Summary
“There is a growing conversation across the United States about arrest practices that cause disproportionately high numbers of black Americans to face harsh consequences in the justice system. Events in Ferguson, Baltimore, Chicago, and throughout the country have highlighted the critical role that police practices play in a system’s racial equity or inequity. More broadly, black people are arrested at significantly higher rates than are other racial and ethnic groups in the United States.1 Compounding this problem are high rates of pretrial incarceration,and this means racial disparity in arrests leads to severe consequences that overwhelmingly affect the black population, even for relatively minor offenses. Disparities are especially dramatic in drug cases, which cause disproportionately large numbers of black residents to enter the criminal justice system, frequently facing long pretrial detention (and often long prison terms after sentencing). Arrests for marijuana-related crimes in particular have been scrutinized nationwide. A large portion of the population has recognized marijuana as minimally harmful and some states have legalized its use. But people arrested for marijuana-related offenses are disproportionately black. Because self-reported data indicates that people of different races in this country use marijuana at approximately the same rate, the disparity in arrests and justice-system involvement for the black population is alarming.”—Page 6.