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Comment by cottonseed | Hacker News Reader

> There is a reason for higher incarceration rates: they commit more crimes proportionally.

That's not true. At least not when it comes to drug use, blacks and white use drugs at similar rates [0]. Asymmetric enforcement is another explanation.

[0] http://c1.nrostatic.com/sites/default/files/pic_corner_07101...

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This is such an important point that it really should be at the top. Just look at the punitive charges for crack vs cocaine: two very similar drugs, but consumed by different demographics.

Legislators, DAs, judges and police adjust their behavior when sentences feel out of whack with the crime. Unfortunately, that empathy goes out the window when the people in charge are sentencing "other" people, who they don't empathize with.

Poor, uneducated people live by one set of laws, and middle-upper class people live by another set of laws.

I don't think drug usage is the right metric, though.

I believe that the law enforcement strategy is a concentration on drug dealers; prosecution of users is pretty much incidental, used to enhance sentences for other crimes as much as anything else.

If prosecution of dealers is the policy, then you'd need to show that blacks and whites sell drugs at similar rates. I have no idea whether or not that's true...

And the other thing is the related factors that make them more or less likely to be caught or noticed by the law. There's counter examples I'm sure, but dealers who service more upper crust types (who in the US are more likely to be white) are frankly less likely to show up on the radar and less likely to have a dime dropped on them by a client who's bag was a little light. It's like streetwalkers vs escorts listed on TER vs companions that you'd need a gold clad personal introduction to even know they exist. The higher up the ladder you go, the more discrete all parties tend to be.

> I believe that the law enforcement strategy is a concentration on drug dealers

I don't think that's right [0]:

"[M]arijuana arrests now account for over half of all drug arrests in the United States. Of the 8.2 million marijuana arrests between 2001 and 2010, 88% were for simply having marijuana."

So more than 44% of all drug arrests between 2001-2010 were for possession. It may be that blacks arrested for possession carried much more than whites because they were dealing and whites were just using. I haven't been able to find any numbers on that.

[0] https://www.aclu.org/gallery/marijuana-arrests-numbers

In fact, white are more likely than blacks to deal drugs [0]:

"Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference)."

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonkblog/wp/2014/09/30/w...

Name someone in prison for just smoking a joint. I honestly have never heard of anyone. all the people in prison are either dealers, were found with a large amount of drugs, or other non drug-related crimes.

Drug use is a small part of why someone is getting arrested..especially to the point of a prison sentence. A chart showing that just as many whites and blacks tried an illegal drug (smoking weed is still illegal in most states) doesnt really tell us anything.

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