Are black men the most HATED in America?

DO YOU KNOW WHY THERE ARE MORE BLACK MEN IN JAIL THAN ANYONE ELSE?

IT'S NOT BECAUSE THEY COMMIT MORE CRIMES!


The racists among us, blatant and closeted, will be quick to attribute the imprisonment disparity to the misguided belief that blacks are inherently prone to criminality. I've seen no valid studies supporting that view. Blacks are disproportionately targeted, stopped, arrested, prosecuted, sentenced to long mandatory prison terms and executed. A study by the California Judicial Council Advisory Committee on Racial and Ethnic Bias in the Courts found that the justice system gives little attention or resources to investigating crimes against minorities and that minority defendants receive harsh treatment compared to white defendants in similar circumstances.

The study also found that black-on-black crime or Latino-on-Latino crime is not taken as seriously as crimes against whites. Judges seem to believe that violence is more "acceptable" to black women because they are viewed as coming from violent communities. A study by the Washington, D.C.-based Sentencing Project, which tracks the demographics of who in our society goes to prison and for what kinds of crimes, found that black men are going to jail in record numbers due to a surge in arrests for non-violent drug offenses.


The Sentencing Project also found that in 1993, 88% of those sentenced federally for crack cocaine distribution were black, while only 4.1% of the defendants were white. This, while there are studies showing that a majority of the nation's reported crack cocaine users are white. federal sentencing guidelines impose a five year minimum sentence if one is convicted of selling five grams of crack, yet the sale of an equal amount of powder cocaine yields only a one year sentence. Crack defendants tend to be black, while powder cocaine defendants tend to be white. Simple possession of more than five grams of crack is a felony with a mandatory minimum sentence of five years for a first offender, while possession of the same amount of powder cocaine is a misdemeanor requiring no jail time. How do prosecutors decide which of these drug cases to pursue in federal court?


Drug trafficking indictments against five black men from Inglewood, California were thrown out after federal prosecutors refused to explain why the defendants were charged in federal court instead of state court. Federal sentences would be much stiffer for the offense than would state sentences. The decision to charge the men in federal court instead of state court is very significant. Federal law sets a minimum 10 year sentence for people convicted of selling more than 50 grams of crack. Under state law in California, the sentence for the same crime ranges from three to five years. In claiming racial bias in the case, the defendants noted that in 1991, all 24 crack cocaine cases handled by the federal public defender's office in Los Angeles involved black defendants. It was also shown that between 1991 and 1993, the federal public defender represented 53 defendants in crack cocaine cases, none of the defendants were white. In 1992, two hundred twenty-two white defendants charged with crack cocaine offenses were prosecuted in state court, effectively avoiding the harsh sentences required under the federal sentencing guidelines. In Los Angeles, where the case against the five blacks arose, not a single white offender had been convicted of a crack cocaine offense in the federal courts since 1986, when Congress enacted stiff new penalties.

So white criminals are allowed to walk free and roam the streets, putting our lives in danger because of this.