Pubdate: Sat, 12 Aug 2000
Source: Baltimore Sun (MD)
Copyright: 2000 The Baltimore Sun, a Times Mirror Newspaper.
Contact:  501 N. Calvert Street P.0. Box 1377 Baltimore, MD 21278
Fax: (410) 315-8912
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Forum: http://www.sunspot.net/cgi-bin/ultbb/Ultimate.cgi?actionintro
Author: Gregory Kane

UNEVEN DRUG SENTENCING IS LIBERALISM, NOT RACISM

IT'S BEEN a couple of months now since that study came out about drugs and 
the criminal justice system in Maryland. You know, the one that said blacks 
are jailed and sentenced disproportionately for drug crimes and that 
Maryland is the nation's worst offender.

Your beloved Sun - STOP those giggles of sarcasm this instant! - ran a 
story on the matter. The first three paragraphs or so of Todd Richissin's 
June 8 article went something like this:

"Maryland ranks number one in the percentage of minorities locked up for 
drug crimes, according to a major national study released yesterday that 
suggests national anti-drug efforts have targeted blacks while paying far 
less attention to whites.

"The study, released by the national advocacy group Human Rights Watch, 
contends that, although the vast majority of people involved with illegal 
drugs are white, far more black people in virtually every state are sent to 
prison for drug crimes.

"That is especially true in Maryland. State data indicate that nine out of 
10 people sentenced to prison for drug crimes are black, even though five 
times more whites than blacks use illegal drugs."

The Human Rights Watch report, predictably, led to much wailing and 
gnashing of teeth, with a rehash of how the criminal justice system is 
inherently racist against blacks and how institutional racism continues to 
rear its ugly head and yadda yadda yadda.

Let's deal with first things first. The report cited what many Americans 
either don't know or refuse to admit: There is as serious a drug problem 
among whites as there is among blacks. Most whites probably know this, but 
some continue to live in denial.

When I was at a news-writing seminar in St. Petersburg, Fla., in September 
I met a woman who edited a paper in Utah. She said her reporters were about 
to do a major series on the drug crisis among young whites in her 
overwhelmingly white state. She expected the grits to hit the fan once the 
series appeared, explaining that most of her readers feel drug use is an 
urban, inner-city, poor-black phenomenon and couldn't believe that their 
precious lily-white kids named Biff and Nancy and Wally and Beaver could be 
popping pills, snorting cocaine, smoking marijuana or shooting smack.

(Commentators, looking to chide the National Association for the 
Advancement of Colored People for continuing to boycott South Carolina for 
flying the Confederate flag on statehouse grounds make this error - 
unknowingly, or perhaps knowingly - when they ask why the civil rights 
organization doesn't focus its attention on drugs in the black community, 
as though only blacks use drugs.)

The major drug problem among white youth in the Midwest is methamphetamine 
use. We should all be hard-pressed to believe that the dealer selling white 
kids "meth" in the Midwest is a black kid from Baltimore or West Philly or 
Harlem with his pants hanging down his butt. If you're talking meth, you're 
probably talking white dealers and users.

But the problem, alas, is not as simple as a hypocritical double standard. 
Law enforcement focuses on black urban drug dealers and users. The cause is 
not racism. It was the Congressional Black Caucus in the mid-1980s that 
asked for mandatory minimum drug sentences and a tougher approach to street 
crime to stem the crack cocaine epidemic, says author John McWhorter. Even 
those folks who decry the disparity in sentencing for selling crack vs. 
powder cocaine can't be so daft that they won't admit crack is a far more 
potent and dangerous drug.

McWhorter, an associate professor of linguistics at the University of 
California, Berkeley who happens to be black (such minutiae being important 
to discussions such as this one) mentioned something else in his new book, 
"Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America": Those laws worked.

And since we've noted that it was liberal black Democrats who supported 
those same laws they now claim are racist, let's ask this question: Who 
runs Maryland?

The executive branch of Maryland's state government has been in the hands 
of liberal Democrats for 32 consecutive years. It has a legislature that is 
overwhelmingly liberal and Democratic, with a caucus of liberal black 
Democrats from Baltimore City and Prince George's County that has for years 
helped determine which laws do and do not get passed. Those liberal black 
Democrats always urge black voters to cast their ballots for Democrats.

So the disparity-in-drug-sentencing mess - in the state of Maryland, at 
least - is the result of traditional liberal Democratic misrule. If 
anyone's looking for someone to blame, that's where they should cast their 
gaze: at those black-and-white Donkey-crats who had the gall in the 1998 
gubernatorial campaign to accuse Republican candidate Ellen Sauerbrey of 
being a racist who opposed civil rights legislation.
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MAP posted-by: Keith Brilhart