Though the Crime Bill just passed by Congress toughens federal sentencing provisons and makes more federal crimes subject to the death penalty, it is irrelevant to people longing for safer streets and neighborhoods. Also largely irrelevant is the proposal to make more offenses federal crimes. There may be more federal crimes, but there won’t be more federal courts, so most of those offenses will continue to be dealt with as state crimes.

Even the provisions that may be relevant—more police officers and grants for prison construction and operation—may not be the unqualified boon they appear to be at first glance. State and local governments will have to find money for expensive matching programs—and in a few years they will have to find even more money, because they will be paying the full cost. There is also big money in the bill for what are termed “community crime prevention programs.” In plain language, that means pork-barrel projects, with grants and federal jobs that members of Congress can use to buy votes.

And then there is the Racial Justice Act. The Racial Justice Act was passed by the House but omitted from the final crime bill. It would have allowed death-row inmates to use statistics to challenge a state or federal death sentence as racially biased. The government would then have had to prove a negative—that there was no discrimination based on race. The Congressional Black Caucus agreed to drop the Racial Justice Act from the crime bill after President Clinton promised to use executive orders to achieve the same result on the federal level. Senate Republicans had promised to filibuster the crime bill to death if the provision was in it.

The Racial Justice Act might more accurately have been termed the Racial Injustice Act, since it was about neither justice nor race; instead, it was a backdoor approach to outlawing the death penalty. Although ostensibly aimed at benefiting blacks sentenced to death, the act would equally have opened the door to claims by whites. It would have made it almost impossible to carry out any death sentence anywhere. It would have negated the principle that every case, and the persons involved, be considered on its own individual merits. Besides, even the Devil can quote statistics (like Scripture) to his purpose.

Blacks make up a higher percentage of death-row inmates than they do of the general population. However, Nancy E. Roman of the Washington Times, who made an extensive examination of studies on the death penalty and race, found a wide body of research demonstrating that racial bias does not account for the disparity between the percentages of whites and blacks arrested, imprisoned, or sentenced to death. Moreover, a study by Stephen Klein of the Rand Corporation found that there is no disparity between those sentenced to death for killing whites and those sentenced for killing blacks, when factors such as severity and number of crimes committed are considered. Others, including Patrick Lanagan of the Bureau of Justice Statistics, have published studies with results similar to Mr. Klein’s.

Nonetheless, there have been occasional studies that conclude that racial discrimination does exist in sentencing. One—the conclusions of which have since been challenged—was used unsuccessfully in an appeal to the Supreme Court in 1987. Opponents of capital punishment will doubtless commission others.

Although promoters of the act concentrated their fire on perceived discrimination against blacks, whites, who make up about 58 percent of death-row inmates, might well have made even more use of it to challenge their sentences. For instance, a white death-row inmate could have cited statistics to claim that a smaller percentage of blacks convicted of the same crime in the same community under the same circumstances have been sentenced to death. As passed by the House, the Racial Justice Act would also have covered all of the more than 2,500 inmates already awaiting execution. This means that appeals could have tied up courts for years to come.

Joseph Katz, a professor of statistics at Georgia State University, objects to defining fairness in sentencing as the percentage of whites and blacks sentenced to death. Mr. Katz and others have found that death sentences have more to do with the types of crimes committed and the circumstances under which they were committed than with the race of the criminal or victim. Mr. Katz has pointed out that, under the standards of the Racial Justice Act, the fairest way to correct the perceived inequity in the system would be to sentence to death more blacks who kill blacks, since statistically they receive the death penalty least of all murderers.

Would the nation be better off with or without any federal crime bill at all? It’s arguable. What the nation does not need, however, is a criminal justice system based on quotas.