A DRUG WAR CASUALTY: EQUAL JUSTICE

Throughout the 20th century, which saw more than its share of inhumanity,
the most common excuse about why such things were allowed to happen was "We
didn't know." Well, after the report that Human Rights Watch released
yesterday, we will no longer be able to use ignorance to shield us from the
reality of the racial injustice being perpetrated every day in America in
the name of the drug war -- completely ignored by national political
leaders and barely acknowledged by the media.

The report, "Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on
Drugs," features a groundbreaking state-by-state analysis of the role race
and drugs play in prison admissions. When 10 states -- including Illinois,
Wisconsin, Minnesota, Ohio and West Virginia -- send black men to prison on
drug charges at a rate 27 to 57 times higher than white men, how can we
continue to boast about our "equal protection under the law" when it's so
obviously not true for so many people? The cookie-cutter excuse is that the
unequal sentencing reflects an unequal use of drugs. Well, that excuse has
also expired -- in fact, five times as many whites use drugs as blacks, yet
62 percent of drug offenders sent to state prisons nationwide are black. In
certain states, that number climbs to an almost unbelievable 90 percent. So
much for equal protection.

But the depth of this tragedy cannot be adequately communicated through
statistics -- no matter how outrageous. It can only be conveyed through the
personal stories of what this injustice has wrought not only on the
nonviolent offenders but on their families and especially their children.
Groups like Families Against Mandatory Minimums, Family Watch and the
November Coalition perform a great public service by putting flesh and
blood on the statistics.

"Dear judge, I need my mom. Would you help my mom," reads a note written in
the 9-year-old scrawl of Phillip Gaines, just before his mother was
sentenced to nearly 20 years after associates of her crack-dealing former
boyfriend testified against her in exchange for lighter sentences. "My
birthday's coming up in October the 25 and I need my mom to be here on the
25 and for the rest of my life. I will cut your grass and wash your car
everyday just don't send my mom off. Please please please don't!!" Phillip
is only one of an estimated 1.5 million children who currently have a
parent in jail.

Sharvone McKinnon is another African-American mother whose boyfriend -- in
her case, an abusive crack dealer who threatened to kill her if she left
him -- helped land her in jail. She's also a particularly chilling case
study of the madness our drug laws have led to: a nonviolent, first-time
offender sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for
conspiracy to distribute cocaine -- even though the government concedes she
played only a tangential role and never actually used or sold drugs.

But such are our Draconian drug laws that even the least-culpable member of
a "conspiracy" can be saddled with the most egregious acts of all the other
conspirators. So based on the testimony of three of her 31 co-defendants
that she was present at a single "organizational meeting" of her
boyfriend's drug ring -- testimony that earned the trio serious sentence
reductions -- this 34-year-old mother, a gainfully employed school-bus
driver at the time of her arrest, will now spend the rest of her life in
prison (at a cost to taxpayers of approximately $21,000 per year). I don't
know about you, but I feel a whole lot safer.

"One of the problems of our justice system," a U.S. District Court judge
told me, "is that the government is settling for very small fish that are
easy to catch and easy to punish. The big ones aren't being pursued."
Indeed, the inequality of the legal representation available to most poor
defendants makes further mockery of the promise of equal justice for all.

The silence of both major parties and their nominees on this widespread
injustice is the starkest example of the bankruptcy of the two-party
system. Even the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who has endorsed Al Gore and will be
campaigning for him, is not pulling his punches. "On this matter," he told
me, "we have one party with two names, or two parties with one assumption.
The assumption is that these lives can be thrown away.

The change we seek can only come outside the two parties. In the same way
that it took a movement to bring about the Civil Rights Act and the Voting
Rights Act, it's going to take a movement to put an end to this tragic
undermining of hard-fought civil rights victories."

The Human Rights Watch report makes it impossible for our leaders to claim
they didn't know. Now it's up to us to demand some answers and an end to
the inhumanity.

Huffington can be reached via e-mail at arianna@ariannaonline.com