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Collateral damage in the war on drugs

Long sentences for nonviolent offenders pack state prisons and wreck families

By CYNTHIA TUCKER
Atlanta Journal-Constitution Staff Writer

John Bell did the crime. He doesn't deny it.

... Bell's lengthy imprisonment reflects the scorched-earth tactics of the war on drugs, which has done little to curb illegal narcotics but has been a remarkable boon for the prison business. It has also acted as a weapon of mass destruction in black America, taking young men away from home, family and community and stigmatizing them for life with prison records.

Nationally, an estimated 12 percent of black men between the ages of 20 and 34 are behind bars, according to Allen Beck, chief prison demographer for the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Similar statistics are not available at the state level; because Georgia has the nation's sixth-highest incarceration rate, its percentage of young black men behind bars may even exceed the national level of 12 percent.

The stunning rise in incarceration rates for black men began after the nation became serious about its second Prohibition -- stamping out illegal narcotics. In 1954, black inmates accounted for 30 percent of the nation's prison population, according to Marc Mauer, assistant director of The Sentencing Project, a Washington-based group that advocates alternative sentencing. Nearly 50 years later, he wrote, blacks account for almost half of all prison admissions. Much of that increase, criminologists say, has come from arrests for drug crimes. ...