By disproportianate sentencing rate do you mean more black people are sentenced than white people, or a higher percentage of black people charged are sentenced when compared to the percentage of white people sentenced after being charged? There are a lot of factors that go into sentencing, race is not one. Blaming the justice department for targeting one race is crazy. Maybe certain races need to quit teaching their young people it is OK to ILLEGALLY smoke weed.
What is the point of your Crack vs cocaine statement? Both are sold to all races.
Wow... Yes to both...
Crack cocaine sentencing presents a particularly egregious case.
Since the 1980s, federal penalties for crack were 100 times harsher than those for powder cocaine, with African Americans disproportionately sentenced to much lengthier terms.
Nearly 20 percent of whites have used cocaine, compared with 10 percent of blacks and Latinos, according to a
2011 survey from the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration — the most recent data available.
Higher percentages of whites have also tried hallucinogens, marijuana, pain relievers like OxyContin, and stimulants like methamphetamine, according to the survey.
Crack is more popular among blacks than whites, but not by much.
Still, blacks are arrested for drug possession more than three times as often as whites, according to a
2009 report from the advocacy group Human Rights Watch.
Of the 225,242 people who were serving time in state prisons for drug offenses in 2011, blacks made up 45 percent and whites comprised just 30 percent, according to the
Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Jamie Fellner, author of the Human Rights Watch report, offered an explanation for this discrepancy.
“The race issue isn’t just that the judge is going, ‘Oh, black man, I’m gonna sentence you higher,’” she said. “The police go into low-income minority neighborhoods and that’s where they make most of their drug arrests. If they arrest you, now you have a ‘prior,’ so if you plead or get arrested again, you’re gonna have a higher sentence. There’s a kind of cumulative effect.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/17/racial-disparity-drug-use_n_3941346.html
A 2013 study by the
American Civil Liberties Union determined that a black person in the United States was 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession than a white person, even though both races have similar rates of marijuana use.[SUP]
[10][/SUP] Iowa had the highest racial disparity of the fifty states.[SUP]
[11][/SUP] Black people in Iowa were arrested for marijuana possession at a rate 8.4 times higher than white people.[SUP]
[11][/SUP] One of multiple factors that explains the difference in arrest rates between whites and blacks is that blacks are more likely than whites to buy marijuana outdoors, from a stranger, and away from their homes.
A 1995
Bureau of Justice Statistics report found that from 1991 to 1993, 16% of those who sold drugs were black, but 49% of those arrested for doing so were black.[SUP]
[18][/SUP]
In 1989, black and white women had similar levels of drug use during
pregnancy. In spite of this, black women were 10 times as likely as white women to be reported to a child welfare agency for
prenatal drug use.
[
A 2012 study found that African American youth were less likely than white youth to use or sell drugs, but more likely to be arrested for doing so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_and_the_War_on_Drugs