It's important to note that [1] seems to refer to federal sentencing, and almost all criminal law in the U.S. is state law. [1] is a small subset of what's going on, and it can't be used to generalize.
Is there any reason to believe that Federal judges are more racially biased compared to State judges? I'd be shocked if State judges as a group are more color-blind than Federal judges.
It may be the case that in state courtrooms judges are the same, worse, or better, but making that inference on the basis of federal-level data is probably unjustified.
1. The most egregiously racist judges probably work in districts which they rarely encounter minorities.
2. Regions with large minority populations have to deal with much more crime in general, so may have lighter sentences for equally severe crimes.
3. Minorities are more likely to plead out and never go to trial, skewing sample size.
To be clear, I doubt that state judges are better than federal ones. After all, criminal justice corruption in smaller towns in America is staggering. Not too long ago, a judge was indicted for being bribed by the owners of a jail to hand down severe sentences to minority offenders.
Statistics is hard, and the entire reason there's leeway in sentencing is to account for situations which are resistant to statistical regularity.
There is, or was, a pretty obvious source of disparity in US law: freebase cocaine was a felony at much smaller quantities than cocaine salt, and the former was more likely to be used and dealt by black Americans.
Would that show up in such an analysis? They were different convictions, after all. So the only answer can be "yes or no", and so on ad infinitum.
https://www.businessinsider.com/racist-origins-marijuana-pro...
Although it's important to note that alcohol was illegal, and tobacco is becoming increasingly low-status and accordingly restricted.
The end of Prohibition meant that the enforcement apparatus for it needed something new to do. I believe this was another contributing factor to continuing the broken logic of Prohibition with new substances.
Sometimes I do wonder how much better we could all get along if some substances had relaxed or dropped restrictions.
When you think about it, there's the mental toll on users about public disapproval amplified by the legal status. On top of that, the divide on the non user side about someone being a "lawbreaker".
Just seems to cause a lot of division. On top of the illegality of harder drugs leading to the rise of cartels and gangs.
Just thinking out loud. What if the US said 'screw it', try making everything legal for 5-10 years, produce what it can locally, and just see what happens. The hope with this idea is that one could starve out the cartels while perhaps providing a path to rehabilitation.
All of that said, I am still a believer in the Rat Park experiment. If we solved some of our more real problems people perhaps wouldn't need to turn to such substances, as examples by the reports of drug use increasing under lockdown conditions. Reality seems to match the experiment. The thing about that experiment, they found if the rat's other needs were met (food, shelter, socialization) they actually would start to prefer normal water to drugged water again.
Hmmmmm