FOCUS OF DRUG WAR HURTS BLACKS

Studies Say Tactics Focus on Urban Sales of Small Amounts, Netting Fewer Whites

More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war
on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are
still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce
them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites
are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two
races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.

Two reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and
by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities
reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on
inner-city drug use, with arrests and incarceration the main weapons.

But they note that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the
1980s, which spawned the drug war, has largely subsided, reducing the
rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system
among many blacks.

In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to
1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980.

More than 4 in 5 of the arrests were for possession of banned
substances, rather than for their sale or manufacture. Four in 10 of
all drug arrests were for marijuana possession, according to the
latest FBI data.

Apart from crowding prisons, one result is a devastating impact on the
lives of black men, who are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned
for drug convictions as white men, according to the Human Rights Watch
report.

Others are arrested for possession of small quantities of drugs and
later released, but with a permanent blot on their records.

Greater Disparity in Arrests

"The way the war on drugs has been pursued is one of the biggest
reasons for the growing racial disparities in criminal justice
overall," said Ryan King, a policy analyst with the Sentencing
Project, who wrote its report, which focuses on the differential
arrest rates, not only between races but also among cities around the
country. Some cities pursue urban, minority drug use far more
intensively than do others.

Two-thirds of those arrested for drug violations in 2006 were white
and 33 percent were black, although blacks made up 12.8 percent of the
population, FBI data show. National data are not collected on
ethnicity, and arrests of Latinos may be in either category.

"The race question is so entangled in the way the drug war was
conceived," said Jamie Fellner, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch
and the author of the group's report.

"If the drug issue is still seen as primarily a problem of the black
inner city, then we'll continue to see this enormously disparate
impact," she said.

Her report cites federal data from 2003, the most recent available on
this aspect, indicating that blacks constituted 53.5 percent of all
who entered prison for a drug conviction.

Reasons for Imbalance

Some crime experts say that the disparities exist for sound reasons.
For example, said Heather MacDonald, a fellow at the Manhattan
Institute in New York, blacks and Latinos are more often involved than
whites in the distribution and sale of heroin and cocaine.

MacDonald said it made sense for the police to focus more on fighting
visible drug dealing in the inner city, largely involving minorities,
than on hidden use in suburban homes, more often by whites, because
the urban street trade is more associated with violence and other
crimes and impairs the quality of life.

"The disparities reflect policing decisions to use drug laws to try
and reduce violence and to respond to the demand by law-abiding
residents in poor neighborhoods to clean up the drug trade," she said.

But what urban people need is not more incarceration but improved
public safety, King said. "Arresting hundreds of thousands of young
African American men hasn't ended street-corner drug sales."

Treatment, Services Best

A shift of resources toward drug treatment and social services rather
than wholesale incarceration, he asserted, would do more to improve
conditions in blighted neighborhoods.

Limited efforts have been made to shift policies in ways that may
reduce racial differences. Many states are experimenting with what are
called drug courts, which send users to treatment rather than prison.
This does not, however, affect arrest rates, which have lifelong
consequences even for those who are never convicted or imprisoned.

The police in a few cities, including Oakland, Seattle and Denver,
have said they are spending fewer resources on arrests for lower-level
offenses like marijuana possession.

In December, the U.S. Sentencing Commission amended the federal
sentencing guidelines for convictions involving crack cocaine, which
is more often used by blacks, somewhat reducing the length of
sentences compared with those for convictions involving powder cocaine.

But mandatory and longer sentences for crack violations remain
embedded in federal and state laws.