Cross posted at Working Man Radio. Please recommend this diary.
Haven't seen this diaried, and it seemed rather important. The ACLU did a study on arrest rates for marijuana possession . They say that usage rates are comparable. Arrest rates are not.
Black people are 3.7 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than white people despite comparable usage rates, according to a report released today by the American Civil Liberties Union. The report also found that marijuana arrests now make up nearly half of all drug arrests, with police making over 7 million marijuana possession arrests between 2001 and 2010. "The War on Marijuana in Black and White: Billions of Dollars Wasted on Racially Biased Arrests" is the first-ever report to examine nationwide state and county marijuana arrest data by race.
"The war on marijuana has disproportionately been a war on people of color," said Ezekiel Edwards, director of the ACLU Criminal Law Reform Project and one of the primary authors of the report. "State and local governments have aggressively enforced marijuana laws selectively against Black people and communities, needlessly ensnaring hundreds of thousands of people in the criminal justice system at tremendous human and financial cost."
The findings show that while there were pronounced racial disparities in marijuana arrests 10 years ago, they have grown significantly worse. In counties with the worst disparities, Blacks were as much as 30 times more likely to be arrested.
I learned of this when I saw a story in my local paper, the Gainesville [FL] Sun. It showed blacks to be six times more likely to be arrested for pot possession in Alachua County . . . higher than the national average disparity reported by the ACLU. I'd give you the link, but the story is now archived and behind a firewall.
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