This article is long but presents some information to ponder as you consider the issue of our war on drugs among other things.

April 16, 2009
even without lies, the damage is already done
When you are sworn into Federal Court, you are exhorted to tell "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth." Each of these phrases carries a slightly different angle against any possible lie - not only are you swearing to speak the truth, but also to not hold any part of the truth back, and to not mix in lies among the truth you do tell.

By its own standards, the US Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics is openly and unabashedly lying about the racial divisions that remain within the American penal system.

A report by The Sentencing Project uses data provided by the Bureau of Justice Statistics to come to the cheery conclusion that over the six-year period from 1999-2005 there was a 21.6% drop in African-Americans serving state prison time for drug offenses, while the number of white increased by 42.6%. This fact headlines every major newspaper article about the report, including articles in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Christian Science Monitor, and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

Ignoring for a moment the extraordinary racial disparity in the enforcement of drug laws that existed prior to 1996, with blacks accounting for less than 15% of all drug users but over half of those in prison for drug offenses, when you take the time to examine these numbers you'll see they are lies.

Here's the chart quoted in The Sentencing Project's report:

See site for chart:http://www.tremblethedevil.com/my_weblog/2009/04/even-without-lies-the-damage-is-already-done.html

The lie bubbles up to the surface when you do the actual calculations to determine the percentages. The numbers simply do not add up.
In the 1999 group the discrepancy is close to irrelevant: totaling up the number given for each race you get 247,500 instead of the 251,200 given in the chart - a difference of 3,700 or just 1.5%. So, not much of a swing.

Much more troubling is what happens when you do the math on the 2005 numbers. Each race is stated to have a certain percentage of the prison population: 28.5% White, 44.8% Black, and 20.2% Hispanic. And when you take the stated population of each group, and divide it into the stated total, those numbers mesh perfectly.

But there's a problem. One that would cause you to fail a high school math test, bring the IRS knocking at your door, or cause a space shuttle to explode during liftoff.

When you add up the number given for each race, you only get 239,600 total prisoners - instead of the 253,300 the chart tells you. So although 72,300 White prisoners divided into a total prison population of 253,300 does give you 28.5% - the total prison population is actually 236,900, or 16,400 prisoners lower.

That's a 6.5% difference - hardly negligible. And this is not the result of a rounding error or from a margin of error. Nor is it the result of the overall racial composition of the country changing. The 2000 census lists 75.1% of Americans as white and 12.3% as black, while the U.S. Census Bureau's Community Survey for 2005-2007 put the numbers at 74.1% and 12.4% - the one-percent change in whites is by far the largest percentage shift.

Dividing a number out of a whole that's missing a gigantic chunk, an error that results in a 50% swing in the stated outcome, is hard to swallow as simply bad math.

It's safe to assume that the total number of prisoners is correct because, as a footnote explains:

Data analysis procedures adopted by the Bureau of Justice Statistics in 2004 affected the categorization of persons identifying with two or more races... and had the result of a modest reduction in the number of persons identified as non-Hispanic white and black.

So what it seems has happened is that, maybe through simple bureaucratic incompetence but more likely through a concerted attempt to warp the numbers, people who identified themselves as mixed race were simply thrown out and percentages were calculated from a ghost number that was missing prisoners who identified themselves as mixed race.

Because where it really gets ugly, is when you put those 16,400 prisoners back into the system. For the sake of an argument that will be illustrated shortly, those thousands belonged in the Black column.

That would change the the total number of incarcerated blacks in 2005 from 113,500 to 129,900 , so instead of 44.8% of the population they now make up 51% of it. So now instead of a total decrease in the Black population from 1999 to 2005 of 21.6% as the chart erroneously states, the adjusted decrease is instead 10%. That's less than half the stated number, a fairly large mistake.

There are two questions which need immediate answering, the first being why not tack on the missing prisoners onto the initial 1999 black population as well? Well, even if this is done - the adjusted decrease would now be 12% instead of 10%, not much of a difference and now just over half of the number the chart gives us, a number highlighted as the most important statistic by every major media outlet that covered the report.

Additionally, as the above footnote explains, the method of reporting those who identified themselves as mixed-race wasn't changed until 2004, so back in 1999 it's unclear where exactly the 1.5% fit into the system. They may have been a rounding error, they may just have been the Asians.

And to answer the second question, of how can you justify lumping the mixed prisoners missing from the total into the Black column - well, we have our first African-American president, and his mother could pass for June Cleaver. In America if you have one African-American parent, you are considered black by society. This point is no longer open to any sort of sensible argument. (Unless, of course, you want to take it up with Young Jeezy.)

Granted, some of those who identified themselves as "mixed" may have been of Hispanic heritage. Which brings us to the reason these numbers are so warped in the first place.


http://www.tremblethedevil.com/my_weblog/2009/04/even-without-lies-the-damage-is-already-done.html

If you were to break the chart up into "White" and "non-White," using the cooked numbers you'd think that there's been a 23.5% decrease in the total of "non-White" prisoners in State prisons for drug offenses in the six-year span from 1999 to 2005. But use the actual numbers, which actually base the percentages on the real total instead of a completely ****ing imaginary one, you'd find that there's only actually only been a 10% decrease.

Well under half of the cooked number. Drug laws in America, after all, "have originally been based on racism... all of these laws are based on the belief that there is a class in society that can control themselves, and there is a class in society which cannot."19

The popularly cited motivation for the War on Drugs is that it was a response to the growing numbers of military serviceman who were getting hooked on heroin and other narcotics while serving in the Vietnam War.

Although that was a troublesome issue, when you know the history of all past American drugs laws it quickly becomes apparent that there's no way in hell that was the only impetus behind this wave of anti-drug legislation, and that Nixon was using soldiers' addiction as opportunistic displacement.

Following the Civil War the earliest anti-drug laws were passed, banning the consumption of alcohol. But not, of course, for everyone.

Whites could drink as much as they pleased, but if you were a minority in antebellum America you permitted from imbibing at all.
At the time it was a widely held belief in American politics that some races, bless their brown souls, simply couldn't control themselves. Furthering the codification of this perception, in 1901 Henry Cabot Lodge spearheaded a law in the U.S. Senate banning the sale of liquor and now opiates as well to all "uncivilized races."

In this case, "uncivilized" was synonymous with "dark." At this point in American history, whites could get as drunk, high, or smacked as they wanted – while the brown-skinned members of American society were completely banned from consuming any intoxicant.

Throughout the first half of the 20th Century, any violence carried out by a black man against a white could be attributed to the commonly-held caricature of a "cocaine-crazed negro." Newspaper headlines screamed of coked-up black criminals who were SHOT BUT DON'T DIE!, and policemen claiming that WE NEED BIGGER BULLETS! because their current caliber wasn't large enough to stop the crack-crazed negroes they routinely came up against in the line of duty.

However blacks weren't singled out as a racial minority, the first anti-marijuana laws targeted the wave of Mexican immigrants who were spreading across the American South. They were seen, then as now, to be stealing jobs and government resources from resident whites, and so politicians from that region of the country first banned marijuana use by minorities alone, and then eventually altogether.
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Nixon's public claim that the War on Drugs was primarily a response to the growing number of addicted veterans was at best a lie of omission. Taking into account past legal precedent, and the fact that American urban centers were being wracked by a series of seemingly unending race riots, it becomes self-evident that the War on Drugs was simply another page in the story of American anti-drug laws that has always been rooted in racism.

Then in 1973, with Nixon desperately attempting to spin his way out of Watergate, New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller passed a set of laws that were soon mimicked by several other states and eventually the entire federal government.

They were minimum sentencing laws for drug crimes that, partially because they included a fifteen-year prison term for possessing even a small amount of narcotics, were the harshest the country had ever seen. The per-capita prison population of the United States remained constant from 1930 to right around 1973, at which point the graph begins an exponential climb that grows steeper and steeper with every passing year.

These counter-narcotics laws that, both by design and in practice, an explosion in our prison population – a population which started disproportionately black, and only grew to become more so as the years passed. Between 1979 and 1990 blacks made up a steady percent of our overall population, but between those same years black went from making up 39% of our prison population to 53% of it.20

Today that number's down to 51.2%. An improvement, but hardly.

Through the 1980s this disparate growth was fueled by the Anti-Drug Abuse Act, one of the hundreds of crime bills passed by state and Congressional legislatures in the 1980s and 1990s. The Anti-Drug Abuse Act imposed the first of the mandatory minimum sentencing laws, here five-years in prison without chance of parole for anyone caught selling a substantial-enough amount of heroin, methamphetamine, marijuana, or cocaine. This last drug, cocaine, had a unique provision.

You'd receive the same unparolable five-year sentence for selling either 5 grams of crack cocaine as you would selling one-hundred times that much – 500 grams – of powder cocaine. Crack and powder cocaine are pharmacologically the exact same drug, there're only two important differences. One is that crack cocaine is smoked while powder cocaine is snorted. The other is a bit more telling. Powder cocaine was mainly consumed by whites, whereas crack cocaine was the form of choice for innercity blacks.

Critics, for good reason, blasted the law as shamelessly racist.21

America introduced a solution to civil disorder and social injustice that wasn't novel, it's simply grown to become unmatched in scale. By 2003, the percentage of our population in prison dwarfed England's level, our international neighbor whose culture and mores are closest to ours.

We have, proportionally, six-times our population locked up behind bars as our tea-sipping crumpet-munching cousins across the pond. For France and Germany, the difference approaches ten-times as many.

Our prison population has increased ten-fold in just thirty years. In terms of the global population, we have just 5% of that but fully a quarter of the world's prisoners.22 And these American prisoners have one common and inescapable denominator that you've almost certainly already stereotyped them with – but for good reason. The stereotype of the black male American prisoner is, among other things, an accurate reflection of reality.

Although only 12% of the American population is black, over half of the two-million Americans locked up in prison are black. A black man is eight-times as likely as a white man to be locked up at some point in his life. At any one time in America, almost a third of black American males in their twenties are under some form of "correctional supervision" – if not actually incarcerated, then either on probation or on parole, meaning they've recently passed through the American penal system.23

This means that as of 1996, a sixteen-year-old kid in America would have nearly a one-in-three chance of spending some time behind bars if he was unlucky enough to have been born black. If he happened to be born white, he'd only face a 4% chance of incarceration. In Chicago's home state there're 10,000 more black prisoners than black college students, and for every two black students enrolled in college there are five elsewhere in the state either locked up or on parole.24

In 2001 a government survey revealed that the rate of illicit drug use was only point-two of a percent higher for blacks, and yet three-quarters of those arrested for drug possession were black. Nearly half of all arrests in America are for simple marijuana offenses. These statistical realities should do much more than stagger you.

If you're black – they terrify you.

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And, again, due to the incredibly high concentration of blacks in the American prison population – accounting for about one of ten in the general population but making up half of our two-million prisoners, a discrepancy that can be traced back to the unjust drug laws enacted as the Civil Rights movement was failing up through the War on Drugs - the hope-numbing impact of being held in prison and then being hard-pressed to find employment afterward enforces "the stigma of race [that] remains the unmeltable condition of the black social and economic situation."26

Racism is generally understood in America to have fallen to an all-time low. But this is an illusion, created because our prisons and the hundreds of thousands of black men inside of them are built at sites unseen.

A "subtler and more covert" racism has been enabled as prison populations artificially bend racially specific underemployment rates as "mass incarceration makes it easier for the majority culture to continue to ignore the urban ghettos that live on beneath official rhetoric."27

The Civil Rights movement was marked by dozens and dozens of indelible images of racism that were carried in the media each day – black children being marched past an angry white mob into a newly segregated school, police dogs being sicced on peaceful black protesters, burnt-out remains of bombed black churches, one black man behind a pulpit preaching of Christian love and patience and another black man punctuating with his fist the need for angry black action, crowds full of college students both black and white being sprayed at times by firehoses and other times by bullets.

We've all seen the living, breathing, killing reality of racism in the 1970s. None of us now are able to see its existence now, because racism no longer lives on the front pages of our newspapers and during our evening news – instead it's been suffocated inside poured concrete walls which rise and fall in invisible existence, locked safely out of sight.

Until from the barrel of a terrorist's gun poured a breathe that brought it back to life for all of us.

I see the numbers concerning ratios of inmates. It has long been known that they are mostly black men/women. It has also been known that blacks, in general, have lower average pay scales, and maintain on average, a lower standard of living.

There have been measures taken to compensate, and the evidence shows that it is working.

The purpose of the article, I find quite questionable. What is the intent?

Are there charts/graphs available to show the liklihood of commiting crimes according to the races? Could this be relevant to the arrest numbers?

Is there a compensation in thought for the fact that most users do not get prison time, but dealers are more likely to?

I promote equality of rights and opportunity, not political motivation for smearing evidence in lieu of.