|
Leonard E. Birdsong
excerpted from: Leonard E. Birdsong, Drug
Decriminalization and Felony Disenfranchisement: the New Civil Rights
Causes, 2 Barry Law Review 73-108, 74-76, 107-108 (Summer 2001)(230
Footnotes)
The war on drugs has been lost for a number of reasons. It has been
lost because drug addiction and usage are being treated as criminal
problems when they are actually public health problems. The war has also
been lost because people are being sent to prison for longer periods of
time, for either possessing, manufacturing, or distributing drugs,
instead of being rehabilitated as productive members of society.
Finally, the war has been lost because it appears that the war is being
used as an immoral pretext to imprison as many African Americans as
possible for nonviolent behavior.
The White House drug-control director maintains that fifty-three tons
of cocaine in the past year have been confiscated. Certainly, this
author believes that this quantity confiscated simply indicates that a
great deal more of the substance is reaching our shores. Why is this
significant? Simply put, there is a tremendous demand for cocaine and
other such mood-altering substances. Legislators continue to concentrate
on cutting the supply, apparently forgetting that without demand there
would be no need for the supply. The tonnage of drugs coming into this
country indicates that there are a lot of people who condone and support
such use.
Nor are these drug users all stereotypical
"down-and-outers." A recent study reveals that seventy percent
of drug users in this country hold full-time jobs. This is a remarkable,
even startling, statistic. Nonetheless it is a quite significant
statistic, and it should not be ignored.
It is a statistic that reveals that the war on drugs is not being
waged against the majority drug-using group. A recent study indicates
that drug usage is basically proportional by race and ethnicity to the
representation of such groups in the country. In other words, the
approximately eighty percent of the American population that is white
comprises a proportional percentage of the drug users. However, whites,
who therefore embody around eighty percent of the drug users, represent
only twelve percent of those arrested on drug charges. In contrast,
African Americans comprise about thirteen percent of drug users but
involve seventy-four percent of those sentenced for drug possession.
A large and racially disproportionate share of our nation's
population has been incarcerated for felony crimes concerning drugs.
Department of Justice statistics reveal that at the end of 1998 there
were 1,302,019 felons incarcerated under the jurisdiction of state or
federal prisons in the country. Nearly 640,000 of these prisoners are
African American. Although African Americans make up less than thirteen
percent of the population of the United States, African Americans make
up forty-nine percent of the total of prisoners under state and federal
jurisdiction.
Not only is the current prison population disproportionate, but the
trend is worsening. The rate of imprisonment for African American men
was over eight times that of white men in 1998. Black men were confined
in prison at a rate of 3,098 per 100,000 compared to a rate of 370 per
100,000 for white men. More strikingly, in the past ten years the
African American men's rate of imprisonment increased ten times more
than the white men's rate of increase.
At the beginning of 1998 there were 548,900 African American males in
these prisons, compared with 541,700 white males. This is an outrageous
statistic for this country, or any country - over half of the male
prison population is drawn from a twelve-percent minority group.
Furthermore, Department of Justice statistics reveal that drug offenses
accounted for thirty percent of the total growth among African Americans
incarcerated between 1990 and 1996.
Nor is this trend confined to black men. Statistics further reveal
that in 1994 African American women comprised eighty-two percent of all
women sentenced for crack offenses. The increase in state imprisonment
for drug offenses for African American women between 1986 and 1991 was
828%, compared to a 241% increase for white women.
These numbers show that the American drug war is mainly being fought
against African Americans whom Americans choose to put in jail and,
thereby, disenfranchise.
. . .
America's terrible problem of teenage gun crime is not uniform
throughout America. The problem is very heavily concentrated among older
adolescent males in large metropolitan areas, and within that group
heavily concentrated among low-income blacks. In this population, the
rate of gun-related death is appallingly high and calls for immediate
action.
Addressing the social pathologies that beset inner-city minorities is
the most realistic approach to dealing with the group's very high
homicide rate. Since drugs are readily available in the inner city,
despite extremely severe national prohibition, it is foolish to expect
that gun controls will take guns out of the inner cities. Nor is it
realistic to expect that calling three delinquent friends who use drugs
and rob people "a criminal street gang" and imposing a federal
prison sentence (as opposed to the severe state prison sentence which
would be imposed anyway for the robberies) will end the existence of
gangs. The longer that the debate focuses narrowly only on the symptoms
of social decay--gangs and guns--the longer elected officials and
American society will postpone the difficult work of restoring hope to
the underclass.
At the 1966 Senate hearings dealing with the problem of
"juvenile delinquents" using guns, Senators Edward Kennedy,
Thomas Dodd, and others wrote a report which promised, "(b)y
prohibiting the mail-order traffic in concealable firearms entirely and
restricting the over-the-counter purchaseof concealable firearms by
nonresidents, and by regulating the mail-order traffic in shotguns and
rifles, the problem will be substantially alleviated." Every one of
Senator Kennedy's proposals (and then some) became federal law in the
Gun Control Act of 1968. Three decades later, there is no reputable
criminological evidence that the restrictions have "substantially
alleviated" the problem of juvenile delinquents carrying guns.
Rather than concede that the Gun Control Act of 1968 is a failure and
should be repealed, gun-control advocates call for more and more
restrictive legislation, which they promise--this time for sure--will
take guns away from juveniles.
The conservative response, unfortunately, is to criticize the failure
of gun control, and then proceed down an opposite--but equally futile
path--by making activities which are already illegal, illegal another
time, under the rubric of gang control.
Will elected officials continue to offer the public only the empty
promises of gun control and gang control, or will they begin the hard
work of combating the true causes of American violence? The answer may
determine whether the adult Americans of today will bequeath to
twenty-first century Americans a society with more violence and less
freedom, or a society that finally started to reverse the blight of its
inner cities. |
