] had marched up the driveway and [her parents] were arrested. They were very lucky, my parents, because they were just under house arrest. Most of the others were put into prisons. ... So, I had no love of Communism from the very beginning. From what I saw when I was in these great big collectives was really Marxism. We were all organized into groups in our own homes and told that we must have consciousness-raising sessions. And I remember the woman who came to our [feminist] consciousness-raising and when she finished, I said this has nothing to do with women, this is actually Marxist. I said so we’re supposed to go to work full-time and put our children into care provided by the state—like the Communist government—and why are we calling this liberation? And so very quickly I was booted out and went off to open a community center for mothers and children. ...

So the feminists of that era drew a lot of their playbooks directly from the communists. It's an interesting story, but to Lewis, it's mainly a story about Lewis:

Reading [This Way To The Revolution], I could feel the familiar grooves of the arguments about feminists versus “ordinary women.” There has long been a tendency to depict feminism as an elite project, and university-educated women are more likely to describe themselves as feminists.

Finding herself promoted deputy editor at the New Statesman, she got caught in the maelstrom following the publication of Caitlin Moran's How To Be A Woman, with now long-established patterns of insult and magic words hurled like so many hand grenades: "privileged", "transphobe", "white feminist", and on and on. She receives a Twitter pile-on that didn't really end until ... wait, whose story is this? It could be worse, but it could have been a lot shorter, too.

Why Don't Federal And Texas Homicides By Illegal Immigrants Match?

I recently encountered a piece at American Thinker purporting to show that illegal immigrants murder at much higher rates than the general US population. Randall Hoven's piece starts with a March, 2011 GAO survey (PDF) estimating the number of murderers among the ranks of "criminal aliens" (a group that includes people legally in the United States) in state jails under the DOJ's State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, or SCAAP) and ones in the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) committed over two periods:

To determine the number and nationalities of criminal aliens incarcerated, we analyzed BOP data on criminal aliens incarcerated in federal prisons from fiscal years 2005 through 2010 and SCAAP data on criminal aliens incarcerated in state prisons and loca l jails from fiscal years 2003 thorough 2009.

Hoven takes 2009 DHS estimates of 10.8 million illegal aliens in the United States, and a total alien population of 25.9 million, from the GAO study. Given there are two periods and two prison populations studied by the GAO, this leads to obvious problems with coming up with the right numerator and denominator. Over the study period, on page 21 (PDF page 27) they claim 25,064 criminal aliens were imprisoned for homicide. Assuming a static population over the longer of the two terms studied (which is clearly false but will serve to increase the rate otherwise), that means

Let’s take homicide as an example. The GAO estimates “criminal aliens” were arrested, convicted and incarcerated for 25,064 homicides. If non-citizens committed them over seven years, the annual rate would be 14.2 per 100,000 non-citizens. If illegal aliens committed them over four years, the annual rate would be 58.0 per 100,000 illegal aliens. Either way you compute, those are high rates.

So far, so bad (at least for what this means). We should expect to see similar figures from the states. Yet this hasn't materialized. Texas, according to the DHS, had 1.9 million illegal immigrants as of 2014 (PDF). The Texas Department of Public Safety records only 225 homicide convictions over a seven-year period from 2011 through 2018. This correlates with an annual homicide rate of around 1 per 100,000, which is dramatically lower than the general US population figure of around 5/100,000 — more than an order of magnitude of those calculated by Hoven, in fact.

So why the discrepancy? Digging deeper into the Bureau of Justice Assistance website, it turns out SCAAP eligibility (PDF) is contingent upon

Each applicant government is to provide detailed information about the individuals —

(1) whom the applicant government “incarcerated” for at least four consecutive days during the “reporting period,” and
(2) who the applicant government either knows were “undocumented criminal aliens,” or reasonably and in good faith believes were “undocumented criminal aliens.”

Which is to say, there's a considerable financial incentive to overreport such individuals. This isn't the end of this discussion, but it bears substantial further investigation, especially given the policy stakes.

Update: One interesting comment on this comes from the National Council of State Legislatures, which mentions that SCAAP eligibility changed starting in 2012: "SCAAP payments will only be made to states and localities only for those inmates that DHS can verify as illegal aliens. DHS will no longer reimburse states for “unknown” inmates (58 percent of the program in 2010)." Indeed, looking at the 2010 data (Excel spreadsheet, the closest year available before the 2011 GAO report, more years available here), 43% of the total presented to UCA for SCAAP reimbursement (21,831 of 50,402 total from Texas) fell into the "unknown" category. This seems ripe for exaggeration, as well.

Update 2: It would appear that SCAAP data would also admit illegal aliens, suspected or actual, who had been jailed in preparation for a trial in which they may have been exonerated. So the "crime" listed might entirely be speculative.