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According to the 1998 Federal Household Survey: • Whites constitute 72% of all drug users in the U.S. • Blacks constitute 13.5% of all drug users in the U.S. • But 37% of those arrested for drug violations are Black. • Over 42% of those in federal prisons for drug violations are black. • African- Americans comprise almost 60% of those in state prisons for drug felonies. According to U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics: • Of convicted defendants, 33% of whites received a prison sentence and 51% of African - Americans received prison sentences. • In New York State prisons Nine in 10 of the 19,000 people serving mandatory sentences for drug offenses are Black or Brown • According to the FBI Uniform Crime Report, a young couple giving birth to a Black male baby today has an expectancy of one -in -three that their child will serve time in prison • Disenfranchisement: Due to the fact that many state laws say no one convicted of a felony can vote, the fact that nearly all drug violations are felonies, and the fact that for drug felonies we arrest seven times as many black men per capita as white men, 14% of the total voting population of black men in the U.S. have lost their right to vote In Texas 31% of black men have lost their voting rights. Racism drives the war on drugs. The estimated population of males 18- years -old and above in the US in 2008 was 113,215,601. Of that number the white population was 90,798,912, the Hispanic population was 16,303,046, and the black population was 14,491,597. In 2008 the number of those in prison by race were: Whites = 856,593 or 0.9% of that population; Hispanics = 451,862 or 2.8% of that population; Blacks = 966,106 or 6.6% of that population. That means blacks in the US are being imprisoned at 7 -times the rate that whites are being imprisoned . 41 Another way at looking at this issue is in 1993, under the most racist regime in modern history, South Africa's Apartheid Law, 851 black men were imprisoned per 100,000 population. In 2008 under the United States' Drug Prohibition Law we imprisoned males 18- years -old and above per 100,000 population at rates by race of 943 white men, 2,777 Hispanic men, and 6,666 black men. 43 Remember that blacks are only 13% of the problem. Although it is true that the U.S. imprisons more than twice as many Hispanic men per capita as we imprison white men, that statistic actually hides an even worse problem. Today police are monitored rather closely to determine if they are conducting racial profiling stops. By definition racial profiling stops are initiated by an officer because the driver of the suspect vehicle is a dark - skinned person. But most police departments give their officers a choice of three items to mark for this demographic; "Black," "White," and "Hispanic." An officer who tends to stop dark - skinned people is very happy for the designation of Hispanic. If officers can say the people they stop are "Hispanic," they do not have to record the race category as black or white. I suspect that if we could divide the list of Hispanic men imprisoned into two groups— identified as white or black—we would discover that the blacks in the Hispanic category also vastly outnumber the whites in the Hispanic category. 12