Report:

97 BLACK DRUG OFFENDERS IMPRISONED FOR EACH WHITE ONE

County 3rd in the Nation in Racial Gap

A study by a Washington-based advocacy group shows that Dane County
locks up 97 black drug offenders for each white offender, ranking it
third in the nation in racial disparity.

The study also found that blacks were more likely to be imprisoned for
such offenses in virtually every community in the nation.

"It's very sad what the finding is for Dane County," said Jason
Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, which
issued the report today. "It's equally sad that 97 percent of the
counties witnessed racial disparities."

The Justice Policy Institute, which advocates for alternatives to
incarceration, used county and municipal census data for the year
2002. That is the first year such data were available, and the
institute has been working with the numbers since then. It studied 198
counties in the U.S. that have populations over 250,000, accounting
for just over half of the nation's population.

The study said that while survey data show that illegal drug usage and
sales among blacks and whites for 2002 were similar, blacks, who
account for only about 13 percent of the U.S. population, were sent to
prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of whites nationally.

The disparity is most pronounced in counties where poverty and
unemployment are rife, in counties where there are large
concentrations of blacks, and in counties that spend a relatively
large amount of their budgets on law enforcement.

"If a community has more resources available to it for law
enforcement, it may have the ability to enforce laws that in another
place wouldn't be enforced in the same way because they mainly would
be responding to violent crime," Ziedenberg said.

And he pointed out that police often concentrate their patrols in
lower-income neighborhoods where there are concentrations of
minorities and where drug deals often take place on the street, as
opposed to suburban neighborhoods, where they are likely to occur indoors.

In January, the National Council on Crime and Delinquency released a
study that found that black juvenile offenders in Wisconsin in 2002
were locked up at nearly 20 times the rate of white juvenile
offenders, more than twice the national average.

In response, Gov. Jim Doyle appointed a 24-member commission to tackle
racial disparities in the criminal justice system. The commission,
which is co-chaired by Madison Police Chief Noble Wray and state Sen.
Spencer Coggs, D-Milwaukee, is expected to issue a report with
recommendations sometime next month.

Dane County District Attorney Brian Blanchard, who is on the
commission as well as a Dane County commission on racial disparities
in the juvenile criminal justice system, said the data included in the
Justice Policy Institute study doesn't take into account an offender's
criminal history. He said controlling for criminal histories in such
studies is essential because when judges make sentencing decisions
"the criminal history of the defendant is huge."

The Wisconsin Sentencing Commission earlier this year issued a report
that took criminal histories into account. That report showed numerous
racial disparities. But Blanchard said it didn't go far enough.

"They controlled for it in a way that I don't think was sufficient to
acknowledge how much attorneys at sentencing and judges at sentencings
focus on criminal history," he said. "It's one of the more objective
things we can look at."

He said he would like to go the next step and compare the outcomes of
cases that involve similar offenses and similar criminal histories.

"That said, there's no question that the numbers are very
disproportionate," he said. "It think the harder question is why and
what we can do about it that would be positive."

He said the reasons for the higher incarceration rates for blacks, and
other minorities as well, are more complicated than simple racial profiling.

"I don't think it springs from conscious decisions to investigate or
prosecute people because of the color of their skin," he said.

Ziedenberg said today's report mirrors disparities found in earlier
studies on the federal justice system.

"It's as great at the federal level, but what we see in this report
that we've never been able to show before is the pervasiveness of it,"
he said. "What this confirms is the federal findings that groups like
the Sentencing Project have been reporting for some time are not an
anomaly. This is something that's playing out in every community in
the country."

The study also included Waukesha County, which locked up black drug
offenders at 24 times the rate of white offenders, and Milwaukee
County, which incarcerated blacks at a rate of 15 for each white.

The two counties that exceeded the Dane County rate were Onondaga
County in New York, with 99 blacks incarcerated for every white on
drug charges, and Forsyth County North Carolina, which saw a rate of
164 black drug offenders imprisoned for each white drug offender.

Ziedenberg said the aim of the report is to spark change on a national
level, while at the same time prompting local communities to take a
look at how they use criminal justice resources.

"The fact that African-Americans are admitted for drug offenses at 97
times the rate of whites should give people a moment to pause and
think about why that is," he said.