“The way the war on drugs has been pursued is one of the biggest reasons for the growing racial disparities in criminal justice over all,” said Ryan S. King, a policy analyst with the Sentencing Project, who wrote its report, which focuses on the differential arrest rates, not only between races but also among cities around the country. Some cities pursue urban, minority drug use far more intensively than do others.
Racial Disparities Found to Persist as Drug Arrests Rise
By ERIK ECKHOLM
More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.
Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.
But they note that the murderous crack-related urban violence of the 1980s, which spawned the drug war, has largely subsided, reducing the rationale for a strategy that has sowed mistrust in the justice system among many blacks.
In 2006, according to federal data, drug-related arrests climbed to 1.89 million, up from 1.85 million in 2005 and 581,000 in 1980.
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