Pubdate: Wed, 03 Mar 1999
Source: Boston Globe (MA)
Copyright: 1999 Globe Newspaper Company.
Contact:  http://www.boston.com/globe/
Author: Derrick Z. Jackson, Globe Columnist

US CRITICISM OF CHINA RINGS HOLLOW IN US PRISONS

It will be interesting to see how long the White House can recite China's
abuses when its own moral threads are unraveling to the point that it has
become the schoolmarm scolding the world in exposed lingerie.

Last week the State Department issued a stinging report on human rights
abuses in China. The report said, ''Abuses included instances of
extrajudicial killings, torture and mistreatment of prisoners, forced
confessions, arbitrary arrest and detention, lengthy incommunicado detention
and denial of due process.

''Prison conditions at most facilities remained harsh. In many cases,
particularly sensitive political cases, the judicial system denies criminal
defendants basic legal safeguards and due process because authorities attach
higher priority to maintaining public order and suppressing political
opposition than to enforcing legal norms.''

To emphasize the point, President Clinton said last weekend in California,
''I believe, sooner or later, China will have to come to understand'' that
it ''cannot purchase stability at the expense of freedom.'' He said this as
Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was off to China, where she lectured
Chinese officials on human rights. Albright said, ''It is very important for
China to be on the right side of history.''

It is increasingly difficult for the United States to demand that China be
on the right side of history when you could take many parts of the State
Department report about China, change only the location, and have the same
report about the United States.

The United States knocks China's courts, but the United States has the
world's highest level of incarceration in the developed world. The report
complains that China does not openly recognize racism against ethnic
minorities, yet nearly every serious study of the American criminal justice
system has found that it profoundly discriminates against African-Americans
and Latinos.

The latest example of this was Sunday's New York Times, which laid out
(finally) the facts that allow one to conclude that the war on crack has
been every bit as oppressive for black and brown people as the tanks rolling
down Tiananmen Square. Filled with hysteria and absent of medical reasoning,
Congress enacted laws in the 1980s that sent holders of 40 grams of crack
cocaine to jail for 10 years while someone nailed with 400 grams of powdered
cocaine could serve a year or less in jail.

Though federal statistics show that up to 62 percent of crack users are
actually white, 90 percent of the people jailed under federal laws for crack
are African-American. Though white Americans are 76 percent of the
population and consume 75 percent of the illegal drugs in the United States,
African-Americans and Latinos make up 79 percent of drug convictions in
state courts from 1990 through 1996 and 71 percent of the drug convictions
in federal courts.

This has not reduced drug use. Only 5 percent of federal crack arrests were
for high-level dealers. Instead, the harsh laws ensnared the chumps of the
trade and unwitting friends and family of dealers, sometimes resulting in
five to 10 years for first-time offenses.

It was ironic that Clinton chose California to urge the Chinese government
to open up its political system and not to ''limit the aspirations of its
people.'' California is one of the nation's best examples of how the drug
war has sucked aspiration out of the reach of the state's youth.

There are now five times more African-Americans in California jails and
prisons than in the state's universities. Spending on prisons in California
has grown over twice as fast as spending for the state's public schools and
has skyrocketed while college spending has been cut. The cuts are so
parallel with prison spending that there is little doubt of a direct shift
in spending, even though it costs $22,000 a year to incarcerate someone in
the state while it costs $4,000 a year for college. Prison guards now make
more than university professors.

Clinton knows this. He knew that the crack laws were unjust from the start.
He knows that vast numbers of the people being jailed for drugs are
nonviolent offenders whom studies would say would more effectively reclaim
their lives and the livelihoods of their families with education and other
second chances.

But he and his cowering administration have been unwilling for six years to
challenge the gulag mentality of the Republicans. Clinton has waited so long
that he has handed the Chinese government the spoon to feed him his own
medicine. When the State Department released its report last week, Chinese
officials wasted no time in firing back, in effect, ''yes, and what about
your prisons, your black people dying at the hands of the police, your
widening gap between rich and poor and 41 million people going without
health insurance?''

Clinton has waited so long that each complaint about China only begs a
harder look at home. He criticizes China for lack of due process. He cannot
say anything until he moves to end the undue process of the crack laws and
the undue procession of black men from hope into jail.

Derrick Z. Jackson is a Globe columnist.

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