US blacks jailed at higher rate for drugs than whites: report
WASHINGTON (AFP) — African-Americans are arrested and imprisoned for drug-related crimes at a much higher rate than white offenders, even though whites commit more drug offenses in the United States, a rights group said.
A black man is 12 times more likely to be sent to prison for a drug offense than a white man, according to a Human Rights Watch report titled "Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States."
A black woman is five times more likely to go to jail for a drug crime than a white counterpart, said the report, which is based on a review of statistics in 34 US states.
In 16 states, including Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland and New York, blacks are sentenced to prison for drug offenses at a rate 10 to 42 times higher than whies.
"Most drug offenders are white, but most of the drug offenders sent to prison are black," said the report's author, Jamie Fellner, senior counsel in the US program at Human Rights Watch.
"The solution is not to imprison more whites but to radically rethink how to deal with drug abuse and low-level drug offenders," she said.
Among the prison population, two in five black men are there for drug-related offenses, compared to one in four whites.
A study conducted by The Sentencing Project and released with the Human Rights Watch report found that, since 1980, the rate of drug arrests in US cities for African-Americans soared by 225 percent, compared to 70 percent among whites.
"The alarming increase in drug arrests since 1980, concentrated among African-Americans, raises fundamental questions about fairness and justice," said Ryan King, policy analyst for The Sentencing Project and author of the study, "Disparity by Geography: The War on Drugs in America's Cities."
"But even more troubling is the fact that these trends come not as the result of higher rates of drug use among African Americans, but, instead, the decisions by local officials about where to pursue drug enforcement," he said.
A study released in February by the Pew Center on the States, an independent research group, found that one in 15 African-Americans are behind bars in the United States, compared to one in 106 adult white men.
The study also found that more than one in 100 adults are behind bars in the United States.
