Race And The Drug War

Reuters is looking at the disparities in Drug Prohibition Enforcement in America.

The numbers tell the story of a criminal justice system blighted by racial disparities in drug law enforcement: African-Americans make up around 12 percent of the U.S. population, account for 33.6 percent of drug arrests and 37 percent of state prison inmates serving time for drug offenses.

The figures come from Human Rights Watch, a New York-based watchdog which complains in its 2011 report about “overwhelming racial disparities” in drug incarcerations despite the fact that blacks and whites engage in drug offenses at equivalent rates. The Sentencing Project, an advocacy group which has tracked disparities in the criminal justice system for the past 25 years, says the black-white gap cannot be explained by disproportionate criminal behavior.

While African-Americans are the minority most affected by racial disparities, they are not the only one, according to Human Rights Watch: “Black non-Hispanic males are incarcerated at a rate more than six times that of white non-Hispanic males and 2.6 times that of Hispanic males. One in 10 black males aged 25-29 were in prison or jail in 2009; for Hispanic males the figure was 1 in 25; for white males only 1 in 64.”

Such statistics have been studied for years by academics, lawyers, and law enforcement experts but public debate has been subdued. This is changing in the wake of sharply critical reports timed to coincide with the 40th anniversary of President Richard Nixon’s declaration of the war on drugs in June. There is growing recognition that the war has been a costly mistake.

But winding it down would require fresh thinking at all levels of the government and the criminal justice establishment and there is little evidence of that from the man who, in January 2004, declared that “the war on drugs has been an utter failure. We need to rethink and decriminalize our marijuana laws … we need to rethink how we’re operating in the drug war. Currently, we are not doing a good job.” That was then-state Senator Barack Obama, no stranger to drugs in his youth.

The Wiki on Race and the War on Drugs tells the story.

In 1998 there were wide racial disparities in arrests, prosecutions, sentencing and deaths. African-Americans, who only comprised 13% of regular drug users, made up for 35% of drug arrests, 55% of convictions, and 74% of people sent to prison for drug possession crimes.[1] Nationwide African-Americans sent to state prisons for drug offenses 13 times more often than white men[8], even though they only comprise 13% of regular drug users.[1]

In the late 1990s, black and white women had similar levels of drug use during pregnancy. In spite of this, black women were 10 times as likely as white women to be reported to a child welfare agency for prenatal drug use.[9]

Go to the Wiki for links.

The Left has its class war and they use taxes to enforce it. The Right has its class war and they use Drug Prohibition to enforce it (Nixon and Reagan are the most prominent Drug Warriors despite the fact that Clinton ramped it up to about 2X what had been going on before his term). The Left goes after the rich and the Right goes after the poor. Between them a feller doesn’t stand a chance.