SCANDALOUS INJUSTICE

To end the disproportionate punishment of blacks, America must rethink its
drug laws.

Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and the New York Police Department may be trying to
show a kinder, gentler face toward minorities, but a new study suggests that
law enforcement across the nation is getting meaner and rougher, at least in
the area of drug laws.

The advocacy group Human Rights Watch has just released a study that asserts
that the majority of people imprisoned for drug offenses are African
American, even though five times as many whites use drugs as blacks. Indeed,
black men are sent to state prisons on drug charges at 13 times the rate of
white men.

"These racial disparities are a national scandal," declares Ken Roth, the
group's executive director. "Black and white drug offenders get radically
different treatment in the American justice system. This is not only
profoundly unfair to blacks, it also corrodes the American ideal of equal
justice for all." Roth is right. But the problem of differential enforcement
isn't just an issue of racism; drug transactions among blacks are more
likely to occur in public than drug transactions among whites and drug use
among blacks tends to be more chronic and more likely to involve "harder"
drugs, such as crack cocaine and heroin.

The problem also is the way drug laws are enforced. At the street level,
it's virtually impossible for the police to know from a distance that a drug
crime is being committed-as opposed to a more obvious offense, like robbery.
So beat officers must rely on their instincts, for better or for worse, as
they look to see if an individual possesses or is selling a controlled
substance.

This is all too often the start of a vicious cycle of racial profiling,
harassment, resistance and tragedy, as in the case of Patrick Dorismond, an
innocent black man who walked out of a Manhattan bar last March 16 and ended
up dead at the hands of the police.

What to do? Human Rights Watch suggests eliminating racial profiling,
repealing mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug offenders, providing
more alternative sanctions and increasing the availability of
substance-abuse treatment. Those are all good ideas, but even those changes
probably would not halt the disproportionate stream of black men into the
criminal-justice system.

A larger and more comprehensive debate about the drug laws seems inevitable.