President Barack Obama again cast an ugly glare on the race-tainted drug laws in a recent interview and in reports from the White House. He specifically finger pointed marijuana. Virtually all medical professionals have repeatedly said that marijuana use is no more damaging than alcohol, and so did Obama. If anything, judging from the thousands of family break-ups, the mountainous carnage from alcohol-related accidents and physical deaths from liquor addiction, marijuana use is far safer than alcohol. But marijuana, as with the wildly disparate racially hammering of minorities with cocaine drug busts, has also been yet another weapon in the ruthless, relentless and naked drug war on minorities, especially African-Americans. [continues 739 words]
Why More Women -- and Especially Black Women -- Are Behind Bars Some years ago I briefly worked as a social worker. Occasionally I would visit clients in jail to determine their eligibility for continued benefits. They were all men -- with one exception. She was a young black woman serving time for theft. She had two small children. She entered the visiting room handcuffed to another woman and dressed in drab prison garb. We talked through a reinforced glass window. The guards stared hard and barked out gruff commands to the women. [continues 769 words]
The Problem With The Federal Prison System For decades federal prisons were repositories for a relatively small number of mostly white, white-collar embezzlers, tax cheats, racketeers, and swindlers. But that drastically changed in 1994 when then President Clinton shoved through Congress the most punitive crime bill in American history. The law created a parade of new federal offenses and lengthened prison sentences. This virtually assured a swell in the number of those jailed in federal prisons. According to a recent Bureau of Justice report, the rate of increase of those that now stuff federal prisons more than doubled the rate of increase of those in state prisons in 2000. The leap in federal incarceration comes at a time when state prison numbers are dropping due to increased emphasis by state lawmakers on drug and alternative sentencing reforms. [continues 696 words]
For the past month the Congressional Black Caucus, the NAACP, and nearly every civil-rights group have loudly protested that thousands of blacks were "Jim Crow-ed" - turned away for various technical reasons - at the polls in Florida. They charge that if their ballots had been counted, Al Gore would have sailed to victory in Florida - and into the White House. But even without those rejected black ballots, Mr. Gore still could have bagged thousands of black votes and taken the state, avoiding the nasty legal war with George W. Bush. [continues 713 words]
Downey Gets Sympathy That Isn't Shown To Other Abusers The moment the news hit that ill-fated actor Robert Downey Jr. had been busted again for drugs, many Hollywood film and TV executives quickly rallied to his defense. Television producer Norman Lear flatly stated that Downey needed treatment, not jail. The producers of Fox's "Ally McBeal," the series in which Downey appears, praised him for his work and said they had no intention of dumping him before he finished work on two more episodes of the show. [continues 634 words]
THE dramatic action by Alameda County officials in declaring a state of emergency to get federal funds to combat AIDS/HIV infection among blacks shouldn't be a surprise. How else to call attention to the fact that blacks in the county make up nearly half of those diagnosed with the disease, though they are only 18 percent of the population? Alameda County is not the only place devastated by AIDS. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report indicated about 40 percent of all AIDS cases in 1996 in the U.S. were blacks. This comes at a time when AIDS deaths have dropped among whites. With a health crisis that wreaks this kind of carnage, it shouldn't take a state of emergency to get a rush of aid from state and federal officials. But it did. [continues 382 words]
