http://www.race-talk.org/?p=3316
Welp.
Filing this under "why humanity sucks".
My gut instinct is that this article is a wee bit slanted. I'm sure the statistics are correct, but they're presented in a misleading way. For instance, the comment about 80% of the arrests being possession of Marijuana--given that it was surrounded by all the negative impacts of imprisonment, my mind assumed that they probably were being imprisoned. But if it's anything like Canada, they weren't--they get arrested, get a ride in the car, an overnight stay, a slap on the wrist, and then they'd be gone.
And as far as the falling scores go, those have much more frequently been linked to crack cocaine rather than the war on drugs. In fact, many Affrican Americans still believe that Crack was created by the CIA to kill the black people. I find the allegation absurd, but there's no question that Crack hit the African American population much harder than any other demographic. It was a drug they could actually afford frequently, giving many of them their first serious substance abuse addiction; and Crack's high is relatively short, allowing a high level of addiction to be built up in a short period of time. Also: for the first time, Black people were finding themselves able to buy drugs directly from suppliers (instead of going through the mafia) meaning they could actually make a profit out of being a drug dealer.
Which is why I find myself a bit weirded out by this article trying to claim "black people don't do drugs nearly as much as white people." The crack explosion in black communities is very well-documented. And I have a friend who lives in the ghetto--I adore her African American neighbors (if they hear us singing Beatles songs they'll burst through the door to provide harmony); but the way she tells it she could buy pot from anyone on the block (and given that every time I visit she seems to have a ready supply of pot, I believe her). Point is, ever since the advent of crack, there have been a lot of drugs in American ghettoes.
And to say that "no, we shouldn't arrest them, drugs aren't a big deal" is clearly not a fix-all; crime rates were on a steady decline before crack, and since the advent of crack were on a heavy incline, largely due to ghetto turf wars. African American males became the #1 murder victim of any demographic (per capita) by a factor of about 4:1, and almost always murdered by other African Americans. Test scores of African Americans in schools dropped precipitously. Average weight of newborn African American babies dropped dramatically. To have not gotten involved would be very irresponsible.
Not saying that American politicians don't have their heads screwed on wrong in some ways; I've always found the length of American prison sentences a bit unreasonable. But "tough on crime" is a motto I've seen politicians yell in several other countries; countries where there's no racial connection at all. There will always be a section of the voterbase you can appease by being "tough on crime"--whether or not this toughness is actually effective. And I would hazard a guess that most American voters don't imagine a black person when they think "tough on crime" either--the most publicized criminals in America have all been white--Charles Manson, Timothy McVeigh, the Unibomber, the Columbine boys, and the mormons who kidnapped Elisabeth Smart. If someone told me to visualize a criminal, I'd visualize a white guy with tattoos, and I think most Americans would too. Which is to say, I'm hardly convinced that the voterbase calling for "tough on crime" is doing so out of fear of black people. Maybe some politicians are, but several of them probably say "tough on crime" just because it's a popular thing to say with the voterbase.
It's all about money, too. More arrests made, the more funding the DEA gets. It's so much easier to do this by A) nailing poor people who can't afford lawyers and B) focusing all their 'efforts' in a handful of locations, so they have no real incentive to branch out of the inner cities. So a disproportionate amount of Blacks and Hispanics get arrested because they're the ones usually living in the inner city.
Oh, definitely. And there is class discrimination there. But as you mentioned, it's not just blacks. Hell, go to a trailer park filled with poor white folks, and ask them whether they like cops. I'm betting the answer is no.
This isn't even getting into the conscious racial profiling most police do.
Well, yes, racial profiling is a really serious and well-documented problem, that undoubtedly contributes to the skewed nature of a lot of these statistics. But even if we legalized all drugs tomorrow, I don't think you'd stop racial profiling.
I dunno, it's weird, I agree with this guy's goal--regulations around drugs should be stripped away. But this should be done because other countries have shown that legalization helps the problem.
