RACIAL INEQUITY AND DRUG ARRESTS

The United States prison system keeps marking shameful milestones. In
late February, the Pew Center on the States released a report showing
that more than 1 in 100 American adults are presently behind bars --
an astonishingly high rate of incarceration notably skewed along
racial lines. One in nine black men aged 20 to 34 are serving time,
as are 1 in 36 adult Hispanic men.

Now, two new reports, by The Sentencing Project and Human Rights
Watch, have turned a critical spotlight on law enforcement's
overwhelming focus on drug use in low-income urban areas. These
reports show large disparities in the rate at which blacks and whites
are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, despite roughly equal
rates of illegal drug use.

Black men are nearly 12 times as likely to be imprisoned for drug
convictions as adult white men, according to one haunting statistic
cited by Human Rights Watch. Those who are not imprisoned are often
arrested for possession of small quantities of drugs and later
released -- in some cases with a permanent stain on their records
that can make it difficult to get a job or start a young person on a
path to future arrests.

Similar concerns are voiced by the New York Civil Liberties Union,
which issued a separate study of the outsized number of misdemeanor
marijuana arrests among people of color in New York City.

Between 1980 and 2003, drug arrests for African-Americans in the
nation's largest cities rose at three times the rate for whites, a
disparity "not explained by corresponding changes in rates of drug
use," The Sentencing Project finds. In sum, a dubious anti-drug
strategy spawned amid the deadly crack-related urban violence of the
1980s lives on, despite changed circumstances, the existence of
cost-saving alternatives to prison for low-risk offenders or the
distrust of the justice system sowed in minority communities.

Nationally, drug-related arrests continue to climb. In 2006, those
arrests totaled 1.89 million, according to federal data, up from 1.85
million in 2005, and 581,000 in 1980. More than four-fifths of the
arrests were for possession of banned drugs, rather than for their
sale or manufacture. Underscoring law enforcement's misguided
priorities, fully 4 in 10 of all drug arrests were for marijuana
possession. Those who favor continuing these policies have not met
their burden of proving their efficacy in fighting crime. Nor have
they have persuasively justified the yawning racial disparities.

All is not gloomy. Many states have begun expanding their use of drug
treatment as an alternative to prison. New York's historic crime drop
has continued even as it has begun to reduce the number of nonviolent
drug offenders in prison, attesting to the oft-murky relationship
between incarceration and crime control. In December, the United
States Sentencing Commission amended the federal sentencing
guidelines to begin to lower the disparities between the sentences
imposed for crack cocaine, which is more often used by blacks, and
those imposed for the powder form of the drug.

The looming challenge, says Jeremy Travis, the president of John Jay
College of Criminal Justice, is to have arrest and incarceration
policies that are both effective for fighting crime and promoting
racial justice and respect for the law. As the new findings attest,
the nation has a long road to travel to attain that goal.