Blacks in prison
The Associated Press

Adult black males are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men.

Featured Topic | Posted 8 weeks 3 days ago

Why are blacks punished for drug crimes more often than whites?

Even though blacks and whites use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates, blacks are more likely to end up in prison as a result. Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the lives of black men: adult black males are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug convictions as adult white men.

Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.

Why are African Americans punished for drug crimes more often than whites? And what should be done?

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Ben likes: High incarceration a function of crime, not racism

Heather Mac Donald/Investor's Business Daily

The favorite culprits for high black prison rates include a biased legal system, draconian drug enforcement and even prison itself. None of these explanations stands up to scrutiny.

The black incarceration rate is overwhelmingly a function of black crime. Insisting otherwise only worsens black alienation and further defers a real solution to the black crime problem.

Racial activists usually remain silent about that problem. But in 2005, the black homicide rate was more than seven times higher than that of whites and Hispanics combined, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

When prominent figures such as Barack Obama make sweeping claims about racial unfairness in the criminal-justice system, they play with fire. The evidence is clear: Black prison rates result from crime, not racism. The dramatic drop in crime in the 1990s, to which stricter sentencing policies unquestionably contributed, has freed thousands of law-abiding inner-city residents from the bondage of fear.

The continuing search for the chimera of criminal-justice bigotry is a useless distraction that diverts energy and attention from the crucial imperative of helping more inner-city boys stay in school — and out of trouble.

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Joel likes: Where is the justice?

Leonard Pitts Jr./Miami Herald

I need no lectures to remind me that good people inhabit the system; my cousin is a federal prosecutor. Nor do I need any lectures on the heroism of cops; I've ridden with police, been protected by them and yield to no one in my admiration for those who do that job with honor.

So save the lectures, just give me an answer: How can I trust a system whose biases against people who look like me are simultaneously well-documented, yet happily ignored by those who resemble me not at all.

The question matters because without trust, the system doesn't work. Everybody came down, and justifiably so, on the idiot rapper who said last year that he would not call police even if a serial killer were living next door. Unfortunately, fewer people bothered to ask where such profound distrust comes from. Fewer still bothered to ask what it leads to.

People don't participate in systems they don't trust. They don't come forward, they don't testify. So criminals go uncaptured and crimes, unpunished. Yet some black people apparently find that preferable to participating in a system they believe is rigged against them. I don't agree with them, but before you condemn them, ask yourself: Would you play in a game refereed by someone who hated you? What's the point?

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