Drug arrests at the millennium

Abstract

People of conscience perforce agonize over the growing racial disparities in drug arrests and incarceration in the United States. One is forced to view with alarm the tendency of this nation to become increasingly a carceral society. That this tendency most strikingly characterizes drug offenses and more specifically the drug offenses of African Americans, should be troubling for us all. The drug war is being fought in earnest, we realize, and its enemy, it seems, is the black community. One first confronts the racial disparities in the War on Drugs with a sense of outrage, a feeling that gross injustice is afoot in its prosecution. One concludes with no less a sense of outrage, but with the feeling that the injustices we observe begin at a much more basic and possibly more intractable level than the racial intent of the architects of the drug war. One also concludes with a sense of wonderment over how deep, how ramifying, and how abiding racial inequities in American society are, and how ineluctably they play themselves out in all corners of social life. In short, one shifts one’s sense of outrage from the part to the whole. Much of the drug policy debate centers around whether and to what extent the War on Drugs is racist. The charge can mean many things, of course, but one of its possible meanings is that African Americans are targeted for arrest specifically because they are black. However, unless we find a smoking gun, it’s unlikely that we will ever be able to locate direct, overt racist motives in the drug war. What we do have is a number of nearly iron-clad processes that both suggest inadvertence and are intricately intertwined with what used to be called institutional racism—that is, the structural reasons why identical factors and dynamics will produce very different outcomes for whites and blacks. In DRUG ARRESTS AT THE MILLENNIUM