Blacks are 10 times more likely than whites to serve prison terms for drug offenses, even though the rate of drug use doesn’t differ significantly between the two groups, a national study released by the Justice Policy Institute says.
Jason Zeidenberg, executive director of the institute, said his nonpartisan think tank conducted the study using the most recent government data available from 198 counties with populations over 250,000. He said 97 percent of those counties sent more blacks to prison than whites.
According to the 2002 Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration National Survey on Drug Use and Health (which included data from adolescents), rates of current illicit drug use are slightly higher for blacks than for whites: 8.5 percent of white Americans were current users of illicit drugs in 2002, compared with 9.7 percent of blacks.
However, in the same year, the Justice Policy study noted that blacks went to prison at 10 times the rate of whites.
“Poverty and racism cannot be disentangled,” said Caroline Acker, a Carnegie Mellon University history professor who teaches drug policy and co-founded a needle-exchange program. “Many of the reasons that African-Americans are disproportionately poor come from residual racism.”
She explained the study outcome as a logical consequence of disparate circumstances: If drug markets concentrate in the poorest neighborhoods and the poorest neighborhoods are black neighborhoods, police will end up arresting more blacks for drug crimes.
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