State lawmakers should examine racial disparity in marijuana arrests
The push to legalize marijuana sales in Connecticut may have gone up in a puff — for now — but a sliver of the proposed legislation should be considered for action before the General Assembly turns out the lights at midnight Wednesday.
This is important: A portion of one of three bills dealt with the glaring racial disparity in arrests for marijuana possession. Senate Bill 1085 included a provision for erasing criminal records: “People with past convictions for up to 1.5 ounces of cannabis could petition for erasure of the record and for that petition to be granted and the records destroyed. There would be no fee charged for those petitions.”
This made sense if marijuana were to be made as legal as alcohol in Connecticut, as it is in 10 other states. But I think it makes sense even without legalization. Why? Because of the imbalance in arrests.
In Connecticut, black people are 3.3 times more likely to be charged for having pot than white people, though their use of the drug is similar.
A data analysis of marijuana arrests in Connecticut by CTMirror in 2016 shows in detail the glaring inequality.
“In all but one town (Suffield), black people were cited for marijuana at a higher rate than their proportion of the population in that town,” the analysis said.
Consider this: “Nearly half of all marijuana citations in New Canaan were given to black people though they make up about 1 percent of the town’s population.”
The analysis looked at data from 2011, after the state decriminalized possession of less than half-anounce, through 2014. Let’s look at some of the larger cities in that time frame.
New Haven had 963 arrests of black people who make up 35 percent of the city’s population, yet only 212 arrests of white people who are 44 percent of the population. Stamford police arrested 354 blacks, who are nearly 14 percent of the population, compared with 233 whites who make up 60 percent. Norwalk police arrested 334 blacks, who comprise 15 percent of the population, and 239 whites, who make up nearly 73 percent.
Though not so disparate for every town (and stats weren’t available for every city, including Hartford and Danbury), you see the picture.
The conflict
I am not so naive to believe it’s likely that one thread of the three bills that progressed out of committees could be saved. The General Assembly has an avalanche of bills to consider, and this week Gov. Ned Lamont put tolls back in their laps, which could occupy most of the time left for debate.
The gist of the three bills is to establish regulations for the growth, retail sale, and heavy taxes (no small element) of recreational marijuana in Connecticut, propelled by Massachusetts opening the market to legal pot earlier this year.
Not long ago, I wrote about the dangers of stoned drivers and the lack of a reliable test, such as a breathalyzer for alcohol. There were still too many questions about safety for me to fully support legalization at this time.
The Hearst Connecticut Media Editorial Board, of which I’m a member, met with Karen O’Keefe, director of state policies for the California-based Marijuana Policy Project, last week. She was knowledgeable as she tried to make a case for legalizing cannabis.
Regarding the record clearing, she had earlier testified before the Judiciary Committee: “A relatively small percent of individuals with past cannabis convictions go through the hoops of erasure. Those who need the help the most, and have the fewest economic opportunities, are the least likely to jump through the hoops. A past conviction can make it very difficult to get a job, housing or even advance one’s education.”
The issue is complex, as evidenced by the conflicting views of some members of CONECT— Congregations Organized for a New Connecticut. The organization of churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and civic organization in New Haven and Fairfield counties supports what they call Clean Slate — legislation to automatically expunge criminal records of those who do not return to crime for three years after a misdemeanor and five years after a nonviolent felony.
Criminal records haunt a person’s life. Sixty percent of those who have been in prison remain unemployed one year after release, many are barred from housing and higher education gets out of reach, CONECT states on its fact sheet.
I asked Matt McDermott, one of the organizers, about the group’s support for the more narrow marijuana criminal record erasure, as in the Senate bill.
“Our organization is very mixed overall,” he said. “A good measure are clearly opposed to legalizing marijuana and a few are for it. African Americans hit with low-level criminal charges are sometimes hit lifelong.”
The racial disparity is as much acknowledged in the “social equity” portion of a related bill (HB 7371) that would require a cannabis commission to “promote full participation in the industry by people from communities disproportionately impacted by cannabis prohibition.”
The Rev. Tommie Jackson, of Rehoboth Fellowship Church in Stamford, said in a telephone interview that he has “seen the situation change lives,” referring to decriminalization. In his 22 years in the city, he has known several people who have “been in and out of penal institutions” and rehabs, only to be returned for a small offense.
“We have to look at historical roots as well as contemporary effects,” he said.
The roots
Michelle Alexander traces the historical roots well in her 2010 bestseller “The New Jim Crow, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.”
From the death of slavery grew another insidious caste system. “The shift to a general attitude of ‘toughness’ toward problems associated with communities of color began in the 1960s, when the gains and goals of the Civil Rights Movement began to require real sacrifices on the part of white Americans, and conservative politicians found they could mobilize white racial resentment by vowing to crack down on crime,” she wrote.
In 1989, then-President George Bush “characterized drug use as ‘the most pressing problem facing the nation.’ ” It wasn’t, but people believed it. Law enforcement budgets “exploded, so did prison and jail populations.” By 1991 “onefourth of young African American men were under the control of the criminal justice system.”
Then-President Bill Clinton was no better with his “three strikes and you’re out” law in 1994 that manifested into a $30 billion crime bill.
“The decision to wage the drug war primarily in black and brown communities rather than white ones and to target African Americans but not whites on freeways and train stations has had precisely the same effect as the literacy and poll taxes of an earlier era,” Alexander wrote.
The sooner we recognize this, the better. And one step to rectify it is to automatically clean the record of those charged with possessing more than the decriminalized amount or marijuana but below the 1.5 ounces, indicating it was for personal use, not sale.