Racial gaps in drug prison admissions predate the War on Drugs.

Evidence

In 1983, the first available data year, the National Corrections Reporting Program indicates that less than 20,000 inmates were admitted to prisons in the 32 reporting states on a drug offense (Bureau of Justice Statistics, 1983–2015). Notably, even in this period of infrequent imprisonment of drug offenders, African Americans’ rate of prison admissions per 100,000 (~13 per 100,000) on a drug offense were more than four times higher than that of Whites (~3 per 100,000). The rate at which African Americans were admitted to prison on a drug crime exploded throughout the remainder of the 1980s, stabilized in the 1990s, peaked around 2,000, and dropped precipitously thereafter. Yet, the Black rate of drug prison admissions currently (~100 per 100,000) is considerably higher than it was in the early 1980s (~13 per 100,000). By contrast, Whites’ rate of prison admission for drug offenses grew relatively slowly in the 1980s and 1990s, continued growing until the mid-2000s, and stabilized thereafter at roughly 30 per 100,000 White Americans. — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law, 1042

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s legal-bias further-reading volume on racial prejudice in criminal justice; the pre-existing-disparity point complicates any causal story that blames the drug war alone. — connects to: Drug-war arrests and imprisonment fell disproportionately on Black Americans — Lawrence M. Friedman and Grant M. Hayden, American Law: An Introduction, 1435
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Joseph Avery, Jim Sidanius, Joel Cooper, Gregory Davis, Amanda N., Bias in the Law: A Definitive Look at…, 1042