Blacks more likely to be arrested for drug violation that Whites
Two new reports highlights the disparity between the arrests of blacks and whites for drug violations.
From the New York Times:
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.
Although both races use illegal drugs at equal rates, a black man is 12 times more likely to be sent to jail for a drug conviction as opposed to a adult white male.
In addition, the article stated that two-thirds of all arrests for drug violations in 2006 were of white men, while blacks accounted for 33 percent of arrests, even though they only account for 12.8 of the population.
