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December 04, 2007
Justice Policy Institute: "The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties"
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.
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 full report and a very good interactive map of states and counties is at : http://www.justicepolicy.org/content.php?hmID=1811&smID=1581&ssmID=69
Posted by lois at December 4, 2007 06:33 PM