Marking the 35th anniversary of New York’s controversial Rockefeller drug laws, the tough mandatory minimum sentencing laws for drug offenders, three new reports were issued by the Human Rights Watch (HRW), The Sentencing Project (TSP) and the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU) that highlight the alarming racial disparities that exist in drug-related arrest and imprisonment.
Over the past decade, New York City alone has arrested more people of color for possessing small amounts of marijuana (less than two ounces) than any city in the United States, researchers found.
Nowhere in American life are racial disparities more pervasive than those in the criminal justice system where Blacks, nationally, are incarcerated at a rate seven times higher, usually on drug offenses, than their White counterparts, according to national data.
Under the Rockefeller drug laws passed in 1973, an offender found guilty of selling two or more ounces of heroin, crack-cocaine, or marijuana was sentenced to a minimum of 15 years to life or a maximum of 25 years to life in prison.
“It’s hard to know how much of the disparity [in arrests] is explicable by discrimination,” says Ryan S. King, policy analyst for The Sentencing Project and author of the report, Disparity by Geography: The War on Drugs in America’s Cities. “However, it would be naïve not to think that some portion of it is race.”
