How else to explain high rates for marijuana arrests when their usage rates are similar to white usage?
http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkb ... ne-charts/
Black youths use at lower rates than whites but are arrested ten times as often
http://healthland.time.com/2011/11/07/s ... an-blacks/

It does make some sense if you think about it for a moment.
More time is spent by police in crime infested areas, these are usually the poorest areas and blacks swell those ranks. Police are in the ghetto more than they are in the suburbs. Police also use arrests for minor crimes such as marijuana possession in order to help crack down on the larger stuff. The report should not focus on black/white but rather on income level, I would bet these drastic differences evened out quite a bit if you didn't view this as black vs white!

I am looking into data on this, but I have a hypothesis.

Perhaps the drug arrests are in conjunction with something else? A black teen is arrested for gang issues, and drugs found on the defendant will bring a drug charge. Possible?

(Posted in other forum discussing oppression... Easy mistake I guess)

The consistently higher-level of arrests in just about every state makes other explanations implausible. I get that blacks may be arrested at a higher rate for drugs because they live on average in higher- crime and poorer areas, but in every state and for a drug not considered by police to be serious, marijuana? And of course there has been a huge disparity in arrests for crack cocaine vs powder cocaine (Whites use powder, Blacks use crack cocaine). I am interested to see from Brad if there is statistical support for alternate explanations.

freeman3 wrote:The consistently higher-level of arrests in just about every state makes other explanations implausible. I get that blacks may be arrested at a higher rate for drugs because they live on average in higher- crime and poorer areas, but in every state and for a drug not considered by police to be serious, marijuana? And of course there has been a huge disparity in arrests for crack cocaine vs powder cocaine (Whites use powder, Blacks use crack cocaine). I am interested to see from Brad if there is statistical support for alternate explanations.

I will do my best to find out some data. I am for arrests on anyone for illegal drug possession, regardless of race/creed/sexual orientation/gender et al...

The "high crime area" is something of a circular argument, since the police are patrolling areas where crime is high. They are likely going to find more people to arrest, keeping it a high crime area. I still believe that what Tom wrote is accurate in summary. However, there may be more social and physical issues involved that lead to this circular situation:

In urban areas (e.g. the usual high crime zones) more people tend to be outside, walking around, or congregating on front steps and corners. It's part of living downtown, uptown, midtown, in-town. You normally do not find this kind of behavior in suburbs and other non-urban zones, except in backyards where somebody is grilling.

Therefore, cops will not normally observe people selling/buying/using drugs in non-urban zones as often as they can in urban zones. But human traffic patterns are different in non-urban (e.g. suburban) areas. Maybe there is just as much drug use, in fact. But if so, I would bet a lot of it goes on inside houses or backyards where visibility is more difficult for patrol cars. As we know from so many episodes of "COPS", suburban drug users seem to go downtown to get their drug supplies and pick up prostitutes.

In addition, the more condensed housing in urban settings exacerbates many of the problems. The larger amount of people walking and driving around, probably help camouflage various types of crime (break-ins, muggings, drug sales/use, prostitution, etc.). Trendy downtown warehouse-to-townhouse neighborhoods usually have their own private security patrols. Not so for the rest. And who are the most common social groups living in these urban zones?

Therefore, my argument is that the issue is not exclusively or mainly racial, but rather, social and economic. Police are not arresting people simply because they happen to be black, Indian, or Hispanic. They are arresting them because they are the most visible people breaking the law. But I am not in any way suggesting race is not a problem. Unfortunately, it seems a fact that it still is a problem (but not strictly the stereotypical white racist). I just don't think it is the main problem.

George, very well put.

I wonder whether the movement to legalize pot would benefit if whites and suburbanites were incarcerated at similar rates as urban African Americans. This represents a terrible waste of resources (both the government's and the users'). Sometimes if a problem hits your own social group you are more likely to try to solve it.

I have not looked into this, but I'm guessing at least some of this "phenomenon" is due to what the police did in NYC many years ago. In an effort to reduce crime across the board they cracked down on ALL crimes, including the minor ones. It worked well for them. With this in mind, I wonder if police use this "minor" pot bust as a tool to get these unsavory types off the street. They use pot as an easy way to get these people off the streets for at least a while and they hope over time it helps reduce the crime across the board?

I gotta think this has at least something to do with the problem. But either way, I think the bigger reason is due to the socio-economic reasons we have discussed. Is it ONLY to do with that? No, race probably plays some role but the article posted mentions race and race alone, I think race is a small part of the problem and not the major let alone the only factor.

I have not seen anything other than a larger sentence for crack use than powder use of cocaine.

Racially, I think it is not the issue but the effect. Crack is used more in the lower income areas of town. Being low income, they cannot afford the best attorney for them, and will get higher sentences.

Thus, my opinion is that it is not a racial issue, but an economic issue that is trying to be made into a racial issue post-Zimmerman.

You could argue why Blacks are so large a portion of the lower income portion of society, but to link drug arrests to race seems like nothing more than race baiting to me.

bbauska wrote:Racially, I think it is not the issue but the effect. Crack is used more in the lower income areas of town. Being low income, they cannot afford the best attorney for them, and will get higher sentences.

I think the flaw in this may be that the argument is based on mandatory minimums for crack being long then powder. So for example, a person busted with 2oz of crack gets 20 years while a person busted with 2oz of powder cocaine only gets 5 years because the law says crack has a mandatory minimum of 20 years while powder has a mandatory minimum of 5 years.

What is the purpose between the different mandatory minimums.

Archduke Russell John wrote:

bbauska wrote:Racially, I think it is not the issue but the effect. Crack is used more in the lower income areas of town. Being low income, they cannot afford the best attorney for them, and will get higher sentences.

I think the flaw in this may be that the argument is based on mandatory minimums for crack being long then powder. So for example, a person busted with 2oz of crack gets 20 years while a person busted with 2oz of powder cocaine only gets 5 years because the law says crack has a mandatory minimum of 20 years while powder has a mandatory minimum of 5 years.

What is the purpose between the different mandatory minimums.

I certainly do not know why there are different minimums. I think there should not be differences with ANY illegal drug (This would include Marijuana). To pick one over the other would bring about the possibility for discrimination that is evident here.

Crack cocaine is quite different from powder (and both from marijuana). Not all drugs are the same and, as a result, the laws covering them differ.

Crack is smoked, and is belived to be more addictive and more damaging than straight cocaine - the 'cracking' breaks up the salt, and affects what happens when the drug is taken - so there is a different chemical that comes with it - Methylecgonidine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methylecgonidine

Methylecgonidine has been shown to be specifically more harmful to the body than other byproducts of cocaine; for example to the heart,[2] lungs[3] & liver.[4]

Similarly, drugs vary in terms of their health effects and their addictability:
source

Just because X is crime and Y is a crime, we don't treat them the same (X=murder, Y=theft). And we have degrees of crimes based on the different nature of them, the severity of them, etc. And so they have different mandatory minimums.

I hope that helps answer ARJ's question.

Ray Jay wrote:George, very well put.

I wonder whether the movement to legalize pot would benefit if whites and suburbanites were incarcerated at similar rates as urban African Americans. This represents a terrible waste of resources (both the government's and the users'). Sometimes if a problem hits your own social group you are more likely to try to solve it.

Well, maybe if there were statistics that showed, for example, for every 50 whites and 50 minorities arrested for the same drug charge, would any one ethnic/racial group be more often found guilty than the other, given the variance in evidence. I suspect this is a bit hard to prove, since evidence is rarely of the same value in each situation. But it would very telling if the evidence for whites happened more often to be less compelling.

My brother-in-law has been on and off drugs many times (a shame really although he has been clean for over a year now) and he had mentioned of all the many drugs he had done (both powder and crack cocaine among them) NOTHING hooked him like crack, it was crack that broke up his marriage and made him go broke, made him beg and steal, But it was also crack that forced him to get clean, it's (according to him) insidious, fairly cheap and can get you addicted after using only one time!
(Myself, I had a beer 3 days ago)