Human Rights Watch, Sentencing Project Release Reports on Racial Disparities in Drug War Policing

From the New York Times:

[L]arge disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates. Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on inner-city drug use, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.

(Above: LAPD officers interview three men who were stopped after officers "detected the smell of marijuana," according to the LA Times.  Photo by Rick Loomis, LA Times. Below: SFPD officers interview a "suspected gang member" on 24th Street in San Francisco, a few blocks away from my house. Photo by Brant Ward, San Francisco Chronicle.)

The Human Rights Watch report is called Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcment and Race in the United States (pdf). The Sentencing Project report is called Disparity by Geography: The War on Drugs in America's Cities (pdf), and is written by Ryan S. King.

These reports come only months after the release of The Vortex, the Justice Policy Institute report which documented exactly the same thing: dramatic racial disparities in the policing of drug crime -- with minorities being arrested at dozens of times the rates of whites despite comparable levels of drug use.

This is an issue, it would seem, that is beginning to get a little uncomfortable for America!

The New York Times, for some reason, gives Hillary Clinton a free pass on this issue, writing that both she and Obama "have strongly condemned the wider racial disparities in arrests and incarceration during their campaigns, although neither has said how to end them." What's left out of this bland description is that after the federal Sentencing Commission changed the federal sentencing law around crack cocaine to address the fact that is was being used in a grossly discriminatory manner to disproportionately affect blacks, Hillary Clinton publicly came out against retroactivity of that change.

As Prof. Berman of the Sentencing Law and Policy Blog has noted, the only other politicians taking that stance were the Justice Department and the Republicans in the House Judiciary Committee. Clinton's position on crack sentencing retroactivity was simply an embarrassment. It was, in Prof. Berman's words, "a racialized decision that echoed her husband's tendency to talk a good game about racial justice, but then actively support criminal justice laws that have well-known and pernicious racial inequities." So it's not simply that Clinton has failed to put forth solutions in this area: she has, in fact, actively opposed reform to one of the most obvious ways that the drug war has impacted minorities.   

Comments

[Wes]

Another reason Clinton shouldn't be the democratic nominee.

[Chrisa]

The Len Bias Law and its effect on the black community is a disgrace on the American war on drugs. It made the penalties for crack much more severe than coke and took many of blacks, especially black fathers, out of their communities.

This is odd considering most politicians and sociologists tout the need for a two-parent household.

These new laws should be used retroactively in order to correct the racism of the Len Bias laws and attempt to somewhat correct the wrongs of the past.

As far as the racism that still exists in prosecuting more minorities, I do not think that this is correctable. As long as whites live in predominantly suburbs that are policed by people who know them, they will not go to jail for their drug use.