Racial Disparities Persist In Drug Arrests
WASHINGTON - The U.S. “war on drugs” disproportionately targets urban minority neighborhoods with African Americans being arrested and imprisoned on drug charges at much higher rates, according to a pair of reports released on Monday by rights groups.
New York-based Human Rights Watch said a review of new statistics across 34 states found persistent racial disparities among drug offenders sent to prison.
The 67-page report concludes that a black man is 11.8 times more likely than a white man to be sent to prison on drug charges, and a black woman is 4.8 times more likely than a white woman.
In 16 states, African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at rates between 10 and 42 times greater than the rate for whites, the report said.
“Most drug offenders are white, but most of the drug offenders sent to prison are black,” said Jamie Fellner, a Human Rights Watch official and author of the report.
“The solution is not to imprison more whites but to radically rethink how to deal with drug abuse and low-level drug offenders.”
Wisconsin, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Colorado, New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan were listed as the 10 states with the greatest racial disparities in prison admissions for drug offenders.
In a separate study, the Washington-based Sentencing Project examined data from 43 of the largest American cities between 1980 and 2003.
The study found that, since 1980, the rate of drug arrests for African Americans increased by 225 percent, compared to 70 percent among whites.
In nearly half of the cities, the odds of arrest for a drug offense among African Americans relative to whites more than doubled, the report said.
Among other findings, the report said African-American drug arrests increased at 3.4 times the rate of whites despite similar rates of drug use.
“These trends come not as the result of higher rates of drug use among African Americans, but, instead, the decisions by local officials about where to pursue drug enforcement,” said Ryan King, a policy analyst for The Sentencing Project.
The project and Human Rights Watch recommended the elimination of mandatory minimum sentences and a return to judicial discretion in the sentencing of drug offenders.
Editing by Chris Wilson
© 2008 Reuters
Illegal drug use in safe suburban homes happens far more often than the illegal drug use on the streets of our inner cities. So it appears that the real crime of most of those arrested is that they didn’t live in the suburbs.
Hoa binh
In 1964:
80% of Drug Use in America - White
80% of Crime in America - White
80% of Poverty in America - White
Back then, Whites were 87% of population, 12% were Black. In ‘64 we had 640000 humans in our prison system, 2/3 were white. Then we passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts in ‘64-’65. That’s when things started to change in so many areas of American life.
IN 2008,
80% of Drug Use in America - White
80% of Crime in America - White
80% of Poverty in America - White
70% of our population are White, 12% Black. We have 2.3 million in prison and 2/3 are now Black and Brown. We reversed the demographics while expanding the prison population 400% of Black & Brown men and women - and made it a profit center for Wall Street. We did this with a 3-prong attack:
Selective Enforcement of the Law,
Targeted incarceration,
Disproportionate sentencing.
In any other country of the world, if they deliberately incarcerated 1/3 of a minority population it would be considered a human rights violation. We are an unrepentant, genocidal Aryan slave empire, we always put the slaves in chains and put them to work (virtually all prisoners work for Fortune 500s for pennies on the $). How else can you run a Plantation?
luckyleft wrote: We are an unrepentant, genocidal Aryan slave empire
You are way too polite.
Good post luckyleft.
If I want to pursue happiness by using drugs is my choice not protected by the constitution?
I think maybe our war on drugs is more criminal than the one in Iraq.
This is nothing new. We’ve been reading articles about the racial disparity of the “War on Drugs” for at least 15 years now… Nothing changes.
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition ( www.leap.cc )
COPS SAY LEGALIZE DRUGS!
ASK US WHY
After nearly four decades of fueling the U.S. policy of a war on drugs with over a trillion tax dollars and 37 million arrests for nonviolent drug offenses, our confined population has quadrupled making building prisons the fastest growing industry in the United States. More than 2.2 million of our citizens are currently incarcerated and every year we arrest an additional 1.9 million more guaranteeing those prisons will be bursting at their seams. Every year we choose to continue this war will cost U.S. taxpayers another 69 billion dollars. Despite all the lives we have destroyed and all the money so ill spent, today illicit drugs are cheaper, more potent, and far easier to get than they were 35 years ago at the beginning of the war on drugs. Meanwhile, people continue dying in our streets while drug barons and terrorists continue to grow richer than ever before. We would suggest that this scenario must be the very definition of a failed public policy. This madness must cease!
The stated goals of current U.S.drug policy — reducing crime, drug addiction, and juvenile drug use — have not been achieved, even after nearly four decades of a policy of “war on drugs”. This policy, fueled by over a trillion of our tax dollars has had little or no effect on the levels of drug addiction among our fellow citizens, but has instead resulted in a tremendous increase in crime and in the numbers of Americans in our prisons and jails. With 4.6% of the world’s population, America today has 22.5% of the worlds prisoners. But, after all that time, after all the destroyed lives and after all the wasted resources, prohibited drugs today are cheaper, stronger, and easier to get than they were thirty-five years ago at the beginning of the so-called “war on drugs”. With this in mind, we current and former members of law enforcement have created a drug-policy reform movement — LEAP. We believe that to save lives and lower the rates of disease, crime and addiction. as well as to conserve tax dollars, we must end drug prohibition. LEAP believes that a system of regulation and control of production and distribution will be far more effective and ethical than one of prohibition. We do this in hopes that we in Law Enforcement can regain the public’s respect and trust, which have been greatly diminished by our involvement in imposing drug prohibition. Please consider joining us. You don’t have to be a cop to join LEAP! Find out more about us by reading some of the articles in our Publications section or by watching and listening to some of our multimedia clips,. You can also read about the men and women who speak for LEAP, and see what we have on the calendar for the near future.
I thought this was well known in all areas of our society.
Blacks and Latinos that live in urban areas are overt dealers of controlled substances, thus they are easier to arrest (blame it on that stupid gangster cultural mentality - or just plain stupidity, with no help from our floundering educational system - I wonder how Iraqi schools are doing with all of that nation building money we send them).
Caucasian are covert in the way they deal drugs and also make up the majority of suppliers to smaller street dealers (mentioned above) thus they are harder to arrest. Caucasians also make up the majority of those that consume or use controlled substances and get more warnings than jail time.
The problem is that there is a stereotypical paradigm in our culture that minorities do more drugs than their caucasian counterparts. This notion was first fostered, in part, by political propaganda and legislation to rid California of marijuana smoking Mexican nationals. The so called marijuana problem was also in Harlem and other minority “urban” areas not yet in the predominately white suburbs that need legislation to protect them from drug using minorities.
Remember propaganda is not always what is said, stated or promoted, there is also power in what is not said, stated or promoted. This paradigm is not going to change until enough effort is made to reverse the political propaganda.
We can always offer the petty minority criminals to serve their time in Iraq or Iran as a part of our armed forces, yet another disproportionate area concerning minorities and caucasians in this country. Yes, let’s just merge the armed services and correctional institutions, since they get more of our tax dollars than educational and social services, so our inmate soldiers can be trained to kill minorities in other countries to secure our supply of oil.
Okay, I’m done.
One way to cut crime, is legalize the mary jane to some extent. Why not? Other vices seem to be going well, such as legalized prostitution in Nevada, gambling houses everywhere, liquor and tobacco. It’s another revenue stream. Not to mention another “benefit” - disenfranchisement for felony convictions.
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But as is, gotta feed the prison industry with dope addicts. You would think with so much “snooping” and military and fences, and drones and crackdown on illegals, the drug imports would decrease. Apparently not. Minorities need to get involved and active.
Think up side, job creation: prison guards, cops, lawyers, judges, bail bondsmen,investigators, social workers, therapist. My goodness legalize or decriminalize drug use and the whole system might collapse. Let’s find out l am calling on all drug users to boycott their pusher for 1 month to see what happens, no ODs, no arrests, no profits for dealers, maybe even getting clean.
California.
Proposition 215.
Grow legally.
I bought an oz. of killer bud yesterday for $150.00 but mine will be done flowering in about seven weeks.
Northern California.
You’re invited.
To luckylefty’s excellent post I would only add:
In the United States (and most of the rest of the world) you get about as much “justice” as you can pay for”.
The current Dallas TX DA (first Adfrican American DA ever in TX!) has reopened all life imprisonment convictions (about 200) and has found so far a 40% error rate in those convictions–in other words 40% of the convicts could be proven by DNA evidence to have never committed the crime. All but one of them were Black so far.
The only reason they have had such a good record at overturning previous convictions is that (for all of its obviously racist prosecutorial tradition) Dallas is one of the few places that saves DNA evidence on crimes which made possible review and analysis of such cases. I wonder how many innocent men died for lack of such review?
Illinois Governor Ryan (despite all his political corruption) was right to commute all death row inmates’ sentences as one of his last acts as Governor.