Black over-incarceration reflects law criminalizing black behavior, not criminal propensity

Evidence

Black people are arrested, convicted, and sent to prison more not because they are prone to criminal activity but because the law criminalizes black behavior more than it does the behavior of their white peers. In 2010 President Barack Obama signed into law a bipartisan bill to reduce the disparity from 100-to-1 to 18-to-1. The Fair Sentencing Act increased the amount of crack cocaine required for mandatory minimums for drug trafficking and eliminated the mandatory minimum sentence for first-time possession. That meant black Americans holding small amounts of crack cocaine would no longer be subject to such long sentences as they previously were. — Dorothy A. Brown, Getting to Reparations, 421