Did you know the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation in the world? (And we have had a 500% increase over the past 30 years!)
Did you know the United States contains 5% of the world’s population but 25% of its prisoners?
Did you know there are more black men age 20-34 incarcerated right now than in jobs? Did you know 1 in 9 black men age 20-34 are currently incarcerated? Did you know 1 in 3 black men age 20-34 who don’t have a high school diploma or GED are incarcerated?
Did you know 1 in 57 white men age 20-34 are currently incarcerated? Did you know 1 in 9 white men age 20-34 without a high school diploma or GED are incarcerated?
1 in 9 vs. 1 in 57…
1 in 3 vs. 1 in 9…
There’s a simple conclusion to this: black people commit more crimes than white people.
I recently heard a talk on mass incarceration by Heather Garretson at the West Michigan Christian Community Development Conference, where Heather shared the above statistics. Heather Garretson is a Scholar in Residence at City University of New York Law School, the premier public interest law school in the country, and posts at the Collateral Consequences Resource Center (latest post: Michigan takes baby steps on criminal justice reform). She is a former federal prosecutor, defense attorney, and Professor of Law at Western Michigan University Cooley Law School in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
Heather points out that the simple solution I wrote above, that black people commit more crimes than white people, isn’t so simple after all, for two primary reasons:
Reason one is that areas with higher poverty rates produce more crime. Since minorities are more likely to live in high poverty areas (due to our white government putting them there during Jim Crow), it makes it look like black people commit more crimes than white people, but the actual correlation is poor people commit more crime than non-poor people, due to the economic and social isolation of poverty. Garretson states that two-thirds of those detained in jail report yearly incomes under $12,000 prior to their arrest. So what has become a racial stereotype is actually based on economics, not ethnicity. So one has to ask, how do we best help the poor? By throwing them in jail?
Reason two is what I find to be even more disturbing. In 1971 President Richard Nixon declared a “War on Drugs,” declaring drug abuse public enemy number one. After this declaration, the arrest rate for drugs went up 89%, with the the amount of arrests of blacks for drug cases being astronomical. What is so ironic and disturbing about this is that studies show that blacks use drugs less than whites do! 
The number of drug offenders in state prisons has increased thirteen-fold since 1980.
Three-fourths of all persons in prison for drug offenses are people of color.
Drug Sentencing Disparities (from NAACP.org)
- About 14 million Whites and 2.6 million African Americans report using an illicit drug
- 5 times as many Whites are using drugs as African Americans, yet African Americans are sent to prison for drug offenses at 10 times the rate of Whites
- African Americans represent 12% of the total population of drug users, but 38% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 59% of those in state prison for a drug offense.
- African Americans serve virtually as much time in prison for a drug offense (58.7 months) as whites do for a violent offense (61.7 months). (Sentencing Project)
What was named a “war on drugs” became a war on arresting blacks, and specifically black men.
If the police are looking for drugs, where are they going to look? Are they looking in white suburban neighborhoods where plenty of drug use is taking place? No, they are looking in poor urban neighborhoods, where people of color live.
You have a system where poor black men sell drugs to affluent white people. (Generally speaking) The black men get arrested, the white people don’t.
Meanwhile, approximately $75 billion is spent on corrections annually. It costs $28-35,000 to incarcerate someone in the state of Michigan for a year. It costs $27,000 to attend the University of Michigan for a year and $23,000 to attend Michigan State University for a year.
Heather Garretson urges the Church to question the commentary on racial injustice and urges society to understand there is a difference between being tough on crime and being smart on crime.
I pray and hope and plead that white readers of this article do not revert to reflexive defense mechanisms when this sort of topic is brought up. No one is saying black people shouldn’t be held responsible for their actions, no one is blaming everything on white people, no one is pointing to our white racist past as a trump card for black people to do or act however they want with no consequences, no one is calling you a racist, no one is saying black people don’t do drugs or don’t commit crimes, no one is saying we don’t need our corrections programs or our police force.
What we are saying, and I am saying is that we need to:
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Humble ourselves. Realize there is more going on than we realize or that we’ve been told. Allow yourself to be a learner. Allow yourself to be educated. Admit you don’t know everything and it’s okay, in fact it’s commanded in Scripture, to be humble. If your first response to all this is to give a defense instead of to listen, consider and empathize, check your heart with the Holy Spirit and ask him to soften you.
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Facts don’t lie. Just because something isn’t your reality or your experience, doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
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Put ourselves in the shoes of a person of color. If we don’t do this, we cannot effectively love one another as Jesus tells us time and time again to do.
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Acknowledge that injustice still exists in the world and that it is possible that it exists in America. (Seriously, just admit that this is a possibility and do not throw out the conversation anytime you hear it)
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Appreciate complexity and avoid simplistic solutions and simplistic answers. You aren’t being simplistically accused of anything, please don’t simplistically accuse others of things. The web of problems is deep and complex and wasn’t born overnight. Respect that when approaching it with a response.
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As Christians, not being the instigator of injustice isn’t enough. We are called by God to fight against oppression when we see it. Isaiah 1:16-17,
16 Wash and make yourselves clean.
Take your evil deeds out of my sight;
stop doing wrong.
17 Learn to do right; seek justice.
Defend the oppressed.
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So we know that far fewer blacks use drugs than whites and yet far more black people go to jail for drug offenses but drug use isn’t the only drug related offense. Do we have any way to determine what percentage of black American’s sell drugs versus white Americans? I don’t feel like we can get the full picture until we know that statistic as well.
The comparison between black prison terms for drug offenses versus white prison terms for violent offenses is an interesting one. Do we know how much time black people spend in prison for violent offenses?
Please don’t think I’m challenging the message of your article, in fact I’m all for it. I love your mention of the difference between being tough on crime and being smart that’s a valuable way to think. But as the husband of a professional statistician I’m always inclined to scrutinize statistics to see what part of the story they’re not telling.
Hi Lee, thanks for the thought provoking questions. I think this helps break it down as both of these stats are from the NAACP website:
So African Americans represent 32% of people arrested for drug possession and 38% of people arrested for drug offenses. This would seem to indicate that if you’re possessing the drug, you’re going to be using the drug (the 32%). Of course you could be possessing the drug so you can deal it, but I don’t think a stat could be shown to measure that as most people caught with a drug are just going to make up a story as to why they have it, but not admit to using or dealing and I don’t think it could always be proven they are using (i.e. a urine test) unless they used it recently. So “possession” is the best crime they can be charged with. Does that make sense? I’m thinking out loud here.
Another point to be drawn out is that even if the 32% or 38% of blacks being arrested aren’t using the drugs, like let’s say only 12% of those arrested for drug use are those who make up the 12% of drug users, who are the other 20-28% of blacks dealing their drugs to? If 1 out of 10 drug users is black, but 4 out of 10 drug arrests are black, then 3 of those black arrests aren’t users, they are dealers. It’s unlikely they are all dealing to the 1 black guy who got arrested for use, and there only leaves 6 more drug arrests out of that 10 sample size. Certainly there’s a Latino contingent in the 10, which the statistics show, but could it be that these 3 black dealers who got arrested were selling drugs to white users…the white users never get arrested because they don’t live in the black neighborhoods… but the black dealers do get arrested because they live in the black neighborhoods… ? I’m probably not being very clear but it seems like the oversaturation of black arrests compared to 12% black users and the 88% non-black users show that a lot of non-black users are doing drug crimes but not getting arrested for them.
(And I’m not saying the black drug dealer shouldn’t be arrested, I’m saying that the non-black person he is dealing to should also be arrested. Or more accurately, I’m saying that people who live in poor neighborhoods shouldn’t be the only people being arrested for drug crimes, both using and dealing, but people who live in rural and suburban neighborhoods should also be arrested at the same rate. This is where injustice comes in…as well as the greater injustice that our society’s solution on how to deal with the poor is to dump billions of dollars into punishing them rather than coming up with other ways of developing them and their neighborhoods with those billions of dollars.)
You explained that very well. If 4 out of 10 drug arrests are black but only 1 out of 10 drug users are black that would mean that 3 times as many blacks are drug dealers than drug users. From a pure supply/demand perspective that would be impossible. I generally dismiss statistics because most are either misgathered or misinterpreted and most are both. I must admit that this information has stopped me in my tracks a little bit. Trying to wrap my mind around all of the problems in our justice system is impossible. I think even well-meaning level-headed people are clueless how to fix things. It’s almost as if this world we live in is cursed and needs to be redeemed.
“…black people commit more crimes than white people.”
Or maybe blacks just can’t afford good legal counsel and are convicted while whites are set free. Have no statistics, only the sense that justice itself in the legal system is not impartial but skewed by money. Some years ago, was driving on a late December afternoon and coming around a bend, got blinded by the sun and rear-ended a lady waiting to turn left. She got taken to the hospital, I had forgotten to send in my insurance renewal due the previous day. Ended up in court but everything turned out OK, the lady had been sent for a precautionary check-up and was fine, and a friend paid his own great attorney to handle my case and I didn’t end up with a fine or points. But as I’m sitting in the courtroom of this affluent white suburb, came away with the sense that if I wasn’t white or have this really great attorney that I would have ended up with some penalty, something.
In Muslim courts, the testimony of women legally only counts half that of men, you need two women to testify to equal that of one man. While our legal system doesn’t codify that some people count less than others like that, it seems to work out that way in practice in a system where justice is treated more like a commodity than based on principles. If principles were the main thing all the way thru then maybe one could have more faith in the system; as it is, laws are too often unequally and unfairly enforced, and in places with 3 strikes, without mercy. The laws themselves are the fruit of a political system that’s influenced by the same factors that so corrupt the legal system. If principles mattered most, being a lawyer or politician would be honorable. Big disconnect for me that while principles are still given a nod in speeches, the truth remains that the institutions we have are both the fruit and mirror of the people we are. Where we are now in the legal system we have, it is not necessarily shameful to be imprisoned and bearing unjust suffering can be a testimony of Christ to a nation whose heart is not set on justice. The laws we pass can never change hearts, and while expecting justice from this legal system is like chasing the wind, the hope/faith is that changed hearts will produce a justice system that’s true.
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