Social concerns and contemporary issues

Social Concern

In complex societies such as the United States, few things happen in isolation. When the country sets national policies into effect, those policies ripple throughout the population and affect other features of the society in dynamic ways. One such public policy is the "war on drugs." The war on drugs has rippled through society and affected other policies, such as racial profiling. Those two policies have become tied to urban poverty, tying all three together.

Profiling, or determining a set of characteristics a group of criminals are likely to share, has been justified by police forces as a way to fight the war on drugs. However, all too often the profiles are not terribly accurate and applied unfairly to one group over another. A detailed study in New Jersey done in 2001 showed that state troopers were pulling over more Blacks than whites or Hispanics, and then asking the driver to let them do a "consent" search of the car. Statistics on this practice showed that 81% of the cars pulled over were driven by blacks or Hispanics, even though the state police knew that whites were statistically more likely to be transporting drugs. In fact in this study, 25% of whites had drugs in the car while only 13% of blacks and 5% of Hispanics did (Snow, 2001).

Possession of drugs is one of the most common reasons for a person to be sent to jail because of the war on drugs. North Carolina, for instance has found that although its black population has remained stable for the last 35 years, today there are three times as many blacks in jail as there were 35 years ago. The reasons are not entirely clear, but racial profiling is one reason believed to contribute to those numbers (Muschick, 2001).

Any time a person is jailed, it immediately causes financial hardship for that person and family, particularly if the person was the breadwinner of the family. Once that person is released, it is much harder to get a good-paying job because of the criminal record (Muschick, 2001). It leads to a vicious cycle of poverty. Unfortunately, one way to earn more money than one would in a minimum-wage job is to deal in drugs. Thus the fact of poverty can contribute to the crime of drug violations.

Some experts in North Carolina, including a judge and a federal prosecutor, believe that racial inequality, including profiling, plays at least some role. They note that between 1995 and 2000 only half as many whites as blacks were sent to prison (Muschick, 2001). Those statistics could be explained to everyone's satisfaction if blacks had committed twice as many crimes as whites, but the facts are a little more complicated than that. Over three-fourths of whites who went to trial got probation, with only 24% going to jail. However, 65% of blacks received probation, and 35% went to jail (Muschick, 2001).

Looking at the statistics from North Caroling and from New Jersey suggests that racial profiling may be part of the problem. During the time when New Jersey stopped so many black drivers, the state actually had a policy in place to end racial profiling (Snow, 2001).