America's enforcement of its corrective drug strategy has resulted in a scheme of apartheid justice. Approximately half the yearly marijuana arrests are of Latinos. This result is no accident; imbalanced handling of minority groups permeates every phase of the criminal justice system. Black and Latino-Americans are wronged by unequal marking and unjust conduct by police and other law enforcement officers; by racially slanted charging and plea-bargaining choices by prosecutors; by prejudiced sentencing performance; and by the failure of judges, elected bureaucrats, and other criminal justice policymakers to restore the unfairness that have come to pervade the structure (Small, 2001).
It appears from reading this article that there is indeed some bias that takes place in the war on drugs. One cannot dispute the fact that the war on drugs is a necessary operation that must be undertaken. The drug crime rate in this country is high and something needs to be done to decrease this problem. I don't feel that the article proved the idea that the laws are necessarily biased, but it did do a good job on showing that the enforcement of the laws can at times be prejudiced.
At the start of the war on drugs it was enacted in order to deal with the drug and crime problems that were taking place in urban, mainly minority neighborhoods. It was generally thought that this campaign was supposed to help black neighborhoods, but there have been several signs that have indicated that there is in fact evidence of racial bias in...
When looking at history it can be seen that U.S. drug control policies have been most punitive when the drug of concern is linked with threatening racial minorities.
It seems that the original idea of launching a war on drugs was a good idea. The drug issues and the crimes that are associated to them need to be addressed in all neighborhoods in this country, not just those made up of racial minorities. The laws that have been established are generally good, but the policies that are in place to carry them out need to be revisited. It has been shown that there is not difference in the amount of whites and blacks who take and/or deal drugs, but there is a difference in the amount of blacks and whites who are locked up for such things. So it is not necessarily that the war on drugs is racially biased but the policies of carrying out the war are.
References
Mitchell, Ojmarrh. (2009). Is the War on Drugs Racially Biased? Journal of Crime & Justice.
32(2), p. 49-71.
Race, the War on Drugs and the United States Criminal Justice System. (2011). Retrieved
March 2, 2011, from Web site:
http://www.drugpolicy.org/about/position/race_paper_crim.cfm
Small, Deborah. (2001). The War on Drugs Is a War on Racial Justice. Social Research, 68(3),
p.896-903.
The Effective National Drug Control Strategy 1999. (n.d.). Retrieved March 2, 2011, from Web
site: http://www.csdp.org/edcs/page30.htm
