Race, Drugs And Imprisonment

March 30, 1993|By Norval Morris. and Norval Morris is professor of law and criminology at the University of Chicago Law School in Chicago.

In the United States as a whole, the differential rate of imprisonment, African-American to Caucasian, proportional to population, is in excess of 7.5 to 1. Efforts to account for this gross difference raise important and disturbing issues.

To illuminate this problem, consider a few statistics of this racial skewing of the criminal justice system. In 1991 in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, studies were made of the number of African-Americans on one day within the control of the criminal justice system, meaning they were behind bars, on parole or probation, out on bond pending disposition of their cases or being sought on arrest warrants. The astonishing results were these: In Washington and in Baltimore respectively, 42 percent and 56 percent of all African-American males aged between 18 and 35 were on the day studied under the control of the criminal justice system.

The Washington figures broke down as follows: In jail or prison, 15 percent; on probation or parole, 21 percent; awaiting trial or being sought for trial, 6 percent. Of Baltimore's 60,715 African-Americans between 18 and 35 years old, 34,025 were under the control of the criminal justice system.

These are deeply disturbing figures, but they could be matched or approximated in many other cities of the United States.

What, then, are the explanations of this gross racial skewing? The question merits an attempt at an answer, but I cannot struggle with it now. It responds to no brief analysis. But let me just make one point about it that will insulate you from any misguided conclusion of genetic differences: As African-Americans move into the middle class in this country, which they increasingly do, they and their children have crime and delinquency rates indistinguishable from those of Caucasians of the same socioeconomic circumstances. Of course, those African-Americans who are left behind in our destroyed inner-city neighborhoods have crime rates and suffer victimization rates grossly higher than the rest of us.

Whatever the causes of this racial skewing of imprisonment rates, it is certainly true that when one visits the larger and tougher prisons and jails of the United States, they give the appearance of institutions for segregating from society a young male African-American underclass.

Perhaps the next topic will explain one cause of this miserable racial imbalance: our domestic drug policies.

A year ago I served as chairman of an international conference at senior governmental level, held in Italy, to consider domestic drug policies. Officials from the United States, Canada, Germany, Great Britain, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and Switzerland took part. It emerged that we are resolutely out of step with the rest of the Western world. From this conference I learned several things:

- There is no Western country that has legalized drugs, and that certainly includes the United Kingdom and Holland. The legalization or prohibition debate misses the realities of the problem.

- There is not much difference in the law relating to domestic drug policies between the countries at this conference. All are signatories to the international conventions of 1961 and 1971 which require governments to prohibit the non-medical use of heroin, cocaine, marijuana and other mood-altering drugs.

- But there are significant differences in philosophy and practice. In philosophy: All other countries regard harm minimization as their primary purpose; with us, it is a moral issue. We are going to make America drug-free. Alone in the Western world, we hope to cure the problem, to remake humans. The other sharp difference is in our enforcement policies. Let me quote from the report of those governmental experts: "In its heavy reliance on the criminal law to eliminate drug abuse, the United States stands alone."

- It is not the law that is astray, it is our socially injurious implementation of the law that does the damage. Practices that have produced uninterrupted failure for 85 years are seen as needing reinforcement, not abandonment.

- It is the same for drug policies as for prisons. If the medicine fails to work, double the dose.

Now I have to add the racial component to this perspective on our drug policies. The focus of enforcement of the drug laws is on inner-city, street markets in which poorly educated, otherwise unemployed, young African-Americans predominate.

Consider drug arrest rates over the past 25 years: The arrest rate of Caucasians for drug offenses increased from 1965 to 1970, and has since remained stable. The arrest rates of African-Americans for drug offenses was slightly higher than that of Caucasians in 1965 and stayed slightly higher through those five years of increase, but it did not stay stable. Since 1970 it increased nearly five-fold to a peak in 1989 and is now five times that of the Caucasian rate.