Drug War Racially Biased

To all those who are privileged enough, or "white" enough to think that there exists no racial or economic class borders in our country, I give you (once again) the "Drug War":

More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large 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 drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.

According to the HRW report , the disparities are huge: 

Across the 34 states, a black man is 11.8 times more likely than a white man to be sent to prison on drug charges, and a black woman is 4.8 times more likely than a white woman.  
 
In 16 states, African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at rates between 10 and 42 times greater than the rate for whites [emphasis mine]. The 10 states with the greatest racial disparities in prison admissions for drug offenders are: Wisconsin, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, West Virginia, Colorado, New York, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and Michigan.

Did you notice that the majority of the worst offending states are north of the Mason/Dixon line?  So don't make the mistake of assuming that this is a problem with The South.  Racism in the US is everywhere, and cuts to the root of our problems (by "our" of course I mean the majority of the population) which is economic exploitation, in which race is still a huge factor in who is an elite and who is not.

tags: racism  drugs  lies  

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