ALERT THE MEDIA: WHITE KIDS USE AND DEAL DRUGS, TOO

The front-page headline read "Good Kids Went Bad." The photos beside
it - high school yearbook portraits - confirmed the meaning of the
code words: The youths in question were clean-cut and white.

The Washington Post's Aug. 12 article on a murder that led police to
the discovery of one of Northern Virginia's largest-ever drug
operations - allegedly run by recent graduates of Chantilly and
Centreville high schools in Fairfax County - described the suspected
ringleaders as the kind of young people who had "played Little League
and soccer in parks, went to church and sold Christmas trees at the
mall parking lot."

A Prince William County cop told the Post that "in many ways these
kids are mirror images of the detectives working the case, except they
have chosen to go the wrong way." And the principal at Chantilly High
said: "There is great cause for concern when a tragedy of this scope
can happen in a safe neighborhood like Centreville or Chantilly."

An unspoken sentiment permeates the article, and it goes something
like, "Oh my God, what are nice white kids doing selling dope and
killing people out here in the suburbs?"

On one level, at least, the answer to that question is obvious:
There's an insatiable demand in America's Pleasantvilles for the
products drug dealers offer, so the narcotics trade thrives in suburbs
that the cops, courts and media don't ordinarily view as the
battlefields on which the drug war is to be fought. Even though
federal studies have shown that white people are more likely than
blacks to use illegal drugs, a black man is 13 times more likely than
his white counterpart to wind up in state prison during his lifetime
for a drug offense.

Nationwide, 58 percent of people in state prisons for drug offenses
are black; together, blacks and Hispanics make up 78 percent.

And in seven states - including Virginia - blacks alone represent at
least 80 percent of prisoners convicted of drug offenses, Human Rights
Watch reported last year.

It's not just that blacks stand a greater chance of being picked up by
the cops on drug charges. Blacks convicted of drug felonies in state
courts are 1 1/2 times more likely than white offenders to get jail
time, Justice Department statistics show.

The drug war's racial disparities perhaps become most apparent when
one examines figures on convictions for possession and trafficking of
crack cocaine, which carry stiffer penalties than the same offenses
involving powder cocaine (the form of the narcotic preferred by more
affluent drug users).

A federal sentencing commission found in the mid-1990s that although
blacks represented only one-third of crack users, they made up 84
percent of those convicted in federal courts of crack possession. In
addition, 88 percent of those sentenced for crack trafficking by
federal courts were black.

"The racially disproportionate nature of the war on drugs is not just
devastating to black Americans," Human Rights Watch said in its report
on the drug war last year. "It contradicts faith in the principles of
justice and equal protection of the laws that should be the bedrock of
any constitutional democracy; it exposes and deepens the racial fault
lines that continue to weaken the country and belies its promise as a
land of equal opportunity; and it undermines faith among all races in
the fairness and efficacy of the criminal justice system."

Since the mid-1980s, politicians of both parties at the local, state
and federal levels have tried to outdo their rivals in filling up
prisons - with a grossly disproportionate number of jail-cell dwellers
hailing from communities of color.

One result of this incarceration mania is that 1.46 million black men
out of a total voting population of 10.4 million have lost their right
to vote due to felony convictions. Of course, this suits Republicans
just fine, since they have historically written off the black vote.

But the disenfranchisement of so many potential black voters - mostly
from lower socioeconomic strata - also causes fewer headaches for the
centrists who run the Democratic Party. With the reduced electoral
weight of lower-income blacks, Democratic leaders don't have to worry
as much about a powerful bloc of voters who might pull the party more
to the left.

That means the Democratic Party can devote more energy and resources
to pandering to "swing voters" - those comfortable (and generally
white) suburbanites who live in the "safe neighborhoods" and raise the
"good kids."