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Groundbreaking Study Examines Drug Imprisonment in 198 Counties; 97 Percent Experienced Racial Disparities

Today the Justice Policy Institute (JPI) released a new report which finds that 97 percent of the nation’s large-population counties imprisoned African Americans at a higher rate than whites. The report documents racial disparities in the use of prison for drug offenses in 193 of the 198 counties that reported to government entities.

      The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties is the first study to examine drug imprisonment rates at the county level. It is also the first study to document the disproportionate impact of drug imprisonment on African American communities at the county level.

Major findings of The Vortex include:

    * While tens of millions of people use illicit drugs, prison and policing responses to drug behavior have a concentrated impact on a subset of the population. In 2002, there were 19.5 million illicit drug users, 1.5 million drug arrests, and 175,000 people admitted to prison for a drug offense. While African Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates, African Americans are ten times more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses.
    * Of the 175,000 admitted to prison nationwide in 2002, over half were African American, despite the fact that African Americans make up less than 13 percent of the U.S. population.
    * There is no relationship between the rates at which people are sent to prison for drug offenses and the rates at which people use drugs in counties. For example, although Rockingham County, NH, has a larger percent of its population reporting illicit drug use, Jefferson Parish, LA, sent more people to prison for a drug offense at a rate 36 times that of Rockingham.
    * Higher county drug prison admission rates were associated with how much was spent on policing and the judicial system, higher poverty and unemployment rates, and the proportion of the county’s population that is African American. 

“The exponential removal of people of color who have substance abuse problems from their communities and into prisons undermines and destabilizes neighborhoods-it does not make them safer,” says Ethan Nadelmann, executive director of the Drug Policy Alliance. “Drug addiction doesn’t discriminate but our drug policies do.”
The findings of The Vortex have already raised comments from scholars and practitioners across the United States.
“Those numbers are frightening,” Albany County District Attorney David Soares told the Albany Times Union in an article published today.
In an article by the Wisconsin State Journal, Pam Oliver, a professor of sociology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison said “There’s a huge racial disparity in the drug war virtually everywhere in the U.S.”
“Dane County has an extremely high racial disparity rate because we have a quite high black incarceration rate compared to an extremely low white incarceration rate” for drug offenses.
In an article published in The San Francisco Chronicle, Public Defender Jeff Adachi said, “if you go to any courtroom in the Hall of Justice, you will see that the majority arrested are African American. At every stage of the criminal process - arrest, conviction and those who are sent to prison - there is a disproportionate impact on blacks.”
While the report does not make detailed recommendations for counties, the authors suggest that policymakers consider reforming drug policies to include:

    * De-escalation of the “drug war.” Drug enforcement practices are focused in the African-American community, despite evidence that they are no more likely than their white counterparts to be engaged in drug use or drug delivery behaviors. Local, state and federal policymakers should closely examine racial disparities in local drug imprisonment rates that result from these practices, and consider alternative approaches to reducing drug use and sales.
    * Careful consideration of public safety funding. While policing and judicial expenditures need to be prioritized to help deal with violent crime, other ways to promote public safety would include investments in public health policies and services that reduce poverty and unemployment. 
    * A shift to evidence-based drug enforcement practices. Reform drug enforcement practices, and collect data to analyze the fairness of local drug enforcement tactics and policies.

The Vortex can be found online at http://www.justicepolicy.org, along with factsheets for the 198 counties studied and additional media coverage.

The Justice Policy Institute is a non-profit public policy and research institute dedicated to ending society’s reliance on incarceration and promoting effective and just solutions to social problems. To learn more about our research and publications visit www.justicepolicy.org