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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Orcastraiter who wrote (478922)	10/20/2003 8:32:20 PM
From: Gordon A. Langston	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769667

Statistics on crime are interesting. It seems that we are able to accept with little comment that women commit less crime than men but are unable to come to grips with even the thought that black men may commit crimes disproportionately to their numbers. " So the answer to the question of why there are higher percentages of African-Americans in public sector treatment and in prisons is that there is a substantial minority of African-Americans who have a variety of social problems that put them at a relatively higher risk for these outcomes. Drug abuse treatment admissions, emergency room episodes and overdose deaths all showed an excess of African-Americans compared to their share of the total U.S. population that was on the same scale as the excess in prison populations (SAMHSA, 1999a). It is as hard to see racism in the war on drugs as the major cause of the excess of African-Americans among public addiction treatment, emergency room visits for drug problems, and overdose deaths as it is to see racism in the war on drugs as a credible explanation for the preponderance of African-American newborns among cocaine-positive infants in Georgia. In addition, although we are focusing on race/ethnicity, it will come as no surprise that similar disparities among those incarcerated are evident when looking at education, income and mental health status (CASA, 1998; U.S. Department of Justice, 1999). There is an even larger gender disparity-in the opposite direction. Females constitute 51.8% of the population and 35.7% of illicit drug users (SAMHSA, 1999b), but only 30.1% of public sector drug treatment admissions (SAMHSA, 1999c) and 6.5% of incarcerated individuals (Beck and Mumola, 1999). Yet, most people are prepared to accept that proportionately fewer females are incarcerated because they commit fewer imprisonable offenses than males do. psychiatrictimes.com