How are communities of color targeted by drug law enforcement?

Though their rates of drug use are roughly equal to those of whites, African Americans are arrested for drug offenses at six times the rate of whites.(1) The drug war subjects communities of color to systematic racial profiling, as well as to increasingly aggressive police tactics such as massive street sweeps, "buy and bust" operations, and other activities heavily targeted at street level drug activity (as opposed to the less visible drug activity prevalent in more affluent communities).

• A 1996 study of traffic stops along I-95 in Maryland showed that blacks constituted 72.9% of all drivers stopped and searched by the state police, though they made up only 17.5% of the total drivers, and were no more likely than their white counterparts to be violating the law. Lawsuits alleging racial profiling of motorists have been filed in Maryland, New Jersey, Illinois, Indiana, Pennsylvania, Florida, and other states.(2)
• Communities of color are disproportionately affected by increasingly militarized local law enforcement. Nearly 90% of police departments have a paramilitary unit, whose most common use is serving drug-related search warrants - generally "no-knock" entries into private residences, which defy the Fourth Amendment prohibition of "unreasonable searches and seizures."(3)
• In 1999, though African Americans made up just 13% of the population, they constituted nearly half of its prison population. In 1995, one in three black men between the ages of 23 and 29 was either in jail, prison, or on parole or probation.(5)

African-Americans comprise nearly two-thirds of all drug offenders admitted to state prison, though they constitute only 13% of American drug users. According to a recent Human Rights Watch report, black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men - with rates up to 57 times greater in some states. In Maryland and Illinois, blacks constitute 90% of all people sent to prison for drug law violations.(6)

Federal mandatory minimum sentences make African American drug law violators more likely to be incarcerated, and for longer periods of time, than their white counterparts. Under legislation passed by Congress in 1986, it takes 1/100 as much crack cocaine as powder cocaine to trigger equal mandatory minimum sentences. In 1995, although African Americans did not constitute the majority of crack users, they accounted for 88% of those sentenced for crack offenses and whites just 4.1%.(7)

How has the drug war's obstruction of effective needle exchange and other harm reduction measures affected the spread of HIV/AIDS in communities of color?

AIDS is now the leading cause of death among African Americans between the ages of 25 and 44. More than 60% of these deaths are associated, either directly or indirectly, with the use of unsterile syringes by injection drug users. More than 110,000 African Americans had injection-related AIDS or had already died from injection-related AIDS by the end of 1997.(9)

AIDS is now the leading cause of death among Latinos aged 25 to 44. Over half of these deaths are injection-related. More than 54,000 Latinos had injection- related AIDS or had already died from injection-related AIDS by the end of 1997.(10)

Among injecting drug users, African Americans are four times more likely than whites to be diagnosed with AIDS. Among African Americans, there were 11,500 new drug injection-related AIDS cases in 1995 - nearly twice the number among whites.(11)

How has the drug war undermined African American political representation?

Almost 1.4 million African American males, or 14% of the adult black male population, are currently disenfranchised as a result of felony convictions. Black men represent more than 36% of the total disenfranchised male population in the U.S., although they make up less than 15% of American males.(12)

Prisoners are counted by the national census as residents of the towns in which they are imprisoned, leaving their hometowns - often urban communities of color - with diminished political power and government funding. Since voting representation and the distribution of government resources are determined by population, drug law convicts of color bring a transfer of public funds and electoral influence from their home communities, which are generally urban and often poor, to the mostly rural towns in which they are imprisoned.(13)

Notes:

1. Jamie Fellner and Marc Mauer, Losing the Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States, The Sentencing Project 13 (October 1998).
2. Harris, David. Driving While Black: Racial Profiling on our Nation's Highways. An ACLU Special Report. June 1999.
3. P. Kraska & V. Kappeler, "Militarizing American Police: The Rise and Normalization of Paramilitary Units," Social Problems, Vol. 44, No. 1 (1997, February).
4. Allen J. Beck, Prison and Jail Inmates at Midyear 1999, U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics 10 (1999).
5. Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs. Human Rights Watch. May 2000. Vol. 12, No. 2 (G)
6. Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs. Human Rights Watch. May 2000. Vol. 12, No. 2 (G)
7. Dan Weikel, "War on Crack Targets Minorities Over Whites; Cocaine: Records Show Federal Officials Almost Solely Prosecute Non Whites. U.S. Attorney Denies Race is a Factor," Los Angeles Times, May 21, 1995.
8. Gopal K. Singh, et al. Advance Report of Final Mortality Statistics, 1994. 45 VITAL STATISTICS REPORT 31-33. Centers for Disease Control. (Sept. 1996. Supplement.)
9. Dawn Day, Ph.D., Health Emergency 1999: The Spread of Drug-Related AIDS and other Deadly Diseases Among African Americans and Latinos, The Dogwood Center (1998), p. i.
10. Ibid.
11 Ibid.
12 Losing The Vote: The Impact of Felony Disenfranchisement Laws in the United States, October 1998. The Sentencing Project.
13 "Prisoner Nation; Prisons Skew Census Results." The Nation. July 17, 2000. No. 3, Vol. 271; Pg.