Pubdate: Tue, 28 Dec 2004
Source: Northwest Arkansas Times (Fayetteville, AR)
Copyright: 2004 Community Publishers Inc.
Contact:  http://www.nwanews.com/times/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/828
Author: Marc H. Morial, Minuteman Media
Bookmark: http://www.mapinc.org/racial.htm (Racial Issues)
Note: Marc H. Morial is president and CEO of The National Urban League.

BIASED DRUG LAWS ARE DAMAGING SOCIETY

For three decades now, the "get tough" posture has distorted America's
response to the problem of violent crime and other so-called street
crime offenses, particularly drug use and drug trafficking. As a
result, since the 1970s, the number of inmates in the nation's jails
and prisons has ballooned from about 330,000 to 2.1 million today.
Some boast that this "lock-em-up" approach has produced the lower
crime rates of recent years - while ignoring the turmoil that soaring
expenditures for prison construction and the housing of a growing
prison population has created for state-funded social programs. Others
reject the claim that the get-tough approach has been beneficial,
asserting that demographic developments, increased crime prevention
and the impact of the 1990s economic prosperity have by far been more
important. As the former mayor of a big city - New Orleans - who led a
coalition of police and civic leaders and community organizations in
taking a significant "bite" out of crime during the 1990s, I share the
latter view. Recently, three studies, one from the federal government,
and two by private think tanks, have underscored the problems produced
by America's obsession with incarceration.

One report, released this month by the U.S. Sentencing Commission,
evaluates the effectiveness and fairness of the guidelines federal
judges must follow in sentencing convicted defendants. A second, by
The Sentencing Project, of Washington, D. C., compares the promise of
Brown v. Board of Education to the growth of the "incarceration
dynamic" in American life. In both instances, the issue of the
explosive growth in the incarceration of African-Americans and Latino
Americans is at the center of the discussion.

With good reason: For, although they comprise just 6 percent of the
total American population, African-American males make up more than 44
percent, or nearly 819,000, of America's inmates. The corrosive impact
of the black-male incarceration rate has been exacerbated in recent
years, according to a third study by the Justice Policy Institute,
because the number of African-American females being jailed has now
risen sharply, too. Three-fourths of the more than 101,000 women in
federal and state prisons last year were African-American - meaning
that black women are more than twice as likely as Latinas and five
times as likely as white women to be in prison.

These statistics led Vince Schiraldi of the JPI to declare, "the
penetration of the prison system into the black family is
extraordinary."

And the same is becoming true of Latino Americans, who, while making
up 15 percent of the nation's inmate population, which is close to
their percentage of the total population, are actually the
fastest-growing group of those being imprisoned.

Overwhelmingly, both groups' growth in incarceration has come from
convictions for relatively low-level drugusage and drug-trafficking
crimes; and here, as the U.S. Sentencing Commission study describes
the role of the federal sentencing guidelines as having been critical
- - and devastating.

While declaring that the sentencing guidelines, devised 15 years ago,
have been overwhelmingly fair and effective, the commission makes
clear that description does not apply in one particular area: the
different mandatory minimum sentences the guidelines require for
possession or trafficking of crack cocaine, on the one hand, and
powder cocaine, on the other.

Those convicted of possessing just five grams of crack cocaine - a
cheaper drug whose users and traffickers overwhelmingly are black -
receive a minimum sentence of five years. But it takes conviction for
possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine - the more expensive form of
the drug whose users overwhelmingly are white - to trigger a fiveyear
mandatory sentence.

The original justification for the gross sentencing disparity - that
crack cocaine was a more destructive form of the drug-has long been
disproved. But Congress thus far has refused to follow the
oft-repeated recommendation of the commission and many others that it
amend the guidelines and eliminate the disparate treatment.

Doing so, the commission report notes, "would dramatically improve the
fairness of the federal sentencing system." And it would be one step
in reducing America's own addiction to the incarceration habit.
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