Pubdate: Thu, 13 Sep 2012
Source: Sacramento News & Review (CA)
Copyright: 2012 Chico Community Publishing, Inc.
Contact:  http://newsreview.com/sacto/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/540
Author: Jeff vonKaenel

JIM CROW 2012

Is the War on Drugs Really a War on Minorities?

I have never spent a day in jail, even though I have committed 
felonies. During my college days at the University of California, 
Santa Barbara, along with the majority of Americans and nearly 
everyone I knew, I regularly smoked marijuana and took drugs. Yet 
very few of my fellow students were ever arrested. I thought this was 
because we were lucky.

But Ohio State University associate professor Michelle Alexander, in 
her brilliantly argued book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in 
the Age of Colorblindness, has a different explanation for my lack of 
jail time: I am white, and I live in an upper-income neighborhood. My 
other advantage: I am old. I committed my felonies before the war on drugs.

In the early 1980s, after President Ronald Reagan announced the war 
on drugs, many police departments naturally questioned why they 
should take valuable resources away from more serious crimes such as 
murder, rape, grand theft and violent assault. Reagan had an answer: 
We will give you extra money and equipment.

First, local police departments across the country were given excess 
military equipment, including 253 aircrafts, 7,856 M16 rifles and 181 
grenade launchers, all to use for the war against drugs. But this was 
just the beginning. Next, they were given special federal grants for 
drug enforcement. Then, in 1984, the Comprehensive Drug Abuse 
Prevention and Control Act of 1970 was amended to allow local police 
agencies to keep cash, cars and homes taken from people suspected of 
drug use and sales. And they did. According to a report commissioned 
by the U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. drug task forces seized more 
than $1 billion in assets between 1988 and 1992.

Due primarily to increased drug arrests and longer prisoner 
sentences, America's prison population has grown from 300,000 before 
the war on drugs to more than 2 million today. This incarceration 
rate is six to 10 times higher than any other industrial country. But 
if everyone who took drugs was arrested, almost half the population 
would be spending time in jail.

Even though the incidence of drug use and drug trafficking is nearly 
identical for whites and blacks, arrests are not. Citing Human Rights 
Watch's "Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on 
Drugs" report, Alexander reported that black men have been sent to 
state prison on drug charges more than 13 times more frequently than white men.

And this problem is growing. The incarceration rate for black men in 
2000 was 26 times what it was in 1983. At this rate, one in three 
young African-American men will serve time in prison for engaging in 
the same behavior that goes on in white neighborhoods and on white 
college campuses.

This is a national disgrace. We should not have one set of laws for 
whites and another for minorities, either in statute or in practice. 
I should have avoided prison because I was lucky, not because I was white.

[sidebar]

In Michelle Alexander's The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the 
Age of Colorblindness, she writes, "More African American adults are 
under correctional control today ... than were enslaved in 1850, a 
decade before the Civil War began."

Jeff vonKaenel is the president, CEO and majority owner of the News & 
Review newspapers in Sacramento, Chico and Reno. His column, 
Greenlight, appears weekly in this space.

Related website: 
www.amazon.com/The-New-Crow-Incarceration-Colorblindness/dp/1595581030
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MAP posted-by: Jay Bergstrom