Pubdate: Tue, 28 Aug 2001
Source: Seattle Times (WA)
Section: Editorials & Opinion
Copyright: 2001 The Seattle Times Company
Contact:  http://www.seattletimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/409
Author: Neal Peirce
Note: Neal Peirce's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times.
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/prison.htm (Incarceration)

DEFENDING THE DRUG WAR AGAINST CHARGES OF RACISM

The United States, rarely shy about condemning other nations for 
human-rights abuses, will get a dose of its own medicine when the World 
Conference Against Racism opens in Durban, South Africa, on Friday.

The target: America's "war on drugs" and the charge that it is inherently 
racist because black men are being imprisoned for drug offenses at 13 times 
the rate of white men.

A team of U.S. lawyers, clergy, drug-policy and alternative-incarceration 
experts, organized as the Campaign to End Race Discrimination in the War on 
Drugs, will assert that America's criminal-justice system has been turned 
into an "apartheid-like" device.

"We don't want to see the United States continue to get off the hook on 
this," says Deborah Small of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy Foundation, 
one of the U.S. delegates. "There has been a lot more attention about 
racial profiling and to the death penalty internationally than to the drug 
war. But there is no other public policy in the U.S. that affects so many 
people detrimentally."

The campaign last week also released a letter to U.N. Secretary-General 
Kofi Annan calling on leaders in Africa and the international community at 
large to speak out against the United States for allegedly racist pursuit 
of its drug war.

What are we to make of this attempt to make an international cause celebre 
of our drug and incarceration policies?

I'd like to say it's based on exaggeration, oversimplification and 
half-truths. But I can't.

The motivation behind our drug wars, our mandatory minimum sentences, our 
willingness to let our incarceration rate balloon to the highest in the 
world, was not race but "law-and-order" politics. Yet, the impact of our 
policies has become profoundly racist. We know it. We just do precious 
little to correct it.

Consider: According to the Washington-based Sentencing Project, African 
Americans are 13 percent of drug users but represent 35 percent of arrests 
for drug possession, 55 percent of convictions and 74 percent of prison 
sentences.

And there's little mystery why. First, there's location: Poor black city 
neighborhoods - not calm white suburbs - are the scene of massive street 
sweeps, buy-and-bust operations.

And then, there's class. Jenni Gainsborough of the Sentencing Project 
notes: "If you're white middle-class and your kid is on drugs, you call the 
treatment center. In the inner city, there's no treatment. Your first port 
of call is the criminal-justice system - and it escalates. Once you have a 
record, every interaction leads to a stronger sanction."

States fed these fires with their tough laws of recent years, and the 
federal government, if anything, is worse. Under a 1986 federal law, it 
takes only one-hundredth the amount of crack cocaine (generally more 
popular in black neighborhoods) to trigger the same mandatory minimum 
sentence as powder cocaine (more popular among affluent whites).

In 1995, one of three American black men between 20 and 29 was either in 
jail, prison, on parole or probation. In many city neighborhoods, more than 
half of young black men spend time in prison. Even those inclined to form 
permanent relationships can't do so from behind bars. As ex-felons, jobs 
are rare. In 13 states, they can't even vote after their release.

Official policy, says James Compton, president of the Chicago Urban League, 
is leading to "incapacitation of future generations . . . crime, addiction, 
poverty, hopelessness and despair in the black community."

There are a few shreds of hope. Justice Department figures show the count 
of Americans behind bars (over 2 million) is starting to level off after 
its explosive growth in the '90s.

And California's reform Proposition 36, passed in 2000, means nearly 40,000 
nonviolent drug users each year will receive treatment rather than being 
slapped in prisons.

But rolling back the incarceration tide may be tough. During the '90s, 
states added 528,000 new prison beds, costing $26.4 billion. Many rural 
areas scrambled to get the prisons and their payrolls. Today, thousands of 
rural white men guard black city convicts.

Try to close such prisons and localities will likely fight as fiercely as 
when military bases are threatened with shutdowns, says the Sentencing 
Project's Marc Mauer. And not just for the jobs. The census counts 
prisoners where they're incarcerated, not their home cities. Result: the 
prison towns get extra political clout and government grants; the desperate 
inner cities lose both.

"Drug prohibition has become a replacement system for segregation," says 
Ira Glazer, director of the American Civil Liberties Union. "It has become 
a system of separating out, subjugating, imprisoning . . . substantial 
portions of a population based on skin color."

One winces at the harsh words. Few of the legislators who wrote today's 
laws anticipated such outcomes. But the results are negative enough to give 
strong credence to the charges of racist policy being leveled against our 
country. And we have no one to blame but ourselves.
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MAP posted-by: Terry Liittschwager