MOST DRUG DEFENDANTS WIND UP BEHIND BARS

Races Have Similar Odds Of Incarceration, But More Blacks Are In System

If you are brought into court on drug charges by the Milwaukee County
District Attorney's Office, the chances that you will be sentenced to time
behind bars are high and don't vary much based on your race.

But the odds that you are a black person, and specifically one who has been
dealing crack cocaine, are high.

Those are two conclusions that can be drawn from figures provided by
District Attorney E. Michael McCann in light of a study by Human Rights
Watch, an international human rights group that singled out Wisconsin as one
of the most vivid examples in the United States of a large disparity between
the rates of blacks and whites incarcerated for drug crimes.

"The overall picture is that selling drugs is not a good thing to do in
Milwaukee County, whether you're black or white or Hispanic," McCann said.
He said the goal of his office is that anyone brought in on drug trafficking
charges "is going to be dealt with severely."

McCann released figures for the three categories of crime that dominate
prosecution of state drug laws in Milwaukee County: selling crack cocaine,
selling powder cocaine and selling marijuana.

One of the clearest messages in the data was the deep impact that the rise
of crack cocaine in Milwaukee has had on criminal prosecutions - and, by
extension, on the low-income communities where the arrests are made.

For 1998 and 1999 combined, there were 2,201 cases brought to court in the
categories McCann described, and 1,313 involved blacks charged with selling
crack, about 60% of the total. Only 108 whites or Hispanics were charged
with dealing crack in the same period.

Overall, about 81% of the people who were brought to court for selling
crack, cocaine or marijuana were black, McCann's figures showed.

But when it came to the outcome of cases, the disparity almost disappeared.
The figures showed about 87% of black offenders, 84% of whites and 81% of
Hispanics served at least some time behind bars.

In the cases of crack and marijuana dealing, the percentages of blacks
getting sentenced to state prison - which means a sentence of a year or more
- - was slightly higher for blacks than for whites, while whites were
sentenced to prison for selling powder cocaine at a higher rate than blacks.

But it was not clear how significant the differences were, and circumstances
of individual cases, such as a defendant's prior record, were not accounted
for in the overall numbers.

McCann's figures show 61% of blacks charged with selling crack got prison
sentences, while 51% of whites did. Marijuana sales brought prison sentences
- - compared with terms of less than a year in the Milwaukee County House of
Correction - for 18% of whites and 23% of blacks, while powder cocaine
selling led to prison for 65% of whites and 61% of blacks.

But overall, 83% of black cocaine dealers did some time behind bars - as did
83% of white dealers. And 84% of black marijuana dealers did some time
behind bars, compared with 87% of white dealers.

McCann cautioned that totals for Hispanics probably were understated because
some likely were counted as either white or black.

Crack Key To Rate Disparity

The rise of crack, particularly in the black community, was clearly a key to
the disparity in imprisonment rates for blacks and whites in the local data.

Crack, a cheap and easily dealable form of cocaine, is often associated with
violence and with the kinds of drug dealing in low-income neighborhoods that
are highly visible and outrage neighbors, McCann said. Those are key reasons
why crack dealers have become such a focus of police action, he said.

McCann said some neighborhoods in the central city have been left "virtually
uninhabitable" by crack-related problems, while he could not think of an
instance of selling of drugs in open-air situations or through heavily
trafficked drug houses in Milwaukee County's suburbs.

Experts have cited the differing styles of drug business between suburban
and central city settings and police strategies that focus on poor
neighborhoods as big parts of why imprisonment rates for drug offenses are
so much higher among blacks than whites, even though actual rates of drug
crimes apparently are not much different.

Human Rights Watch, a New York-based private group, said in the study
released this week that in Wisconsin, the rate of incarceration of black
males for drug offenses is 53 times higher than the rate for white males.
The study called the disparity in white and black imprisonment for drugs
"nothing short of a national scandal."

Thomas Hammer, a Marquette University Law School professor who served on a
task force that recommended overhauling the state's criminal code, said
factors other than race affect who is brought into court.

Hammer said that Milwaukee, for example, has concentrated law-enforcement
efforts in the city's high-crime areas, where drugs and violence go hand in
hand.

"If you allocate your police resources in those areas, you're going to
produce arrests more of minority citizens than majority," Hammer said. "Now
is that racist law enforcement? I don't think so. I think that's throwing
the resources at where the greatest problem is."

But Jennifer Bias, director of community justice initiatives for the state
public defender's office, said the disparities were a result of law
enforcement policy and not just social conditions. She said many black
youths are charged with dealing drugs when their crime could more accurately
be charged as possession.

Referring to studies that show that drug crimes are common in higher income
areas but harder to catch, Bias said police and prosecutors should work on
"trying to find everyone who commits crime." She added, "Using good police
practice to do so is critical."

Johnnie L. Smith, the chief of the narcotics division in the state
Department of Justice and a retired Milwaukee police official, said the drug
war was not being waged exclusively against blacks, but it has had an
adverse impact on black communities. The reasons are numerous and complex,
said Smith.

Smith said the causes likely were rooted in society long associating crime
and poverty with black people, politicians pushing a tough-on-crime agenda,
the media's constant attention to crime, the public's fear of crime, and law
enforcement's response to it all.

"At the end of the day, the bottom line is, the numbers are there, they are
disproportionate, and we need to be talking about it," Smith said. "We need
to be looking at ways to deal with it."