America's Way of Justice Favors Whites Over Blacks

By RBG
www.stillrbg.ning.com
Contributing Writer
March 2, 2008

Legal scholars pondering reports that 1 of every 100 U.S. adults is in jail or prison need look no further than Roger Clemens to see why it is blacks who mainly choke the jails. Men such as Clemens - unlike their counterparts such as, say, Barry Bonds - enjoy a white privilege conveying a sense of immunity from prosecution, or even suspicion.

Clemens' raised right hand seemed steady while he swore before a House committee that he'd never, ever used steroids or human growth hormone. His self-righteous duplicity, however, was too much even for the U.S. Congress. Defending what passes for its honor, the committee has called in the Justice Department to sort through the baseball star's inconsistencies. The more credible Andy Pettitte, as well as the man who admits to injecting illicit chemicals into Clemens' butt, testified to a different set of facts.

Baseball and some other professional sports and pseudo-sports - football, wrestling, speed skating, bodybuilding, track and field - are awash in illicit drugs designed to enhance performance. Can it be that the athletes punished as poster children for drug abuse, such as Bonds, Marion Jones, Jose Conseco, Ben Johnson, etc., are either Latino or black?

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Yes, for this is the American way of justice. This racial pattern of enforcement imprisons one of every nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34. This '06 national figure was disclosed by the Pew Center, which ranks the United States as the world's lone incarceration superpower. Its 2.3 million inmates in jails and state and federal prisons far outdistanced China, which has a population four times greater. The U.S. prison rate also tops that of other "police-state" nations such as Russia and former Soviet republics.

Concentrating on the overall incarceration, however, the media downplay the vastly disproportionate impact of the harsher sentences that courts hand to African-Americans.

Another recent study revealed a stark contrast in the way blacks and whites are jailed for drug offenses, which account for a high percentage of prison populations. The Justice Policy Institute studied drug arrests in 198 of the largest U.S. counties, making up over half the nation's population. All but two of these counties incarcerated blacks at a higher rate than whites. Suffolk County, where my wife and I raised three children, sent black drug offenders to prison at a rate some 36 times that of whites.

Such a shameful, national disparity in incarceration rates, according to the institute, occurred even with a pattern showing no appreciable difference between whites and blacks in illegal drug possession, use and sale. Some 8.5 percent of whites were found to use illicit drugs in '02, compared to 9.7 percent for blacks. Despite this similarity, African-Americans, the report found, were "admitted to prison for drug offenses [at] nearly 10 times the rate for whites."

Much has been made of the federal sentencing policy - softened by a recent Supreme Court decision - that punished crimes involving crack cocaine at a 100-1 ratio compared with powder cocaine. This Draconian law was mocked in this space as if, say, during Prohibition Congress found that whites drank mainly Coors and blacks Colt 45 and the lawmakers then proceeded to enact a policy punishing crimes involving Colt 45 some 100 times more severely than those involving Coors.

The sinister court system reaches well beyond even the de jure strictures of policy to ensure, de facto, that blacks are hauled off to prison at a much greater rate. Some 24 percent of crack cocaine users were reportedly black, for example, and 72 percent were Latino or white. Yet, the institute says, "more than 80 percent of defendants sentenced for crack cocaine offenses were African-Americans."

This disparate rate of black incarceration appears to result from unfair police and court policies at every level. "Cash-strapped" states that last year spent some $50 billion on corrections, so called, reaped no clear benefits in recidivism rates or overall crime, the institute concluded.

Treating blacks the same as whites - whether it's Barry Bonds or Roger Clemens - would be a cost-effective way out of this national shame of incarceration. Besides, it's the right thing to do.

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