AP Impugns Military Vets as More Likely to Commit Sex Crimes
Media Research Center
"Last year John Kerry badmouthed Americans who serve in the military as uneducated failures. Now the Associated Press is badmouthing them as perverts," James Taranto relayed in his Tuesday "Best of the Web Today" compilation for OpinionJournal.com. Indeed, AP Washington reporter Matt Apuzzo led a Sunday night dispatch: "Military veterans in prison are more than twice as likely to have been convicted for sex offenses as non-veteran inmates, federal researchers say."
Taranto, however, undermined the premise: "The sex-crime incarceration rate for veterans is 23% of 630 per 100,000, or 145 per 100,000. The sex-crime incarceration rate for non-veterans is 9% of 1,390 per 100,000, or 125 per 100,000. The veteran rate is only 16% higher than the non-veteran rate. The AP notes that the overwhelming majority of veterans are male, but it does not note that men commit the overwhelming majority of crimes. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 11.3% of all men will be in prison at some time in their lives, vs. just 1.8% of women. Veterans, then, are far more law-abiding, both in terms of sex crimes and non-sex crimes, than non-veterans, once we adjust for the sex ratio."
Taranto's May 22 item:
Last year John Kerry badmouthed Americans who serve in the military as uneducated failures. Now the Associated Press is badmouthing them as perverts:
"Military veterans in prison are more than twice as likely to have been convicted for sex offenses as non-veteran inmates, federal researchers say. They cannot say why....
"Veterans are half as likely to be incarcerated as those without service experience in the first place, researchers found, but 23 percent of the veterans in prison were sex offenders, compared with 9 percent of nonveteran inmates....
"The incarceration rate for veterans is 630 per 100,000, compared to 1,390 per 100,000 for non-veterans. More than 90 percent of U.S. veterans are male and 99 percent of the veterans in prison are male."
The headline reads "Study: Imprisoned Military Vets More Likely to Have Sex Crime Convictions Than Others." It could just as easily read, "Study: Military Vets Far Less Likely to Be Imprisoned Than Others."
What's more, it's very easy to make the sex-crime disparity vanish. The sex-crime incarceration rate for veterans is 23% of 630 per 100,000, or 145 per 100,000. The sex-crime incarceration rate for non-veterans is 9% of 1,390 per 100,000, or 125 per 100,000. The veteran rate is only 16% higher than the non-veteran rate.
The AP notes that the overwhelming majority of veterans are male, but it does not note that men commit the overwhelming majority of crimes. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, 11.3% of all men will be in prison at some time in their lives, vs. just 1.8% of women. Veterans, then, are far more law-abiding, both in terms of sex crimes and non-sex crimes, than non-veterans, once we adjust for the sex ratio.
Probably the AP was just being sloppy, but the result was to smear Americans who have served their country in uniform.
END of Excerpt
Taranto's Tuesday rundown: www.opinionjournal.com
The FoxNews.com posting of the AP story was headlined, "Study: Imprisoned Military Vets More Likely to Have Sex Crime Convictions Than Others." See: www.foxnews.com
But to be fair to the AP, while that headline matched the lead sentence, it may not have been their wording. Yahoo posted the same article under the more benign "Study finds trend among imprisoned vets." See: news.yahoo.com
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