LE ROI BRASHEARS
Washington state is the third most prolific incarcerator of blacks for drug offenses in America. Even though blacks constitute only 3 percent of our population, 51 percent of all people sent to state prisons for drug offenses are black.
Regional studies such as Professor Katherine Beckett's masterful and meticulous "Race and Law Enforcement in Seattle" show, however, that blacks simply do not sell or consume illicit drugs in proportion to the disparity with which they are arrested and/or incarcerated for drugs.
In fact, in Washington, blacks consume illicit drugs at rates slightly under that of whites.
The "crack thang" does not account for the disparity. The U.S. Sentencing Commission estimates that 65 percent of crack users are white. However, 90 percent of federal crack cocaine defendants are black.
Richard Pryor's dark ironic humor said it best. "Go in there looking for justice," Pryor mused, "and that's all you'll find -- 'just us' (blacks)."
In Seattle in 2001, 2,181 blacks (51.9 percent of drug arrests for that year) were arrested for drug offenses, although African Americans are only 8.4 percent of Seattle's population. Contrast that with 1,798 arrests of whites (42.7 percent of the year's drug arrests) that constitute 73 percent of Seattle's population.
The 2001 report titled "Equity and Representation in Washington State: An Assessment of Disproportionality and Disparity in Felony Sentencing" revealed that King County African American males were sentenced to prison for drugs at a rate almost 25 times higher than white males. Same crime, more time.
African American women fared a bit better; they received drug-related prison sentences at a rate 20 times higher than that for white women. Same crime, more time.
The report also revealed that of all sentences received by King County African American men and women, respectively, 45.4 percent and 46.5 percent of the sentences were for drugs.
In fact, drug-related prison sentences actually have made a significant dent in the overall African American population of King County. We imprison 237 of every 10,000 King County African Americans over drug charges versus just under 10 of every 10,000 King County whites.
This means that more than 10 percent of King County African Americans are serving drug-related prison sentences versus one half of 1 percent of whites.
Why the disparity? One answer, according to a recent Brandeis University survey, is the fact that Seattle police, like officers in other major cities, target poorer neighborhoods where visible retailing occurs with "buy and bust" techniques.
This excludes police focus on affluent areas where people comfortably sell and smoke their crack, snort their powdered cocaine, ingest their methamphetamines, Ecstasy and marijuana safely cloistered inside their houses and condominiums.
The ugly and unpleasant fact is that we practice selective class- and race-based law enforcement in Washington. The institutionally racist practice also corrupts police, as evidenced by the recently exposed actions of Seattle police fabricating evidence and reports in order to keep their drug arrest numbers high.
In 1980 when the War on Drugs took on a focus on incarceration, Washington state did not increase its incarceration rate as sharply as the rest of the country. In fact, to this day, we continue to run about five points behind the national average.
There's no question that race-based bias in policing, sentencing and corrections, blacks were primarily targeted to the exclusion of whites and that only two states jail more of their black citizens than we do.
More prisons are not an answer. As a precious public safety resource, we actually have misused our corrections system by filling up prisons with poor, non-violent drug users instead of violent criminals. We must change that flawed, despicable and thoroughly discredited paradigm.
We need broad ongoing reform, especially in law enforcement.
Most of all, we must all act to end this dreadful systematic racist oppression. Based on our principles of citizenship, if you do not act for change, it certainly makes you a knowing participant -- and apparently a willing one -- in our state's fundamentally racist system.
Le Roi Brashears is president of Financial Adviser Communications Inc., and active in several Washington state social justice organizations.
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