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Overview
Why are 1 in 9 young Black men in prison
The so-called "war
on drugs" has created a national disaster: 1 in 9 young
Black men in America are now behind bars.1
It's not because they commit more crime but largely
because of unfair sentencing rules that treat 5 grams of
crack cocaine, the kind found in poor Black communities,
the same as 500 grams of powder cocaine2, the
kind found in White and wealthier communities.
These sentencing
laws are destroying communities across the country and
have done almost nothing to reduce the level of drug use
and crime.
Senator Joe Biden
is one of the original creators of these laws and is now
trying to fix the problem.3 But some of his
colleagues on the Senate Judiciary Committee are
standing in the way. Join us in telling them to stand
with Joe Biden and undo this disaster once and for all:
http://colorofchange.org/crackpowder/
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Glenn Loury: A Nation of Jailers—"Today,
fifteen years after crime peaked, the American prison system
has become a leviathan unmatched in human history," he said.
"Never has a supposedly 'free country' denied basic liberty
to so many of its citizens."
The impact on communities of
color has been enormous. According to U.S. Department of
Justice figures, a black man has a 32 percent chance of
entering state or federal prison during his lifetime. If
current incarceration rates continue, one of every three
black male babies born today will see the inside of a prison
cell, a rate more than five times higher than that of white
male babies. In many inner-city neighborhoods, a stint in
prison is as much a rite of passage as graduation from high
school. The effects of these incarcerations are not confined
to the prison walls.
More than half of state and
federal inmates are parents of minor children; according to
DOJ, black children are nearly nine times more likely than
white children to have a parent in prison.
Finding work for any person
with a criminal conviction is already a challenge; for an
African-American, that challenge can be almost
insurmountable.
Prisoner statistics, Loury said
in his Tanner lectures, tell only part of the story:
[N]o
cost-benefit analysis of our world-historic prison build-up
over the past thirty-five years is possible without
specifying how one should reckon in the calculation the pain
being imposed on the persons imprisoned, their families and
their communities.
How to
value this aspect of policy is, to my mind, a salient
ethical issue. BrownAlumniMagazine
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Man dies after cop hits him with Taser 9
times—A police officer shocked a
handcuffed Baron "Scooter" Pikes nine
times with a Taser after arresting him
on a cocaine charge. He stopped
twitching after seven, according to a
coroner's report. Soon afterward, Pikes
was dead. Now the officer, since fired,
could end up facing criminal charges in
Pikes' January death after medical
examiners ruled it a homicide.Dr.
Randolph Williams, the Winn Parish
coroner, told CNN the 21-year-old
sawmill worker was jolted so many times
by the 50,000-volt Taser that he might
have been dead before the last two
shocks were delivered. Williams ruled
Pikes' death a homicide in June after
extensive study.
CNN
How Scores of Black Men Were Tortured
Into Giving False Confessions by Chicago
Police—By 1999, it was
"common knowledge," according to U.S. District Judge
Milton Shadur, "that in the early to mid-1980s, (Jon
Burge) and many officers working under him regularly
engaged in the physical abuse and torture of
prisoners to extract confessions. Both internal
police accounts and numerous lawsuits and appeals
brought by suspects alleging such abuse substantiate
that those beatings and other means of torture
occurred as an established practice, not just on an
isolated basis."
Alternet |
The massive scandal began to unravel in 1989, when
convicted cop killer Andrew Wilson launched a very
public federal civil rights suit against the Chicago
Police Department. Seven years before, Wilson had
been beaten, shocked in the testicles and burned on
the face, chest and thigh by Area 2 detectives
working under Burge. What caught the eye of Chief
Medical Examiner of Cermak Medical Services John
Raba, however, were the small markings on his ears
that he couldn't explain away. Wilson told him the
markings were from alligator clips used to
electrocute him, and Raba believed him. He notified
then-Superintendent of Police Richard Brzeczek, who
wrote a letter to then-State's Attorney Richard M.
Daley, "seeking direction" on how to proceed. Daley,
who is now Chicago's mayor, never responded.
Alternet
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1 in 100 U.S.
Adults Behind Bars, New Study Says—Incarceration
rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36
Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice
Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is,
too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20
and 34. The report, from the Pew Center on the States,
also found that only one in 355 white women between the
ages of 35 and 39 are behind bars but that one in 100
black women are. . . . In 2007, according to the
National Association of State Budgeting Officers, states
spent $44 billion in tax dollars on corrections. That is
up from $10.6 billion in 1987, a 127 increase once
adjusted for inflation. With money from bonds and the
federal government included, total state spending on
corrections last year was $49 billion. By 2011, the
report said, states are on track to spend an additional
$25 billion. It cost an average of $23,876 dollars to
imprison someone in 2005, the most recent year for which
data were available. But state spending varies widely,
from $45,000 a year in Rhode Island to $13,000 in
Louisiana. The cost of medical care is growing by 10
percent annually, the report said, and will accelerate
as the prison population ages. About one in nine state
government employees works in corrections, and some
states are finding it hard to fill those jobs.
California spent more than $500 million on overtime
alone in 2006. . . .The Pew report recommended diverting
nonviolent offenders away from prison and using
punishments short of reincarceration for minor or
technical violations of probation or parole. It also
urged states to consider earlier release of some
prisoners.
NYTimes
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1 percent of
U.S. adults behind bars—The report, released
Thursday by the Pew Center on the States, said the
50 states spent more than $49 billion on corrections
last year, up from less than $11 billion 20 years
earlier. The rate of increase for prison costs was
six times greater than for higher education
spending, the report said. Using updated
state-by-state data, the report said 2,319,258
adults were held in U.S. prisons or jails at the
start of 2008 -- one out of every 99.1 adults, and
more than any other country in the world. The
steadily growing inmate population "is saddling
cash-strapped states with soaring costs they can ill
afford and failing to have a clear impact either on
recidivism or overall crime," the report said. Susan
Urahn, managing director of the Pew Center on the
States, said budget woes are prompting officials in
many states to consider new, cost-saving corrections
policies that might have been shunned in the recent
past for fear of appearing soft in crime."We're
seeing more and more states being creative because
of tight budgets," she said in an interview. "They
want to be tough on crime, they want to be a
law-and-order state -- but they also want to save
money, and they want to be effective." The report
cited Kansas and Texas as states which have acted
decisively to slow the growth of their inmate
population. Their actions include greater use of
community supervision for low-risk offenders and
employing sanctions other than reimprisonment for
ex-offenders who commit technical violations of
parole and probation rules.
CNN
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BIDEN Calls for an End to
Crack/Powder Cocaine Sentencing Disparity—Our
intentions were good, but much of our information
was bad. Each of the myths upon which we based the
sentencing disparity has since been dispelled or
altered. We now know:
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Crack and powder cocaine are
pharmacologically identical. They
are simply two forms of the same
drug.
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Crack and powder cocaine cause
identicalphysiological and
psychological effects once they
reach the brain.
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Both forms of cocaine are
potentially addictive.
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The two drugs’ effects on a fetus
are identical. The “generation of
crack babies” many predicted has not
come to pass. In fact, some research
shows that the prenatal effects of
alcohol exposure are “significantly
more devastating to the developing
fetus than cocaine.”
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Crack simply does not incite the
type of violence that we
feared. Gangs that deal in other
types of drugs are every bit as
violent as the crack gangs.
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“After 21 years of study and review,
these facts have convinced me that the 100-to-1
disparity cannot be supported and that the penalties
for crack and powder cocaine trafficking merit
similar treatment under the law.Biden.Senate
Press Statement
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Race and the
Drug War—Once arrested, people of color are
treated more harshly by the
criminal justice system than whites. The
best-known example of the inequality in sentencing
is the disparity between crack cocaine and powder
cocaine sentences. Crack and powder cocaine have the
same active ingredient, but crack is marketed in
less expensive quantities and in lower income
communities of color. A five gram sale of crack
cocaine receives a five-year federal mandatory
minimum sentence, while an offender must sell 500
grams of powder cocaine to get the same sentence. In
1986, before the enactment of federal mandatory
minimum sentencing for crack cocaine offenses, the
average federal drug sentence for African Americans
was 11 percent higher than for whites. Four years
later, the average federal drug sentence for African
Americans was 49 percent higher.
Drug Policy
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A Statement of Racism & Racial
Oppression: "The virtuous aspirations of our
children must be continually checked by the
knowledge that no matter how upright their conduct,
they will be looked upon as less worthy than the
lowest wretch who wears a white skin.
Daily Star
(Alabama) 21 May 1867
[James S. Allen,
Reconstruction: The Battle for Democracy (1937),
pp. 237-238] |
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posted 27 March 2008 |
