http://www.thenation.com/doc/20060710/glasser
July 10, 2006 issue The Nation
Drug Busts=Jim Crow
by IRA GLASSER
<snip>
According to
federal statistics gathered by the Sentencing Project, only 13 percent
of monthly drug users of all illegal drugs--defined as those who use a
drug at least once a month on a regular basis--are black, about their
proportion of the population. But 37 percent of drug-offense arrests
are black; 53 percent of convictions are black; and 67 percent of all
people imprisoned for drug offenses are black. Adding in Latinos,
about 22 percent of all monthly drug users are black or Latino, but 80
percent of people in prison for drug offenses are black or Latino.
Even in presumptively liberal New York State, 92 percent of all
inmates who are there for drug offenses are black or Latino.
The fact that so many people arrested, convicted and imprisoned for
drug offenses are black or Latino is not because they are mostly the
ones doing the crime; it is because they are mostly the ones being
targeted. This is not a phenomenon of the Deep South. It is
nationwide.
<snip>
Despite these patterns of racial targeting, it has not been
fashionable among liberals to see drug prohibition as a massive civil
rights problem of racial discrimination. Perhaps it would be easier if
we examined the way racially targeted drug-war incarceration has
damaged the right to vote, a right quintessentially part of the rights
we thought we had won in the 1960s with the demise of Jim Crow laws.
Until recently (there have been some changes in the past few years in
some states), every state but two barred felons from voting--some
permanently, some in a way that allowed, theoretically but often not
as a practical matter, for the restoration of voting rights. Because
of the explosion of incarceration driven by drug prohibition, more
than 5 million people are now barred from voting. The United States is
the only industrial democracy that does this. And the origin of most
of these laws--no surprise--is the post-Reconstruction period after
slavery was abolished. Felony disenfranchisement laws, like poll taxes
and literacy tests, were historically part of the system that arose
after slavery to bar blacks from exercising equal rights and, in
particular, equal voting rights. Felony disenfranchisement laws were,
to a large extent, part of a replacement system for subjugating blacks
after slavery was abolished.
If you want to contemplate what this means, consider the state of
Florida in the 2000 presidential election, where 200,000 black
Floridians were barred from voting because of prior felonies in an
election in which the presidency was determined by 537 disputed votes.
If even one-third of these people had actually voted--say, 70,000--and
if they voted in the usual proportions that blacks vote for the
Democratic candidate--say, 80 percent, probably a low estimate--those
70,000 voters would have produced a 42,000 net gain for Al Gore.
This is a dramatic example, but hardly unique. A 2002 study in the
American Sociological Review concluded that John Tower would never
have been elected to the US Senate from Texas in 1978 but for racially
disproportionate felony disenfranchisement; that John Warner for the
same reason wouldn't have been elected in 1978 from Virginia; and that
despite the apparent rise in conservative Republican voting, the
Senate would have remained under Democratic control every year between
1984 and 2003 if former felons had been allowed to vote. Indeed, if
the same degree of racially disparate felony disenfranchisement that
exists now had existed in 1960, Richard Nixon might well have defeated
John F. Kennedy.
The kicker for all this is that all these black citizens who were
disproportionately targeted for arrest and incarceration and then
barred from voting are nonetheless counted as citizens for the purpose
of determining how many Congressional seats and how many electoral
votes states have. During slavery, three-fifths of the number of
slaves were similarly counted by the slave states, even though slaves
were not in any way members of the civil polity. This is worse. In the
states of the Deep South, 30 percent of all black men are barred from
voting because of felony convictions, but all of them are counted to
determine Congressional representation and Electoral College votes. If
one wants to wonder why the South is so solidly white, Republican and
arch-conservative, one need look no further.
<end excerpt>
Michael