UNFAIR LAWS FILL JAILS WITH BLACK MEN

THERE ARE forgotten neighborhoods in America where the holiday season
imposes a distinct and peculiar ritual: Mom and the kids, or Grandma
and the grand kids, pack up a few goodies in tin plates and paper
bags, carefully wrapped in foil. They set out early for a visit
preordained to be brief and circumscribed, its joy limited by the
setting. They go to visit relative in prison.

The places in America already decimated by poverty and economic
collapse - the black and brown inner-cities - are also places where
many of the young men are out of circulation. They cannot become
taxpayers or decent parents or reasonable prospects for marriage. They
will leave prison with criminal records that guarantee them limit job
opportunities.

Lacking decent incomes, they will never marry the mothers of their
children. And that, in turn, will guarantee another generation of
children who have had little contact with their fathers.

America has succeeded in locking up more of its citizens than any
other country on the planet. The state of California alone has more
inmates than France Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore and the
Netherlands combined, according to a report of Eric Schlosser in the
December issue of the Atlantic Monthly.

We have incarcerated violent, dangerous felons as well as nonviolent
drug abusers. We have created laws designed to keep the streets safe.
And we have designed laws whose only result is to ensure that entire
neighborhoods regularly send their young men off to prison. And we
have confused the one with the other.

Let's make some distinctions. Many convicted felons are thugs and
punks. Some of them practiced their violent tendencies on their
families and friends first beating a girlfriend, robbing a neighbor,
abusing a child. They deserve to be in prison.

But a substantial portion of the 850,000 black Americans behind bars
are there for non-violent drug offenses. Marc Mauer of the Washington,
DC.-based Sentencing Project estimates the number at 216,000 - about
one fourth. With drug treatment of the sort routinely available to
drug-addicted actors and athletes, or to white-collar employees with
good health, insurance, many of them would become taxpaying citizens,
able to support a family, own a home.

To avoid being labeled "soft" on crime, even politicians who know
better have refused to acknowledge a simple truth: We waste money, as
well as lives, when we lock up non-violent offenders.

"Among those arrested for violent crimes, the proportion are
African-American men has changed little over the past 20 years. Among
those arrested for drug crimes, the proportion who are
African-American men has tripled. Although the prevalence of illegal
drug use among white men is approximately the same as that among black
men, black men are five times as likely to be arrested for a drug
offense," Schlosser wrote.

We ought to be able to talk about alternative sentences for
non-violent drug abusers - free drug treatment, with participation a
condition of probation, for example.

The streets may be safer because we have succeeded in locking away for
good many of the most dangerous predators, the gangbangers and serial
killers, the robbers and rapists and carjackers. But the country is no
better off for a shameless double standard that celebrates the
privileged athlete, actor or businessman who licks his drug habit in a
ritzy sanitarium, while imprisoning the crackhead too broke to afford

drug treatment. That policy guarantees a permanent underclass.

Checked-by: Rich O'Grady