Is the drug war racist?

Samuel G. Freedman
Rolling Stone Magazine
May 14, 1998


The government's policy has scorched the inner cities and put a generation of young black men behind bars.  Two leading African- American scholars reflect on the damage done.

America's war on drugs has ravished the inner cities it aspired to save.  Without curbing drug traffic, the crusade has sent a generation of young black males into the criminal-justice system, which offers them not rehabilitation but firsthand instruction in violent crime.  While blacks make up thirteen percent of the national population and thirteen percent of the country's monthly drug users, they account for thirty-five percent of arrests for drug possession, fifty-five percent of convictions and seventy-four percent of prison sentences, according to the Sentencing Project, a nonprofit that promotes criminal-justice reform.  Between 1986 and 1991, the number of blacks held in state prisons on drug charges rose by 465 percent, the project also reported.  That increase partly reflects the inequality of federal sentencing rules, under which a person convicted of possessing five grams of crack cocaine receives the same five-year mandatory minimum as someone caught selling 500 grams of powder cocaine.

Such evidence has turned Glenn C.  Loury and Orlando Patterson into vociferous critics of the war.  Two of America's leading public intellectuals, both men espouse cautious, unromantic liberalism on issues like affirmative action are socially conservative about family values.  Loury is an economist who won an American Book Award in 1996 for "One by One, From the Inside Out: Essays and Reviews on Race and Responsibility in America".  He also directs the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University and was one of thirty-four prominent scholars and law-enforcement officials who last September signed a set of "principles for practical drug policies" that staked a middle ground between what it called "two positions stereotyped as 'drug warrior' and 'legalizer.'" Patterson is John Cowles Professor of Sociology at Harvard University and the winner of a 1991 National Book Award for "Freedom in the Making of Western Culture." He decries the drug war in his current book, "The Ordeal of Integration."

Both men speak as academics and as products of their divergent pasts.  Loury, who is forty-nine, grew up in a black working-class neighborhood in Chicago.  he later joined, then broke from, the neoconservative movement and now calls himself "a recovering reactionary." He is also a recovering freebase addict who went through a highly publicized arrest and finally got clean in a halfway house.  Patterson, 57, was brought up in Jamaica, did graduate study in England and served in the Seventies as special advisor to the Democratic Socialist prime minister of Jamaica, Michael Manley.

ROLLING STONE: If ten years ago you had said to people, "We're going to increase arrests and incarceration by several hundred percent over the next decade," the response probably would have been that there won't be any more drug problem.  Arrests and incarcerations have gone up, as promised, but the drugs are still here.  What makes it so difficult to reform our policy?

LOURY: There's an anxiety among people about drugs.  I mean, this is not just an inner-city issue.  You've got it throughout rural and urban life; I hear about drugs in the Brookline [Massachusetts] schools where my kids go.  The War on Drugs is a way of doing something about it.  It's away that we're determined to fight back.  It's easy to get that concern on the table.  It's harder to get a concern about the consequences of a particular way of fighting drugs on the table.

What happens to the fellow who stands up and says, "Look at what's going on with the incarceration of racial minorities in the country.  Look at the way in which we're criminalizing a whole class of young black men.  There is a tremendous cost of this policy"? The person who stands up and says that isn't seen as credible.  After all, he's advocating on behalf of these bad guys.  They're the threat, right?

ROLLING STONE: What is the cost when you criminalize a whole class of young men?

PATTERSON: Horrendous.  You not only send these people to prison but you actually make them into criminals.  The ones who go to prison end up as professional criminals committing major crimes later on - the costs of which are borne by the society in terms of property damage, murder and police costs.

It's often been pointed out, though, that many drug crimes are, in fact, victimless crimes.  In a funny kind of way, that may well be what explains why people buy into this scorched-earth approach to controlling drugs.  You don't have to account for people who are victimized as a result of making criminals of these people and sending them to prison.

LOURY: You've got social policy being fueled by very significant resources on the ground.  Peter Reuter, a criminologist who's a student of these matters, said that something like $30 billion is spent annually on the War on Drugs.  So this is a massive mobilization; these are some significant resources.  If we propose to spend $30 billion over five years on preschool education for kids, after-school programs, summer jobs or whatever, people would be up in arms in the Congress, saying, you know, "Midnight basketball doesn't work." Michael Tonry, in his book, "Malign neglect: Race, Crime and Punishment in America", makes a very strong case that the anti-drug money substantially affects the behavior of police departments.

ROLLING STONE: You mean that because the dollars are there, the public demands great numbers of arrests?

LOURY: Yes, exactly.  What's success? Success is locking people up.  Success is cases, it's collars.  And where does the police department find people? It's going to go to the point of least resistance, where there are transactions that are occurring on the street, where neighborhoods are poorly organized so that it's easy to infiltrate the rings that are selling the stuff.

I use this analogy: If we were having a war on prostitution and we decided we wanted to lock up as many prostitutes as possible, you're going to concentrate on people who are streetwalkers.  You're going to go down by the docks, to the wrong side of the railroad tracks, the Combat Zone here in Boston.  What you're going to find are poor woman who are drug-addicted, who are welfare dependent, who are going to be disproportionately minority.  And you're going to lock them up.  Now we all know that sex for money is being transacted in this society at many different levels and in many different ways.  But a policy designed to maximize the number of persons arrested for selling sex for money will predictably fill up the jails with women of a certain kind.

So the perspective from these communities well could be, "This is a war on us." I use that kind of rhetoric cautiously because I don't mean to contribute to conspiracy theorizing.

PATTERSON: The difference between [the criminal penalties for] cocaine powder and crack cocaine is way out of proportion, and it doesn't matter what the original motivation is.  One doesn't have to prove that this deplorable state of affairs originated in deliberate racist practices.  In fact, I don't think it did.  Because there's good evidence that the members of the African-American community wanted a strong crackdown on crack and pushed for having extreme penalties.

ROLLING STONE: Part of what went with that was the idea that crack was so addictive that you couldn't rehab from it.  And once you believe that, you take the whole idea of treatment off the table and it becomes purely a debate over punishment.

LOURY: The animus against crack that you find in the African-American community comes from the tremendous damage that crack addiction has done to so many people.  The last thing you want to learn is that your son-in-law, your nephew, your cousin, is on the pipe.  Because that's going to be trouble for a long time, and you know the downside is pretty far down.

Now, the anti-treatment people say treatment doesn't work, and it's true that on any given attempt treatment has a relatively low cure rate.  You have to keep at it.  But from my prospective, anybody who pulls themselves up out of the gutter and says, "I want to go and try and get my life together," there should be a place for them to go.  And if it doesn't work this time, as long as there's a place there and they can go back - and they do go back - that should be paid for.

ROLLING STONE: Would you talk to some extent from your own experience?

LOURY: It's dangerous business to try and make social policy on the basis of one's biography.  So I wouldn't, except to say I have observed firsthand the difficulty of getting out from under the allure and the obsession with some of these substances.

ROLLING STONE: How is it that criticizing the drug war has become perceived as tantamount to being soft on drugs?

LOURY: You have to distinguish between the effect of a policy and the symbolic meaning of a policy, which I think is important politically.  You know, we have sodomy laws on the books that are not enforced.  My view is that they're bad laws in some demonstrable sense, but it might be very hard politically to get them off the books because an effort to take them off is understood to be endorsing a certain way of life.

Similarly, with drug policy, the discourse is shrouded with these symbolic meanings.  If you have a lot of pot-smoking hippies running around denouncing all of the drug laws, then we know those are bad people.  The fact that the image of drug users and dealers is that of a hooded-sweat-shirt-wearing, gun-toting sixteen-year-old hanging out in a doorway - the black, urban, thug - gives you some indication of the demonization.  Once these people become the face of this problem, those who say, "Let them out, don't hit them too hard" are people who don't take the problem seriously.  That's the construction of symbolic meaning.

PATTERSON" There was a time when alcohol was also ethnically identified, and the Irish in America were criminalized as a result.  As long as that association existed, no one could see alcoholism as an illness.  It wasn't until people were able to persuade themselves that, in fact, alcoholism wasn't the problem of one single ethnic group that they were able to see it as an illness.

LOURY: The degree of tolerance for alcohol use is relatively unique in American history.  But the policy of Prohibition is universally recognized to have been a failure.  It seems to me that we need to recognize the same failure with drug policy.

PATTERSON: Having acknowledged all of this, the question is, "What do we do now?" And it seems to me that this is something that political will could be very effective in changing.

ROLLING STONE: But virtually no politician is willing to stand up publicly and question the drug war.  It's like the Cold War years and no wants to normalize relations with China because they'll look soft on communism.  This issue is waiting for its Nixon.

PATTERSON: This is a fundamental problem in the American political process, isn't it? There's nothing you can say about changing traditional attitudes towards law-breaking behavior because of the political fear that it will used against you.  I don't know how America got itself into this bind.  But in the final analysis, it will only be a powerful leader who also is courageous enough to risk his popularity by saying, "This is ridiculous."

LOURY: Look at what the Republicans tried to do in the last presidential election.  When there was some statistic about marijuana use among high-school students, there was a whole campaign about how Clinton had had some marijuana smokers in the White House so he's sending the wrong message.  Which is ridiculous.  These social trends are not driven by the symbols that are given off by somebody who sits in Washington, D.C.  They're driven by the fundamentals on the ground in a nation of 270 million people.

PATTERSON: I don't see why Clinton in his second term couldn't have selected a few issues that are ostensibly unpopular.  This would have the political benefit for him of making him appear to be courageous.  And given the fact that the African-American community constitutes such a major part of his base, he has a responsibility to take some unpopular stands on important issues.  And drug policy is one I would certainly emphasize.

LOURY: This is what Clinton's "national conversation on race" should partly be about.  You don't have to frame it in terms of "You know the drug policy is racist." But you can say that the policy is creating distress and polarization and alienation among inner-city blacks.  And that is a problem.

PATTERSON: What I find irritating is that in prison not only is there no rehabilitation but there's widespread use of drugs, which is quite incredible.  At least we could get to drug users at that point.  If you can't get to them in prison, you don't stand a chance in hell outside.

If Clinton and others decided to come down heavily on the need to do something about addiction in prison, that is politically easy to do.  And it reinforces the heavy stick - the stick rather than the carrot approach.

ROLLING STONE: To what degree might religious leaders have a role in turning the debate from punishment to treatment? Because you know religion is going to speak in a moral way about issues of substance abuse.  At the same time, if you think about who houses Alcoholics Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous groups, who runs rehab centers, it's religious sector of society.

LOURY: If you're looking for a Nixon today on this issue, that's one quarter where he or she might come from.  Some who is a Pat Robertson- type person or a Gary Bauer-type person who woke up one morning and said, "Oh my God, I've looked at this.  We're criminalizing a whole class of people.  How big can the prison population be? What manner of country are we? Real resources go into that prison system, diverted from somewhere else.  This is not the answer."

PATTERSON: I'm pessimistic about any such person coming on the scene any time soon.  There is another way we can consider changing policy, and that is the enormous amount of money being spent on trying to stop the drugs from flowing in.  I read some figure - it's preposterous.  It's in the billions and billions of dollars.  And it's gotten us nowhere.

We have not succeeded in preventing the drugs from coming in, and, therefore, we have to emphasize somehow trying to reduce the demand.  Perhaps we should shift some of the billions of dollars we're now wasting on trying to prevent drugs coming into rehabilitation.  I'm not going to be spending any less, I'm not soft on drugs - I'm simply saying, as a practical matter, instead of spending $50 billion on Colombia or Bolivia, all of which is going just to sort of fill the pockets of these corrupt generals, spend it here.

Since we're in a prison-building mode, let's start getting a little creative and perhaps build some kinds of prisons that are more rehabilitative centers rather than simply throwing these people among hardened criminals.  One of the disturbing things that has come out in research in some ghetto areas is the fact that going to prison is not any longer seen as a big deterrent.

ROLLING STONE: No, in fact it's become like a rite of passage.

PATTERSON: Right.

ROLLING STONE: I remember reporting on South Africa and talking to people who'd been part of the resistance there and almost expected to go into prison for their political actions.  There was a Zulu term for jail that translated to "the place of men."

PATTERSON: Then maybe we need to build a place of boys and relegate some first-time offenders and nonviolent offenders there.  I would use some money on that instead of wasting it on military exercises in Bolivia.

ROLLING STONE: Professor Loury, you've been a steadfast critic of liberal solutions to social problems.  Does this sound like one that is both tough-minded and efficient?

LOURY: We're not talking about washing our hands of drug abuse, becoming relativists and saying it doesn't matter.  What's being said is, "Can we think sensibly about how we can enter into people's lives more constructively in order to try to produce something positive?" Now the idea of rehabilitation has a bad odor.  People laugh at you when you talk of rehabilitation.  Our prisons now don't rehabilitate; what they do is incapacitate.

I'd like to see much greater funding for treatment and a focus on the demand side of the drug market as well as the supply side.  And a ratcheting down of the punitiveness of the mandatory-minimum sentencing.  Those would be pillars of moderation.

PATTERSON: As a practical matter, it's simply politically not in the cards right now to have decriminalization.  I personally would think that, in the long term, that may be the best approach.  But in terms of what's possible, I do not see this ever taking place.

But there are alternatives.  One we actually tried in an ad hoc sort of way in Jamaica.  In the Seventies, we had a large number of young people being arrested for ganja - marijuana - and the jails were being filled up with people who perhaps aren't violent.  What happened in response was not so much decriminalization but that the police were urged, essentially, to back off.  And they did.  The police themselves did not want to decriminalize, because they found the use of ganja laws an effective strategy to get people for other things.  So the laws are on the books and you can get arrested, but for the typical user the probability of being arrested is very low.  Some version of this is one possibility for America.

LOURY: Never mind the point that we have an enlightened self-interest in seeing that people come out of prison better than what they went in.  Because we're not going to put them in a spaceship and ship them off to another planet.  They're going to still be here, they're going to have children, they're going to have an impact.  Because we're in this thing big time.  I mean 1.7 million under lock and key on any given day - and it's going up.

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Young, vulnerable and black

Black leaders are in a bind: it is on their turf that the drug war is being fought.  For years black politicians and church leaders supported the War on Drugs because they saw the damage inflicted on their communities by drugs like crack.  Even today, Atlanta's Democratic mayor, Bill Campbell, takes a tough line and tells ROLLING STONE: "We must reject all proposals to legalize illicit drugs, because it is morally reprehensible to consider an action that would ( a ) erode our children's anti-drug attitudes of risk and social disapproval and ( b ) make harmful and addictive drugs far more accessible." Another black officeholder, Rep.  J.C.  Watts Jr., R- Okla., argues that drug use is a "widespread epidemic that is everyone's problem."

But the drug laws have had unforeseen and damaging consequences for African-Americans.  The discrepancy on sentencing for crack-cocaine offenses ( five years for possession of five grams of crack or sale of 500 grams of powder ) is a notorious example.  The U.S.  Sentencing Commission, which was established by Congress, declared that Congress had made a mistake in enacting disparate sentences and recommended that crack penalties be reduced.  President Clinton and Congress rejected the commission's recommendation.  Many black politicians and leaders, however, have spoken out on the inequities of the drug war.

- - Erika Fortgang

"In the absence of a real War on Drugs and an urban policy, we have a war on the young, vulnerable and black.  Oddly, the rationale for the disparity is to protect blacks from crack.  That is racial paternalism.  What is at stake is the essence of the 1954 Supreme Court decision -equal protection under the law."

- - Rev.  Jesse Jackson Sr.  President, Rainbow/PUSH Coalition.

"Our drug policy has become a tale of two cities or, more accurately, a tale of two classes - rich and poor."

- - Rep.  Donald Payne, D-N.J

"It is not about being soft on crime.  It is not about condoning drugs.  It is about being able to look our children in the face and say: 'There is fairness in our system of justice.  There is fairness in our laws.'"

- - Rep.  Melvin Watt, D-N.C.

"Cocaine and crack cannot be separated.  The right thing to do would be to treat both of these lethal drugs under the same mode.  The problem that we have in our society today is we misidentify drugs, we confuse the scene, and we have so many powerful burdens and powerful penalties that no one really understands it."

- - Rep.  James Traficant, D-Ohio

"Maintaining the sentencing disparity fuels the belief that our criminal-justice system is inherently unfair and racially unjust.  Our judicial system must be fair if we ever expect it to earn the trust of our citizens.  There is no such thing as a 'little justice.'"


Sources: The Drug Policy Foundation and the Congressional Black Caucus.