CCJRC and Justice Policy Institute
PRESS RELEASE
LaWanda Johnson, 202-558-7974 x 308, Justice Policy Institute (authors of report)
Christie Donner, CCJRC, 303-956-9603
Groundbreaking National Study Finds Racial Disparity in Colorado Counties in the Imprisonment of African Americans for Drug Crimes
“The Vortex: The Concentrated Racial Impact of Drug Imprisonment and the Characteristics of Punitive Counties” is the first study to examine the relationships between these sociodemographic structures and the specific annual rate at which people are admitted to prison for drug offenses, and the first to localize the racially disparate impact of drug imprisonment at the county level.
“This important report shows how pervasive racism is in the enforcement of drug laws. It’s not an anomaly when the same findings are reported in 97% of the nation’s larger counties,” said Christie Donner, Executive Director of the Colorado Criminal Justice Reform Coalition.
This report found that counties with higher poverty rates, larger African-American populations and larger police or judicial budgets imprison people for drug offenses at higher rates than counties without these characteristics. These relationships were found to be independent of whether the county actually had a higher rate of crime.
Major findings include:
- While tens of millions of people use illicit drugs, prison and policing responses to drug behavior have a concentrated impact on a subset of the population. In 2002, there were 19.5 million illicit drug users, 1.5 million drug arrests, and 175,000 people admitted to prison for a drug offense.
- While African Americans and whites use and sell drugs at similar rates, African Americans are ten times more likely than whites to be imprisoned for drug offenses.
- Of the 175,000 admitted to prison nationwide in 2002, over half were African American, despite the fact that African Americans make up less than 13 percent of the
- There is no relationship between the rates at which people are sent to prison for drug offenses and the rates at which people use drugs in counties. For example, although
- Higher county drug prison admission rates were associated with how much was spent on policing and the judicial system, higher poverty and unemployment rates, and the proportion of the county’s population that is African American.
“Laws—like drug laws—that are violated by a large percentage of the population are particularly prone to selective enforcement,” says Phillip Beatty, co-author of the study. “The reason African Americans are so disproportionately impacted may, in part, be related to social policy, the amount spent on law enforcement and judiciary systems, and local drug enforcement practices.”
Data from seven counties in
“Unfair drug policies being enforced by a racist, classist system have led to overrepresentation of people of color in our criminal justice system. It does not surprise me to see that African Americans in the City and
The report also found that
Vortex Report-Colorado data summary
| | | Arapahoe | | | | | Larimer |
| Drug admission rate to prison* | 46.51 | 29.6 | 11.10 | 147.39 | 44.32 | 36.86 | 24.94 |
| African American drug admission rate to prison* | 402.40 | 145.44 | 27.23 | 638.04 | 174.04 | 155.60 | 65.47 |
| White drug admission rate to prison* | 17 | 13.71 | 4.93 | 32.75 | 23.28 | 26.27 | 17.66 |
| Poverty rate | 9.7% | 7% | 8.2% | 14.5% | 9.2% | 6.1% | 8.4% |
| % of population that is African American | 3.9% | 9.7% | 1.3% | 12% | 8.1% | 1.5% | 1.2% |
| Unemployment rate | 6.4% | 5.7% | 5.7% | 6.8% | 6.2% | 5.5% | 4.7% |
| Per capita spending on law enforcement | $372.25 | $236.55 | $188.90 | $267.58 | $186.73 | $191.68 | $165.84 |
| Per capita spending on judiciary | $35.28 | $43.93 | $30.62 | $91.63 | $29.66 | $35.45 | $21.39 |
| Ranking by most drug admissions per 100,000 of the 198 counties included in study | 94th | 125th | 186th | 12th | 99th | 113th | 143rd |
(*Admission rates to prison are calculated as the number of county residents per 100,000 that are sentenced to prison for a drug offense.)
City & County of
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http://www.justicepolicy.org – to view the full report and interactive state map
About Justice Policy Institute
The Justice Policy Institute is a non-profit, public policy and research institute dedicated to ending society's reliance on incarceration and promoting effective and just solutions to social problems.
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