The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Has Detailed the Failure of the War on Marijuana — and Its  Egregious Racial Bias — in a Factually Scathing Indictment of the American Criminal Justice System

© 2013 Peter Free

 

05 June 2013

 

 

Citation

 

Ezekiel Edwards, Will Bunting, and Lynda Garcia, The War on Marijuana in Black and White — Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests, ACLU (June 2013) (PDF file)

 

 

Simple facts

 

The bad:

 

 

Over the past 40 years, the United States has fought a losing domestic drug war that has cost one trillion dollars, resulted in over 40 million arrests, consumed law enforcement resources, been a key contributor to jaw-dropping rates of incarceration, damaged countless lives, and had a disproportionately devastating impact on communities of color.

 

The ferocity with which the United States has waged this war, which has included dramatic increases in the length of prison sentences, and has resulted in a 53% increase in drug arrests, a 188% increase in the number of people arrested for marijuana offenses, and a 52% increase in the number of people in state prisons for drug offenses, between 1990 and 2010.

 

Indeed, the United States now has an unprecedented and unparalleled incarceration rate: while it accounts for 5% of the world’s population, it has 25% of the world’s prison population.

 

© 2013 Ezekiel Edwards, Will Bunting, and Lynda Garcia, The War on Marijuana in Black and White — Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests, ACLU (June 2013) (PDF file) (at page 7) (paragraph split)

 

The worse:

 

 

In 2010, the Black arrest rate for marijuana possession was 716 per 100,000, while the white arrest rate was 192 per 100,000. Stated another way, a Black person was 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person — a disparity that increased 32.7% between 2001 and 2010.

 

In the states with the worst disparities, Blacks were on average over six times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than whites. In the worst offending counties across the country, Blacks were over 10, 15, even 30 times more likely to be arrested than white residents in the same county.

 

© 2013 Ezekiel Edwards, Will Bunting, and Lynda Garcia, The War on Marijuana in Black and White — Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests, ACLU (June 2013) (PDF file) (at page 9)

 

 

What to do?

 

Seems obvious:

 

 

[U]ntil legalization or depenalization is achieved, law enforcement agencies and district attorney offices should deprioritize enforcement of marijuana possession laws.

 

In addition, police should end racial profiling and unconstitutional stop, frisk, and search practices, and no longer measure success and productivity by the number of arrests they make.

 

Further, states and the federal government should eliminate the financial incentives and rewards that enable and encourage law enforcement to make large numbers of arrests, including for low-level offenses such as marijuana possession.

 

In sum, it is time to end marijuana possession arrests.

 

© 2013 Ezekiel Edwards, Will Bunting, and Lynda Garcia, The War on Marijuana in Black and White — Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests, ACLU (June 2013) (PDF file) (at page 5) (paragraph split)

 

 

The moral? — Don’t hold your breath, we are arguably in love with bigotry and self-righteous judgmentalism

 

One would think that oppressing millions of people on the basis of their skin color would be seen as soulfully obscene.

 

Similarly, one would estimate that incarcerating 25 percent of the world’s population of prison residents, at a rate five times America’s proportion of the world population, would also seem to be glaringly immoral — unless we think that Americans are five times more likely to be antisocial criminals than other cultures’ peoples.

 

Being a relatively violent and often overly simplistic people, we seem to enjoy throwing people in jail, rather than taking the more challenging and effective course of examining:

 

(a)  the causes of why we actually object to what they’re doing

 

and

 

(b) how we might fix or ameliorate the problems that lead to them doing it.

 

Instead, bullets, missiles, and jail cells are the American way.

 

These simple-minded solutions to complex problems short-circuit effective analysis, intelligent action, and moral grace.  But being a nation that is addicted to avoiding self-reflective mirrors, I predict that the ACLU critique will be largely ignored.