A Report on Drug Policy (2001)

[Interviewer]: And the reason for that being is this so-called war in drugs? [Interviewee]: Well, the primary engine of mass incarceration has been the war on drugs. Nearly three quarters of the increase in the federal prison population in more than half of the increase in the state prison population between 1980 and 2000, the period of the greatest expansion of our prison system was due to drug convictions alone. Drug convictions have increased more than 1,000 percent since the war on drugs began. I mean, to get a sense of how large a contribution the war on drugs has made to mass incarceration, you know, consider this. There are more people in prison or jail just for drug offenses today than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980. Our prison population is exploded due to a drug war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color. [Interviewer]: And I'll ask, I'll be a, how do you say, play devil's advocate. Is it because in our communities there are more drug, how would you say, traffic activities

or what? [Interviewee]: Contrary to popular belief, studies have shown now for decades that people of color are no more likely to use or sell illegal drugs than whites. In fact, where significant differences in the data can be found, they frequently suggest that white youth are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than Black youth. Now, that defies our basic racial stereotypes about who a drug dealer is when we think about a drug dealer. We typically imagine a Black kid standing on a street corner, and drug dealing certainly happens in the ghetto, but it happens everywhere else in America as well. But unfortunately, in many states, nearly 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison have been African-American, even though they're not any more likely to violate drug laws. [Interviewer]: And is there a reason there's something called 'sidewalk justice'?

If I'm a white person, many times, and I commit an offense or something, I'm a youth, especially a young kid, I get what's called 'sidewalk justice.' Is there a problem with our judicial system the way they treat our youth that makes, that's another reason for this heavy incarceration rate? [Interviewee]: Absolutely. It's biased law enforcement that has produced the astonishing racial disparities in drug law enforcement. People of all races use and sell drugs, but a white kid walking down the street isn't perceived as a potential drug user or dealer, but a Black kid walking down the street in his neighborhood is likely a target of being, you know, stopped, surged, frisked, interrogated about potential criminal activity. You know, the Supreme Court has given license to the police to fan out into poor communities

of color, stopping, frisking, searching folks without any evidence of criminal activity. It used to be that, you know, police actually had to have probable cause or reasonable suspicion to stop, interrogate, and search one, but to someone. But today, as long as the police getting, you know, quote unquote, consent, the Fourth Amendment doesn't even apply to the police interaction at all. Now, what's consent? When a police officer approaches a kid on the street with one hand on his gun and says, "put your arms up in the air so I can search you," and you say yes and comply. That's consent. No evidence of any criminal activity is necessary for the police to have that encounter. So by fanning out into poor communities of color, stopping and searching, extraordinary numbers of young people of color in particular, we've managed to fill our prisons and jails with low-level drug offenders, not violent drug offenders, low-level drug offenders.

[Interviewer]: And that leads to another question. I'm going to ask you about the Supreme Court and the way they have ruled on some cases and the case, you know, our rights, on rights of people like you talk about the probable cause. Could you just expand a little bit more on that? The Supreme Court's role. [Interviewee]: Sure. Well, you know, the United States Supreme Court has really facilitated the war on drugs, far from being a check on the exercise of arbitrary or discriminatory police power. The U.S. Supreme Court has given license to the police to stop interrogate search people, even in the absence of any criminal activity whatsoever, as long as they get consent, which really means compliance. They can, you know, interrogate, stop search just about anyone, anywhere for, you know, imagined drug activity. In New York City, you know, it was recently reported that, you know, police have been stopping hundreds of thousands

of overwhelmingly Black and brown people for imagined criminal activity. And of those 500 plus thousand arrests, only about 6%, I mean, of those stops, only about 6% ever result in arrests. But to make matters worse, the U.S. Supreme Court has closed the courthouse doors to claims of racial bias