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Study: Racial disparities in drug...

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Study: Racial disparities in drug incarcerations
BY ZACHARY R. DOWDY
December 5, 2007 

Blacks on Long Island were 36 times more likely in 2002 to be imprisoned for drug offenses than whites, despite possessing and selling illegal drugs at similar rates, according to a national study tracking racial disparities in prison admissions.

Only 14 of the nation's 198 largest counties, with populations of 250,000 or more, yielded higher disparities than Long Island in the study released by the Justice Policy Institute, a Wash- ington-based think tank focusing on alternatives to incarceration.

"I did not expect that 97 percent of the largest counties would see racial disparities in terms of the African-American and white admission rates," said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the institute.

He added that the researchers did not try to find out why the disparities exist but that they may stem from law enforcement policies that concentrate on "open-air" drug sales. Blacks tend to sell drugs on streets while whites tend to sell them in indoor locations, he said.

Four of those top counties were in New York. They are Westchester, Dutchess, Albany, and Onondaga counties where blacks were 37, 40, 58 and 99 times more likely than whites to serve prison time for drug offenses, respectively.

The latest year for which data were available is 2002.

New York City had a smaller gap: There, blacks are five times more likely to serve time in prison for drug offenses than whites. Nationally, the study found blacks go to prison at more than 9 times the rate of whites, and 193 of the country's 198 largest counties present such disparities.

Its findings, said one analyst, may reflect misguided law enforcement policies.

Bob Gangi, executive director of the Correctional Association of New York, which monitors the state's prisons, said the "discriminatory aspects of how we deploy police, and the impact of mandatory sentencing laws leads to this result and a policy that is not only ineffective, but marked by corrosive racial bias."

Titled "The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties," the study also found that:

Of 175,000 people sent to prison for drugs nationwide in 2002, over half were black, though blacks are 13 percent of the population.

It found no relationship between rates at which people are sent to prison for drug offenses and the rates at which people use drugs. The study said 9.2 percent of blacks use illegal drugs, compared with 8.1 percent of whites.

Nassau District Attorney Kathleen Rice could not be reached for comment last night and a spokesman for Suffolk District Attorney Tom Spota, Robert Clifford, said, "Until we read and study the findings, we decline to comment."

Ethan Nadelman, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance, a Manhattan-based organization devoted to decriminalizing drugs, said economic factors such as whether white defendants are better represented than black defendants could also affect the disparity.

"It's clearly the case that the rates of arrest and prosecution and incarceration of blacks relative to whites far exceed any relatively higher rate of involvement in crime," said Nadelman.

Prison and race

Drug imprisonment rates by county based on 2002 data.

In Nassau, for example, 4.69 whites were sent to prison on drug offenses out of every 100,000 whites in the population.

County / Number imprisoned for drug crimes per 100,000 (Whites / Blacks) / Times more likely blacks are imprisoned

Nassau 4.69 166.98 36

Suffolk 6.27 227.22 36

New York City 32.09 174.17 5

Westchester 2.70 100.78 37

San Francisco 35.83 1,013.89 28

Los Angeles 24.15 416.16 17

Fairfax, Va. 3.31 38.95 12

Philadelphia 85.30 162.71 2

Nationwide 27.36 258.17 9

SOURCE: JUSTICE POLICY INSTITUTE REPORT