The Drug War and Racial Profiling

We hear a lot of talk on the news about racial profiling. Usually we hear it when a famous rapper is annoyed that his Hollywood house party got crashed by the cops looking for dope. However, these isolated and glamorized accounts largely make America turn the other way on the subject of racial profiling. However, the truth is that racial profiling is indeed a dark reality in the world of United States law enforcement, particularly with regard to the War on Drugs. Don't believe me? Let the numbers speak for themselves.

The ratios between numbers of blacks living in a particular state and the numbers of blacks in prison in those states shows a marked disparity along racial lines. The lowest ratio of black percentage of state population vs. black percentage of state prison population is in Mississippi, which has a 1.9 ratio. South Dakota has the highest such ratio, with a whopping 11.1 ratio in South Dakota state prisons. What is even more interesting is that only 0.6% of South Dakota's population is black. Further statistics from a 2002 report from the U.S. Department of Justice reveals that nearly 5% of all black men in America are behind bars, as opposed to 0.6% of white men. Are black people much more violent than white people?