How many times have you heard that making pot illegal was “The New Jim Crow”, producing by design massive racial disparities in drug arrests? As is so often the case in drug policy, the data are unkind to theory.
About 18 months ago, Dr. Mike Males published a report showing that legalizing/decriminalizing marijuana had if anything made racial disparities in marijuana arrests worse. At the time, I thought that this might be some short-term effect of the early days of a new era in marijuana policy, so I did not write about it. But I did maintain a watching brief.
As it happened, I was talking with Mike a few weeks ago about his excellent piece on incarceration in Washington Monthly, and he mentioned that he had replicated his race and marijuana finding. Legalizing pot, it turns out, does nothing to change the relatively high rate at which Blacks are arrested for marijuana offenses. I write about that finding today at Washington Post’s Wonkblog.