Is It Time For New York State To Reform Its Drug Sentencing Laws? [POLL]

Michelle Alexander is the author of the 2010 novel The New Jim Crow Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness in fact we have featured topics from her book on Know thyself Community Wednesday.

In her book she says that there are more black men behind bars or under the watch of the criminal justice system than there were enslaved in 1850.

I remember some time ago watching a PBS special on “America’s Drug Problem” or was it the “War on Drugs” and how harsher drug sentencing is disproportionate to African Americans incarcerated in the United States each year.

Here are the facts:

African Americans constitute 13.6 percent of the U.S. population according to the Census data issued in 2011

African American men make up about 40.2 percent of all prison inmates

Crack possession sentencing is still far more greater than cocaine possession sentencing in some states even after the Fair Sentencing Act went into effect in 2010