RACIAL PROFILING IN THE WAR ON DRUGS

Racial Profiling in the War on Drugs: Common Sense or Institutional Racism

Racial Profiling in the War on Drugs: Common Sense or Institutional Racism

Introduction

For more than a quarter years the “war on drugs” has exerted a deep impact on the structure and scale of the lawless person fairness system. The inception of the “war” in the 1980s has been a foremost assisting component to the historic rise in the jail community during this period. From a number of about 40,000 persons incarcerated in prison or jail for a drug offense in 1980, there has since been an 1100% boost to a total of 500,000 today. To place some perspective on that change, the number of persons incarcerated for a drug infringement is now larger than the number incarcerated for all offenses in 1980. The increase in incarceration for pharmaceutical infringements has been fueled by harshly increased regulation enforcement aiming at of drug regulation violations, often escorted by enhanced punishments for such offenses. Many of the mandatory sentencing provisions taken up in both state and federal regulation have been focused on pharmaceutical offenses. At the federal grade, the most infamous of these are the punishments for chink cocaine violations, whereby chink offenses are penalized far more harshly than dust cocaine offenses, even though the two substances are pharmacologically identical. Despite alterations in federal sentencing guidelines, the mandatory provisions still in location require that any person convicted of owning as little as five grams of chink cocaine (the weight of two sugar packets) obtain a five-year prison term for a first-time offense. At the state level, the most longstanding of the current generation of rough pharmaceutical regulations are New York's “Rockefeller” pharmaceutical regulations. Adopted in 1973, these regulations call for a 15- year jail period for ownership of four ounces of narcotics or sale of two ounces. Modest restructures to the law were enacted in 2004, and more substantial restructure is likely to be marked into law this year. The spectacular escalation of incarceration for pharmaceutical infringements has been escorted by deep racial/ethnic disparities. Overall, two-thirds of individuals incarcerated for a drug infringement in state jail are African American or Latino. These figures are far out of proportion to the degree that these assemblies use or deal drugs. Awealth of study illustrates that much of this disparity is fueled by disparate regulation enforcement practices. In effect, policeman bureaus have often aimed at drug law violations in low-income groups of hue: Red;">hue for enforcement operations, while substance abuse in communities with considerable assets is more expected to be addressed as a family or public wellbeing problem. In recent years, there is emerging evidence of potentially significant change in the approach and effects of national drug policy. First, there is increasing public and policymaker recognition of the value of drug treatment as a more appropriate response to substance abuse than incarceration in many instances. In this consider, we can find the rapid expansion of pharmaceutical ...