BLACKS BEHIND BARS IN RECORD NUMBERS, CENSUS SHOWS

Advocates Point To Bias In Law Enforcement

Get-tough policies on crime and a jail- and prison-building boom in the
1990s put a record number of inmates behind bars in North Carolina, with
blacks locked up in increasingly disproportionate numbers, according to new
statistics from the 2000 Census.

Overall, North Carolina's inmate population nearly doubled over the past
decade to 46,614, as new sentencing guidelines kept some state prisoners
incarcerated longer, and as jails and prisons filled with suspects and
convicts from the war on drugs. The 88 percent increase in the inmate
population far outstripped the state's 21 percent growth rate.

The number of blacks in prison rose even faster, by 101 percent. Though
about one in five North Carolinians is black, slightly more than three in
five inmates across the state are black.

"Those numbers should make people sit up in bed and look at the ceiling and
say: 'Oh my gosh, what is going on?' " said Warren Herndon, who oversees
Rites of Passage, a mentoring program in Durham that steers troubled black
teenagers from crime. "Those numbers are disturbing."

The Governor's Crime Commission has appointed a committee to study the
reasons for the disproportionate percentage of blacks in state prisons,
with recommendations expected this fall.

"It does give pause to a lot of us," said Theodis Beck, the state
correction secretary and a crime commission member. "We are trying to
understand what are some of the causal factors."

The census count of the state's incarcerated population included people in
federal and state prisons, local jails and other detention facilities. It
found that 5.3 percent of black men ages 18 to 64 in North Carolina were
incarcerated, compared with 0.7 percent of non-Hispanic whites and 1.2
percent of other minorities in the same age group.

James Ferguson II, a prominent civil rights lawyer in Charlotte, said the
numbers pointed to bias in the criminal justice system.

"I've been very concerned about the spiraling incarceration of black men
and, to some extent, black women," he said. "That's alarming. It means that
something racial is going on in the system that needs to be corrected."

Alfred Blumstein, a Carnegie Mellon University professor and an authority
on crime statistics, said racial discrimination explains only part of the
reason blacks are incarcerated disproportionately.

Blacks are more likely to commit certain crimes, he said, and those
frequently happen to be crimes that are punished severely. For instance, in
a 1993 study Blumstein found about half of people in prison for homicide
were black. Arrests for homicide are a reasonably good indicator of the
racial breakdown of the offenders, he said.

It's a different story with drugs. Whites, blacks and Hispanics use illegal
drugs in roughly the same proportion, according to the federal National
Household Survey on Drug Abuse. But stiffer federal penalties for crack
cocaine -- which is more predominant in poor black communities -- than for
powder cocaine resulted in a higher percentage of blacks going to prison
after their arrest, Blumstein said.

"We are more severe on the kinds of crimes that blacks commit," Blumstein
said. "And there's an open question about how much of that difference is
attributable to a concern about the seriousness of the crimes, and how much
those policies are a subtle reflection of discrimination."

Race and drugs

Drug offenders in North Carolina's state prisons are disproportionately
black, Department of Correction data show. Among drug offenders, 76 percent
were black, while blacks made up 63 percent of the total state prison
population.

African-Americans were 92 percent of the state's prisoners in the two most
common categories of drug charges: selling and possessing with the intent
to sell Schedule II narcotics. Those include amphetamines, cocaine, opium
and PCP. Black prisoners also were disproportionately serving time for
robbery and assault, while whites were serving time in disproportionate
numbers for sexual offenses, larceny, and breaking and entering.

"The so-called war on drugs has had an absolutely devastating effect on the
black community, on the number of young black males who are being locked up
and given longer and longer sentences," Ferguson said. "To my mind, there
is no question that the so-called war on drugs has effectively been a war
on young, male African-Americans, and to some extent, young
African-American women."

Police more often target illegal drugs in minority communities, said Jenni
Gainsborough, a senior policy analyst with The Sentencing Project, an
advocacy group in Washington that promotes criminal justice reform and
alternatives to incarceration.

"When you go to arrest people doing drugs, you don't go out to the white
suburbs and break into people's houses when they're sitting around smoking
a joint," she said. "What you do is go to the inner cities where people are
dealing drugs, and that tends to be young black kids on street corners.
That's been the primary focus of drug-law enforcement."

John Baker, Wake County's sheriff, said his agency, for one, does not focus
disproportionately on law enforcement in black communities.

"My philosophy is if you commit a crime -- regardless of whether you're
African-American or Caucasian or Hispanic -- you should be arrested and
charged," said Baker, who is black. "I don't see too many cases that are
thrown out of court because of false arrest."

Inside the Wake County jail that Baker runs, however, not all the prisoners
see things the sheriff's way. The jail's male population is about 85
percent black in a county that is about three-quarters white.

"You can always find five or six cops in an African-American neighborhood,"
said Thomas Antwan Lucas, 22, who is serving time on a cocaine conviction.
"If you go across town, you're liable to see one riding down the highway,
but that's about it. It's really not fair. But I guess they feel there's
more crime in black neighborhoods. Crime can happen anywhere."

Uyganda Earl Brown, 27, who is in jail for a probation violation, said many
poor black neighborhoods seem almost designed to tempt residents into trouble.

"You've got your liquor stores, you've got anything that's negative placed
right inside our communities to break us down," Brown said. "Sometimes when
you put cheese out for mice to grab hold of, and he's hungry, he's going to
grab hold of that cheese."

Relatively few locked up

Although North Carolina's prison population is rising, the state does not
rank high nationally in the percentage of its citizens who are locked up.
In 2000, 0.58 percent of the state's population was incarcerated, up from
0.37 percent in 1990.

North Carolina's 2000 percentage ranked in the middle of the 31 states and
Washington, D.C., for which the U.S. Census Bureau has released data so far.

Despite falling crime rates, the state prison population -- which accounts
for nearly two-thirds of all North Carolina inmates -- is expected to
continue growing rapidly.

By 2010, the number is expected to surpass 40,300, according to the state
Sentencing and Policy Advisory Commission. State prisons now hold nearly
32,000 inmates, up from the 30,104 counted in last year's census. Officials
are proposing building $1.2 billion worth of new prisons over the next
decade, primarily maximum-security compounds. Already, the state Department
of Correction is more than 2,000 prisoners above its official capacity. And
that's after the state spent about $525 million since 1990 adding 18,670
prison beds, mainly by expanding current facilities, said Lynn Phillips,
assistant secretary for the Department of Correction.

The projected increase in prisoners is largely a result of structured
sentencing, Phillips said. In 1994, North Carolina became one of the first
states to eliminate parole with the adoption of sentencing laws that set
specific prison terms for violent and repeat offenders.

State inmates are serving nearly twice as much time in prison as before the
new law took effect, according to a 1999 study by the Bureau of Justice
Statistics, part of the U.S. Department of Justice.

"This next wave of [state prison] construction -- the bulk of it are cells
to house dangerous offenders," Phillips said. "These are the worst of the
worst. And that's what the sentencing law was designed to do: Let's send
the worst of the worst to prison, and let's keep them there a long time."