LAST WEEK, THE Legislature once again refused to increase the appallingly low number of African-Americans and women on the state’s appellate bench.

As usual, you can find explanations that have nothing to do with race or gender. Occasionally, lawmakers have chosen a clearly better-qualified white man over a black or female opponent; more often, the candidates have brought equally compelling packages of strengths and weaknesses, and what distinguished the winning candidate was personal ties to legislators.

But whatever reason can be given for the results of any given race, one glaring fact is incontrovertible: The South Carolina General Assembly has either not realized or not accepted that in a state where a third of the population is black and half is female, yet 90 percent of the judges are white and 85 percent are men, it needs to go out of its way to put qualified black and female judges on the bench.

It’s not about political correctness, as defenders of the status quo charge, but prudence. Judges must determine who can be rehabilitated and who needs to be put away for life. That takes more than simply knowing the law; it takes being able to read different types of people, and understand different communities. In some cases, white, male former legislators can make the best calls; but other times a black or female judge has a better chance at getting it right. Having a good mix of judges — white and black, male and female, people from the upper classes and people who had to work their own way through college and law school — increases the odds of getting these crucial calls right.

More important, our judiciary, like all of government, draws its power from public trust. The dearth of black faces on the bench contributes to a feeling among a large segment of the population that the judiciary doesn’t understand or care about or intend to act fairly toward black people. That undermines trust, and endangers the ability of the judicial system, and the larger criminal justice system, to maintain the rule of law.

Unfortunately, little can be done to solve the problem until legislators acknowledge that there is a problem. And the “solution” being proposed does nothing to make that happen. Worse, it is almost certain to create even larger problems.

The House proposes to increase diversity by neutering the Judicial Merit Selection Commission, which was created just eight years ago amid outrage over the Legislature’s insistence on electing unqualified judges and elevating the least qualified candidates available.

The plan, ostensibly a reaction to complaints that the commission doesn’t nominate enough black candidates, would eliminate the commission’s nominating role and allow the Legislature to consider any candidate who meets the minimal qualifications. And, as if to make it obvious that the real goal for many is a return to cronyism, it eliminates the one-year waiting period before former legislators can run for a judgeship.

The Senate has modified the bill to restore the legislators’ waiting period and to double the number of candidates nominated rather than eliminating the nomination requirement entirely. Those changes make the legislation less harmful, but they still invite mischief, and they still will do nothing to increase diversity.

If the commission is unfairly holding back more qualified black candidates than white candidates, we can change the makeup of the commission. What we must not do is swing open the doors to back-room deals that inevitably result in a race to the bottom.