The racism of drug war policies, long evident in federal and state enforcement practices, has now been documented across the country at the local level. A new report by the Justice Policy Institute found that 97 percent of the nation's large-population counties imprisoned African Americans at a higher rate than whites.
 
Of 198 counties examined in the report, 193 showed racial disparities in the use of prison for drug offenses. While African Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates, the report revealed that African Americans are ten times more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses.
 
“The exponential removal of people of color who have substance abuse problems from their communities and into prisons undermines and destabilizes neighborhoods--it does not make them safer,” said Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Drug addiction doesn’t discriminate but our drug policies do.”
 
“The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties,” found that counties with higher poverty rates, larger African American populations and larger police or judicial budgets imprison people for drug offenses at higher rates than counties without these characteristics. These relationships were found to be independent of whether the county actually had a higher rate of crime.
 
The report also found that the rates at which people are sent to prison for drug offenses have nothing to do with the rates at which people actually use drugs in counties.
 
Researchers attributed disparate policing practices, disparate treatment before the courts, mandatory minimum drug sentencing laws, and differences in the availability of drug treatment for African Americans compared with whites as reasons for the significant racial disparities seen in drug imprisonment rates.
 
“Laws—like drug laws—that are violated by a large percentage of the population are particularly prone to selective enforcement,” says Phillip Beatty, co-author of the study. “The reason African Americans are so disproportionately impacted may, in part, be related to social policy, the amount spent on law enforcement and judiciary systems, and local drug enforcement practices.”
 
The report called for de-escalation of the war on drugs as one of its recommendations for addressing the racial disparity in enforcement.
 
The full report, which was partially funded by DPA, is available on the Justice Policy Institute website.