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Black Paranoia -- Or Common Sense

By Vincent Schiraldi

Date: 12-18-96

Pundits are alarmed by what some describe as black America's susceptibility to "bizarre rumors and myths" -- like the CIA's alleged support of crack cocaine sales to South Central Los Angeles. But one veteran analyst of the criminal justice system says arrest and incarceration data offer ample reason why African Americans view the war on drugs as a war on blacks. PNS commentator Vincent Schiraldi is executive director of the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice, a public policy organization located in Washington, D.C. and San Francisco.

WASHINGTON, D.C. -- In the wake of Congressional hearings on allegations that the CIA supported sales of crack cocaine in South Central Los Angeles, there has been much speculation inside the Beltway about why such conspiracy theories fall on fertile ground in the black community. Why, the public opinion makers and shakers want to know, are African Americans so ready to believe that the government is out to get them?

Some commentators, like the Washington Post's Richard Cohen, point to factors like slavery, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment in which blacks were allowed to suffer the disease in the furtherance of research, and the FBI infiltration of the civil rights movement.

Maybe I'm not as complex a thinker as some, but it strikes me there is a much more straight-forward way to explain the willingness of African Americans to view the "War on Drugs" as a government-sponsored "War on Blacks." Because it is.

By this I do not mean there is a deliberate effort on the part of the government to "get" blacks, or more particularly, young African American men. I just mean that, if there was such a conspiracy, it could hardly target blacks any more effectively.

Several think-tanks, including the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice (CJCJ) which I direct, have offered mounds of evidence over the past decade of this officially ignored phenomenon over the past decade. We have shown, for example, that in Washington D.C., 42 percent of young African American men are under control of the justice system. In Baltimore the figure is 56 percent.

In California, the rate is forty percent but that may rise -- we also found that the state's new "three strikes law" imprisons blacks 13 times as often as whites, even though blacks are arrested for felonies at less than five times the white rate. In October, a CJCJ study concluded that there are four times as many black men in prison in California as are enrolled in higher education, a figure which will grow to seven times as many given the population predictions of both those departments.

It's tempting to conclude that blacks are arrested more often because they are more inclined to get in trouble. But in fact, government surveys show that blacks are slightly less likely to use illicit drugs yet blacks are arrested at five times at the rate of whites, and nearly three out of four (74 percent) of those sentenced to prison for possession of drugs are black.

Does this mean there is a government conspiracy to ruin the black community? Of course not. But to assume that it's the result of benign neglect is a bit more charitable than I, personally, am willing to be.

It is instructive to imagine the war on drugs being waged with such ferocity with white middle class men as the targets. "Buy and bust" police teams could as easily be dispatched to Stanford fraternity parties as to East Palo Alto street corners and would probably result in about the same number of arrests.

Indeed, if whites were imprisoned at comparable rates it is likely a national emergency would be declared with calls for funds to treat and prevent the problem.

Certainly, the distinction is clear in the black community. Which is why some are quite ready to believe the government is engaged in a conspiracy.

It may be that the belief in a CIA plot is a natural outgrowth of a basically flawed policy. By declaring a war against its own citizens, we have pumped up a powerful propaganda machine which promotes an "us vs. them" mentality.

In the process, we entered a conflict even less winnable than Vietnam. At least we could finally pull out of Vietnam and go home. This time we are home already.

SIDEBAR:

The following data are compiled by the Center for Juvenile and Criminal Justice based on federal statistics (numbers are approximate):

Ratio of blacks to whites arrested for felonies: 5 to 1

Ratio of blacks to whites imprisoned under California "three strikes" rule: 13 to 1

Ratio of blacks to whites consuming illicit drugs: about even

Ratio of blacks to whites arrested for drug offenses: 5 to 1

Ratio of blacks to whites sent to prison for drug possession: 3 to 1