Original article
County ranked second-worst in racial balance on drug crimes
By MADELAINE VITALE Staff Writer, 609-272-7218
Published: Wednesday, December 5, 2007
Atlantic County ranks second among the nation's nearly 200 largest counties for its disparity in the number of blacks jailed for drug-related crimes compared with whites, according to findings of a study released by the Washington, D.C.-based Justice Policy Institute.
The study found that 97 percent of the nation's counties with 250,000 or more people incarcerated blacks at a higher rate than whites. Kern County, Calif., has the highest drug-admission rate with 320 per 100,000 people, while ranking fifth in the nation for the number of blacks in the jails as opposed to whites. Atlantic County has the second-highest drug admission rate, with 256 drug offenders admitted per 100,000 people and 960 blacks admitted per 100,000 black residents. Camden County ranks fifth in the nation for admission of drug offenders and 14th for racial disparity, while Ocean County ranks 122nd for drug offender admission and 40th for disparity.
A spokeswoman for New Jersey's state judiciary department as well as the Atlantic County executive said the study does not show the whole picture.
Winnie Comfort, spokeswoman for New Jersey's judiciary, said that while she is sure the researchers put a lot of work into the study, the information is old - based on 2002 figures. Researchers from the Justice Policy Institute said the numbers were the most up to date they could gather from the counties analyzed.
"We did not have drug court in Atlantic and Cape May counties until September of 2004. We talked many times about the need for drug court to help alleviate the over-representation of minorities incarcerated," Comfort said. "I think it is inappropriate to call Atlantic County among the top in the nation (for racial disparity) when only 198 counties across the country were examined and entire states were not included in the study."
Amanda Petteruti, a researcher at the Justice Policy Institute, said Monday that the co-authors of the year-long study purposely used the rates of people imprisoned per 100,000 people in the county for accuracy.
While Petteruti said the focus was really on racial disparity, it also dealt with poverty, unemployment and law enforcement.
"We could say across the board, the higher the spending on law enforcement, the higher the prison rate," she said. "When we did the statistical analysis, we were able to make these comparisons."
Petteruti said the study really gets to the heart of how local officials are allocating funds in the budget for public safety. What the institute found was counties that used more funding on law enforcement and not as much on rehabilitation had a higher rate of blacks locked up for drug-related crimes.
Atlantic County Executive Dennis Levinson said the Atlantic County jail in Mays Landing is overcrowded.
"We better get a saner policy. Those out there who think the drug offenders should be locked up and the key should be thrown away should keep in mind that the county taxpayer is responsible for feeding the inmates," Levinson said. "It could cost $70 to $90 a day to house an inmate, and we have about 1,000 inmates."
In 2005, just a year after the drug courts began in Atlantic and Cape May counties, the Atlantic City NAACP honored Atlantic County for its work to reduce recidivism with rehabilitation programs, Levinson said.
Levinson also touched upon the second part of the study: economics. "If, say, an African-American person has a court-appointed attorney because he cannot afford his own and the other has Ed Jacobs, (a prominent defense attorney) if I were a betting man, I would bet on Ed Jacobs."
The study is the first to localize the racially uneven impact of drug imprisonment at the county level, officials from the study said.
"Rather than focus law enforcement efforts on drug-involved people who bear little threat to public safety, we should free up local resources to fund treatment, job training, supportive housing, and other effective public safety strategies," said Jason Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute.
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