Pubdate: Thu, 08 Jun 2000
Source: USA Today (US)
Copyright: 2000 USA TODAY, a division of Gannett Co. Inc.
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Website: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nfront.htm
Author: Gary Fields

STUDY: WAR ON DRUGS IS STACKED AGAINST BLACKS

WASHINGTON -- America's war on drugs is unfairly targeting blacks,
according to a report that says they are being jailed at much higher
rates than whites even though five times as many whites use drugs.

The report by Human Rights Watch, a New York-based activist group,
says 62% of the drug offenders sent to state prisons are black. The
report also says that two out of five blacks sent to state prisons are
there on drug charges, compared with one out of four whites who are
serving time in state prisons.

"Five times as many whites use drugs as blacks," says Jamie Fellner,
associate counsel for Human Rights Watch and author of the report.
"But blacks comprise the great majority of drug offenders in prison."

There are 1.8 million people in America's jails and prisons. That
figure is expected to hit 2 million in 2001. Blacks, who account for
about 13% of the U.S. population, have made up the majority of the
nation's inmates since 1995.

Fellner says the statistics, based on data from 37 states, suggest
that "police are deploying drug law enforcement resources in certain
neighborhoods, and they are not doing it on Wall Street or at Ivy
League schools."

To make enforcement of drug laws more equitable, the report suggests
that:

* More resources go to drug treatment.

* Mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders be
repealed.

* The number of drug courts be increased.

"There are other ways to protect neighborhoods without sending 100,000
drug offenders to prison every year," Fellner says.

The report was greeted skeptically by some law enforcement officials,
who said the incarceration figures for blacks are being driven upward
in part by justifiably aggressive responses by police to intense drug
dealing in low-income urban neighborhoods.

"What is a police officer supposed to do if he sees a black guy on the
street breaking the law, not arrest him?" asks James Pasco of the
Fraternal Order of Police. "The people who live in those areas . . .
are the victims, and they are usually of the same ethnicity as the
perpetrators."

James Polley, communications director for the National District
Attorneys Association, cautions that basing a national report on
arrest statistics is problematic because there are nearly 3,000
prosecutors across the USA, and each may decide his own priorities for
prosecution. "Large metropolitan areas can skew a state's statistics,"
he says.

Human Rights Watch officials say that even when those factors are
taken into account, the figures for drug convictions show a criminal
justice system tilted against blacks.

According to the report, Maryland had the greatest disparity between
the size of its black population and its number of blacks in prison in
1996, the most recent year for which Justice Department prison census
statistics are available. Seventy-eight percent of Maryland's prison
population was black then, compared with 27% of the state's population.

Mike Morrill, spokesman for Maryland Gov. Parris Glendening, said a
sentencing commission has been examining racial disparity within the
state's courts for the past year. Glendening has increased funding for
drug treatment from$44 million to $62.5 million this year, Morrill
says.

Bob Weiner, spokesman for Barry McCaffrey, director of the White House
Office of National Drug Control Policy, says McCaffrey has long touted
several of the ideas suggested in the report. That's why McCaffrey has
supported the increase in state drug courts from 12 in 1995 to 750
now. "Drug courts make it possible for persons who would otherwise be
imprisoned to instead receive mandatory drug treatment and testing,"
Weiner says.

McCaffrey has pushed for a 32% increase in federal drug-treatment
funding, to $3.8 billion a year. "He has also emphasized that there be
a law enforcement component that potential drug abusers know is
there," Weiner says. 
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