DRUG 'WAR' IMPRISONS ACCORDING TO CLASS

If you knew nothing about Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama
other than that Clinton is a 60-year-old white woman and Obama is a
46-year-old black man, you could still calculate the odds that each
was in prison.

It won't come as any surprise that someone like Obama is, in this
crude comparison, more likely to be found behind bars than someone
like Clinton. What should shock people is how much more likely we are
to incarcerate a 46-year-old black man than a 60-year-old white woman.

If we took into account only race, gender and age, Obama's chances of
being in prison would be 550 times higher than Clinton's.

A report published by the Pew Center last week revealed that one out
of every 100 American adults is in prison. That's startling enough,
but not nearly as shocking as the fact that more than 10 percent of
black men between the ages of 20 and 40 are incarcerated.

But of course other factors also play a powerful role in determining
whom we choose to lock up and for how long. The most important of
these is socioeconomic class. Poor people go to prison, while people
with money, with rare exceptions, don't.

It's hard enough to get Americans to focus on the amazing explosion
in the size of our prisons (we have 400 percent more people behind
bars than in 1980) without upsetting people further by pointing to
the role that class bias plays in these developments.

We have the highest incarceration rate in the world, and the prison
population continues to grow, despite a plunge in crime rates over
the past 15 years. Nearly 1 million Americans are behind bars for
non-violent crimes - many of which are "crimes" only because of what
political scientist Scott Lemieux has labeled "the war on (some
people who use some) drugs."

The report does mention some encouraging developments. Even Texas,
where voters have had an almost unlimited appetite for paying taxes
to build and staff more prisons, is finding the costs of locking
people up so high that it's beginning to experiment with alternatives
to prison.

The most rational alternative would be to stop treating drug use as a
criminal offense. A small minority of users of mind-altering
substances become addicted to those substances. They should be able
to get medical help for what ought to be considered a medical
problem, instead of one of the main justifications for keeping 2.3
million Americans behind bars.