THE HARSH TRUTH IS, U.S. WAR ON DRUGS IS 'RACIST'

The United States, rarely shy about condemning other nations for
human rights abuses, will get a dose of its own medicine when the
World Conference Against Racism opens in Durban, South Africa, on
Aug. 31.

The target: America's "War on Drugs" and the charge that it is
inherently racist because black men are being imprisoned for drug
offenses at 13 times the rate of white men.

A team of U.S. lawyers, clergy, drug policy and alternative
incarceration experts, organized as the Campaign to End Race
Discrimination in the War on Drugs, will assert that America's
criminal justice system has been turned into an "apartheid-like"
device.

"We don't want to see the United States continue to get off the hook
on this," says Deborah Small of the Lindesmith Center-Drug Policy
Foundation, one of the U.S. delegates.

The campaign last week also released a letter to U.N.
Secretary-General Kofi Annan calling on leaders in Africa and the
international community at large to speak out against the United
States for allegedly racist pursuit of its drug war.

What are we to make of this attempt to make an international cause
celebre of our drug and incarceration policies?

I'd like to say it's based on exaggeration, oversimplification and
half-truths. But I can't.

The motivation behind our drug wars, our mandatory minimum sentences,
our willingness to let our incarceration rate balloon to the highest
in the world, was not race but "law-and-order" politics. Yet the
impact of our policies has become profoundly racist. We know it. We
just do precious little to correct it.

Consider: According to the Washington-based Sentencing Project,
African-Americans are 13 percent of drug users but represent 35
percent of arrests for drug possession, 55 percent of convictions and
74 percent of prison sentences.

And there's little mystery why. First, there's location: Poor black
city neighborhoods -- not calm white suburbs -- are the scene of
massive street sweeps, buy and bust operations.

And then, there's class. Jenni Gainsborough of the Sentencing Project
notes: "If you're white, middle-class and your kid is on drugs, you
call the treatment center. In the inner city there's no treatment.
Your first port of call is the criminal justice system -- and it
escalates. Once you have a record, every interaction leads to a
stronger sanction."

States fed these fires with their tough laws of recent years, and the
federal government, if anything, is worse. Under a 1986 federal law,
it takes only one-hundredth the amount of crack cocaine (generally
more popular in black neighborhoods) to trigger the same mandatory
minimum sentence as powder cocaine (more popular among affluent
whites).

In 1995, one of three American black men between 20 and 29 was either
in jail, prison, on parole or probation. In many city neighborhoods,
more than half of young black men spend time in prison. Even those
inclined to form permanent relationships can't do so from behind
bars. As ex-felons, jobs are rare. In 13 states, they can't even vote
after their release.

There are a few shreds of hope. Justice Department figures show the
count of Americans behind bars (over 2 million) is starting to level
off after its explosive growth in the '90s.

And California's reform Proposition 36, passed in 2000, means nearly
40,000 nonviolent drug users each year will receive treatment rather
than being slapped in prisons.

But rolling back the incarceration tide may be tough. During the '90s
states added 528,000 new prison beds, costing $26.4 billion. Many
rural areas scrambled to get the prisons and their payrolls. Today,
thousands of rural white men guard black city convicts.

Try to close such prisons and localities will likely fight as
fiercely as when military bases are threatened with shutdowns, says
the Sentencing Project's Marc Mauer. And not just for the jobs. The
census counts prisoners where they're incarcerated, not their home
cities. Result: the prison towns get extra political clout and
government grants; the desperate inner cities lose both.

Few of the legislators who wrote today's laws anticipated such
outcomes. But the results are negative enough to give strong credence
to the charges of racist policy being leveled against our country.
And we have no one to blame but ourselves.