How Racist is Your State’s Prison System?

In the United States a black man has a one in three chance of ending up in prison at one point in his life. White men have a one in 17 chance. This is largely because of the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1971 War on Drugs. Richard Nixon created the War on Drugs to curb the nation’s growing crime rate, and Bill Clinton signed the 1994 Crime Bill to fix the problems the War on Drugs had not solved. The War on Drugs imposed a set of mandatory minimum sentences for drug trafficking (a term used to define any involvement in the cultivating, manufacturing, distributing or otherwise selling of controlled substances). Setting penalties at 10 years in prison for possessing 5 kilograms of cocaine on the first offence, and life without parole on the third offence was supposed to scare people out of selling drugs. This did not work. What it did instead was force judges to send people to prison for much longer than they otherwise might have. Some judges have even sent appeals to various presidents due to being forced to give someone an “unjust, cruel, and even irrational” sentence. (President Bush declined to commute the 55-year sentence of Weldon Angelos for selling marijuana while possessing a firearm). Another thing that the War on Drugs has done for the United States is fill the prisons, mostly with black and latino men.

East coast states have the greatest disparity between the percentage of the population who are black and the percentage of those in prison who are black. Maryland’s population is 29 percent black, while its prison population is 68 percent black, compared to a 55 percent white population and 27 percent white prison population. Pacific Northwest states have the least prison disparities, but Native Americans were overrepresented in most of these states. The South has an over-representation of both Latinos and blacks, with New Mexico showing an over-representation of Native Americans as well blacks and Latinos.

While each race has been found to use drugs at around the same rate (with asians being the lowest) based on a 2013 survey by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Despite this black people are sent to jail for drug crimes at much higher rates than white people. This isn’t only because of the War on Drugs’ mandatory minimum sentencing rules. The racial biases can be found all the way down to the enforcement level. As New York’s stop and frisk policy showed us, police are much more likely to suspect a minority of being involved in a crime. In New York only 9% of the people stopped and frisked were white, while 51% were black and 33% were latino.

The problems that the United States faces in terms of race are huge and present in many areas of life. Systemic racism is clearly evident within our judicial branch, but a lot of this is because of the laws that judges are following. These laws come from a Congress made up of mostly white men representing a country with a very different demographic.

One thing that can be done to start to get rid of the racial disparities in United States prison is to get rid of mandatory minimum sentencing laws. This would allow judges to have greater discretion to impose sentences appropriate to the crimes.