Title: Criminal injustice: The percentage of African-Americans in prison
Headings: Criminal injustice: The percentage of African-Americans in prison
Criminal injustice: The percentage of African-Americans in prison
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Content: Since 1971, when President Richard Nixon declared a war on drugs, there has been a 700% increase in the U.S. prison population. Today, African-Americans are also more likely to spend time in prison for drug related offenses than their white counterparts. According to the Sentencing Project , African-Americans make up 12% of the nation's drug users, but represent 34% of those arrested for drug offenses, and 45% of those in state prison for such offense as of 2005. In her book, "The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness," Alexander chronicled how black youth are less likely to be drug users. White students use cocaine and heroin at seven times the rate of black students, and use crack at eight times the rate, according to a study from the National Institute on Drug Abuse. Eugene Jarecki, filmmaker behind the documentary "The House I Live in," thinks that Americans have been swindled into believing these higher incarceration rates among minorities are justified by drug use. Recommended
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"We lived for a very long time with the idea that crack is a black drug and powder is a white drug, and the actual facts that I discovered when I made the film is that crack was never a black drug," he said. " The majority of crack users in the United States of America are and always have been white." "Once you know that fact, it reminds you how much propaganda has hoodwinked us for 40 years about these drugs," he added.