Pubdate: Sat, 10 May 2008
Source: New York Times (NY)
Page: 18, Section A
Copyright: 2008 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/298

RACIAL INEQUITY AND DRUG ARRESTS

The United States prison system keeps marking shameful milestones. In 
late February, the Pew Center on the States released a report showing 
that more than 1 in 100 American adults are presently behind bars -- 
an astonishingly high rate of incarceration notably skewed along 
racial lines. One in nine black men aged 20 to 34 are serving time, 
as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.

Now, two new reports, by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights 
Watch, have turned a critical spotlight on law enforcement's 
overwhelming focus on drug use in low-income urban areas. These 
reports show large disparities in the rate at which blacks and whites 
are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, despite roughly equal 
rates of illegal drug use.

Black men are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug 
convictions as adult white men, according to one haunting statistic 
cited by Human Rights Watch. Those who are not imprisoned are often 
arrested for possession of small quantities of drugs and later 
released -- in some cases with a permanent stain on their records 
that can make it difficult to get a job or start a young person on a 
path to future arrests.

Similar concerns are voiced by the New York Civil Liberties Union, 
which issued a separate study of the outsized number of misdemeanor 
marijuana arrests among people of color in New York City.

Between 1980 and 2003, drug arrests for African-Americans in the 
nation's largest cities rose at three times the rate for whites, a 
disparity "not explained by corresponding changes in rates of drug 
use," The Sentencing Project finds. In sum, a dubious anti-drug 
strategy spawned amid the deadly crack-related urban violence of the 
1980s lives on, despite changed circumstances, the existence of 
cost-saving alternatives to prison for low-risk offenders or the 
distrust of the justice system sowed in minority communities.

Nationally, drug-related arrests continue to climb. In 2006, those 
arrests totaled 1.89 million, according to federal data, up from 1.85 
million in 2005, and 581,000 in 1980. More than four-fifths of the 
arrests were for possession of banned drugs, rather than for their 
sale or manufacture. Underscoring law enforcement's misguided 
priorities, fully 4 in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana 
possession. Those who favor continuing these policies have not met 
their burden of proving their efficacy in fighting crime. Nor have 
they have persuasively justified the yawning racial disparities.

All is not gloomy. Many states have begun expanding their use of drug 
treatment as an alternative to prison. New York's historic crime drop 
has continued even as it has begun to reduce the number of nonviolent 
drug offenders in prison, attesting to the oft-murky relationship 
between incarceration and crime control. In December, the United 
States Sentencing Commission amended the federal sentencing 
guidelines to begin to lower the disparities between the sentences 
imposed for crack cocaine, which is more often used by blacks, and 
those imposed for the powder form of the drug.

The looming challenge, says Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay 
College of Criminal Justice, is to have arrest and incarceration 
policies that are both effective for fighting crime and promoting 
racial justice and respect for the law. As the new findings attest, 
the nation has a long road to travel to attain that goal. 
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