Minorities and Drug Offenses in The Vortex

We can all agree that our nation’s drug laws should be fair and effective. To be effective, they need to keep our neighborhoods safe. To be fair, the police, judges and prosecutors who enforce drug laws should not treat people differently just because of their skin color or the size of their bank account. This is the America that we believe in and the America that we want to raise our children in.

But an aptly-titled report released today by the Justice Policy Institute, The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Outcomes, holds up a brutally honest mirror to the type of drug policy and justice system that we as a nation say that we believe in.

Sure, we don’t need a report to tell us that our nation’s drug laws have utterly failed to rid our country of drugs – especially in the neighborhoods most wracked with drug-related crime – but The Vortex presents hard data demonstrating that in most of America’s counties, an African-American or Latino person is virtually assured to do more time for the same crime than his or her white counterpart.

The institute’s website features this clickable map of the U.S. where you can learn the extent of racial disparity when it comes to drug law enforcement in your area. You can also find out how your area ranks in terms of how many people it locks behind bars for drug-related offenses.

The bottom line is that we can make our drug policy fairer and more effective by changing laws so that fewer nonviolent crimes are punishable by prison sentences in the first place. We can then reallocate the money spent on prisons to programs that are proven to be effective at reducing drug abuse, such as treatment, education and job training. Not only would these changes reduce the number of nonviolent offenders who are wasting years of their lives in prison, they would also make significant progress in eliminating the ways in which the criminal justice system treats people differently based on their skin color.