Statistics: Blacks Treated More Harshly Than Whites Under Virginia's Marijuana Laws

From the end of Reconstruction onward through the Jim Crow period and then to Massive Resistance, Virginia lead the South in devising ways to disenfranchise black voters and/or subjugate blacks to an inferior status. Virginia's current marijuana laws are a continuation of that legacy which involves two steps: first, enact draconian marijuana laws and second, disproportionately target blacks for arrest and prosecution.   Under § 18.2-250.1, Code of Virginia, possession of marijuana is punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a fine up to $500 for the first offense and up to one year in jail and a fine up to $2,500 for subsequent offenses.  Under § 18.2-248.1, the delivery or sale of one-half ounce of marijuana or less is punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine up to $2,500. For greater than one-half ounce, the penalties increase to a possible 1 - 10 years in prison and a fine up to $2,500. Add to this the disproportionate prosecution of blacks for marijuana offenses and one discovers a vehicle to accomplish the voter disenfranchisement so loved by Republicans, including those in the Virginia General Assembly.  Inroads have been made in legalizing medical marijuana, but much reform and decriminalization for recreational use is needed. A piece in the Daily Press looks at the damning statistics on what happens to black Virginians.  Here are excerpts:

Whites charged with marijuana possession in Virginia are more likely to get a second chance, while blacks are far more likely to spend time behind bars, a Daily Press review of court data found.

And, while only about one in five Virginians is African-American, half of those charged with a first offense of marijuana possession are black, the review found.

The data show the pattern holds for all marijuana charges, for first offenders and for first offenders who were not charged with any other offense when arrested. 

Health surveys suggest blacks and whites are about equally likely to use marijuana. But, in Newport News and Hampton, where U.S. Census figures show just under half the residents are black, African-Americans are defendants in more than three-quarters of first-offense marijuana cases.

“This is something I kind of knew, I felt it in my gut, but we never had the numbers,” said a shocked Del. Mike Mullin, D-Newport News, who has worked as a prosecutor for a decade and has been thinking Virginia might need its first update in four decades of its marijuana possession laws.

The Daily Press analysis of district court case records found 49 percent of all first-offense marijuana charges statewide are filed against African-Americans, compared to 47 percent against whites. The percentages are almost exactly the same when those first-offenders have no other charges, which occurs a bit less than half the time.

The disparities are sharper on the Peninsula. In Newport News, 75 percent of charges are filed against blacks; in Hampton, the figure is 80 percent.

The paper reviewed nearly 29,500 marijuana cases from 2017 arrests, matching them against a database of more than 200,000 earlier cases to sort out individuals charged with possession for the first time, and a database of more than 1.8 million other district court cases from 2017 to find those who had been charged only with marijuana possession.

The review found:

*Once in court, blacks are slightly more likely to be found guilty, but are significantly more likely to go to jail. Only about one out of 14 convictions for a first-offense marijuana possession ends up with jail time; but of those that do, 65 percent are black. 

“These figures are staggering,” said Bill Farrar, director of public policy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Virginia. . . . Farrar said, “there is no reason to keep possession on the books as a criminal charge except as way to punish a particular group of people … this is a major racial justice, criminal justice and mass incarceration issue.”
 “It was meant to be an easy conviction, especially after the General Assembly dropped the requirement for a crime lab analysis of seized marijuana in possession cases — the field analysis is sufficient to prove a substance is marijuana,” he said. In Hampton Roads’ urban cities, four out of five charges for a first offense of marijuana possession making it to court were filed against African-Americans. In suburban communities, that figure was just under two-thirds. In Newport News, the figure was three out of four. In rural communities, about half of cases going to court were filed against blacks. In the Williamsburg/James City County General District Court, about half the cases of first-offense marijuana possession were filed against blacks. Once in court, judges found blacks guilty in seven of 10 cases, whites in four of 10. Four out of 10 blacks found guilty spend time behind bars, while two out of 10 whites did.

And, of course, once has a criminal record on their record, it becomes much more difficult to find a decent job setting the stage for marijuana law loving Republicans to whine about blacks not in the work force and being freeloaders.  If Virginia wants to escape some of the worse elements of its past, one step is to decriminalize recreational marijuana. 

Say Not To Jeff Sessions' Revival of The War on Drugs

I did not like Jeff Sessions years ago when I lived in Alabama and I like him even less now that he is in a position to harm all of America.  In general, Session is a racist and homophobe who wants to take America back to the 1950's when white privilege was still dominant and any one who wasn't a white, heterosexual conservative Christian lived in the margins.  Now, Sessions wants to revive the failed war on drugs, including mandatory minimum sentences which disproportionately hit minorities without the financial ability to hire legal counsel. This has two negative effects.  First, having a criminal record permanently bars offenders from most opportunities of landing a good job later in life  - even as Sessions and those like him whine about low employment results for past prisoners. Second, it disproportionately disenfranchise minorities, something in high favor with Mr. Sessions and similar racists who hold sway in today's Republican Party.  Sessions is a dangerous Neanderthal who should never have been confirmed as Attorney General.  A piece in the Washington Post looks at his effort to revitalize failed programs that fit hand in glove with his long history of racism and bigotry.  Here are excerpts:

When the Obama administration launched a sweeping policy to reduce harsh prison sentences for nonviolent drug offenders, rave reviews came from across the political spectrum. Civil rights groups and the Koch brothers praised Obama for his efforts, saying he was making the criminal justice system more humane.

But there was one person who watched these developments with some horror. Steven H. Cook, a former street cop who became a federal prosecutor based in Knoxville, Tenn., saw nothing wrong with how the system worked — not the life sentences for drug charges, not the huge growth of the prison population. And he went everywhere — Bill O’Reilly’s show on Fox News, congressional hearings, public panels — to spread a different gospel.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions has brought Cook into his inner circle at the Justice Department, appointing him to be one of his top lieutenants to help undo the criminal justice policies of Obama and former attorney general Eric H. Holder Jr. As Sessions has traveled to different cities to preach his tough-on-crime philosophy, Cook has been at his side.

Law enforcement officials say that Sessions and Cook are preparing a plan to prosecute more drug and gun cases and pursue mandatory minimum sentences. The two men are eager to bring back the national crime strategy of the 1980s and ’90s from the peak of the drug war, an approach that had fallen out of favor in recent years as minority communities grappled with the effects of mass incarceration.

Crime is near historic lows in the United States, but Sessions says that the spike in homicides in several cities, including Chicago, is a harbinger of a “dangerous new trend” in America that requires a tough response.

Advocates of criminal justice reform argue that Sessions and Cook are going in the wrong direction — back to a strategy that tore apart families and sent low-level drug offenders, disproportionately minority citizens, to prison for long sentences.

“They are throwing decades of improved techniques and technologies out the window in favor of a failed approach,” said Kevin Ring, president of Families Against Mandatory Minimums (FAMM).

The records of Cook and Sessions show that while others have grown eager in recent years to rework the criminal justice system, they have repeatedly fought to keep its toughest edges, including winning a battle in Congress last year to defeat a reform bill.

But sentencing reform advocates say the tough crime policies went too far. The nation began incarcerating people at a higher rate than any other country — jailing 25 percent of the world’s prisoners at a cost of $80 billion a year. The nation’s prison and jail population more than quadrupled from 500,000 in 1980 to 2.2 million in 2015, filled with mostly black men strapped with lengthy prison sentences — 10 or 20 years, sometimes life without parole for a first drug offense.

Cook and Sessions have also fought the winds of change on Capitol Hill, where a bipartisan group of lawmakers recently tried but failed to pass the first significant bill on criminal justice reform in decades.

The legislation, which had 37 sponsors in the Senate, including Sen. Charles E. Grassley (R-Iowa) and Mike Lee (R-Utah), and 79 members of the House, would have reduced some of the long mandatory minimum sentences for gun and drug crimes. It also would have given judges more flexibility in drug sentencing . . . . The bill, introduced in 2015, had support from outside groups as diverse as the Koch brothers and the NAACP. House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) supported it, as well.

“Sessions was the main reason that bill didn’t pass,” said Inimai M. Chettiar, the director of the Justice Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. “He came in at the last minute and really torpedoed the bipartisan effort.”

Now that he is attorney general, Sessions has signaled a new direction. As his first step, Sessions told his prosecutors in a memo last month to begin using “every tool we have” — language that evoked the strategy from the drug war of loading up charges to lengthen sentences.

Sessions is also expected to take a harder line on the punishment for using and distributing marijuana, a drug he has long abhorred. His crime task force will review existing marijuana policy, according to a memo he wrote prosecutors last week. Using or distributing marijuana is illegal under federal law, which classifies it as a Schedule 1 drug, the same category as heroin, and considered more dangerous than cocaine and methamphetamine.

In his effort to resurrect the practices of the drug war, it is still unclear what Sessions will do about the wave of states that have legalized marijuana in recent years. Eight states and the District of Columbia now permit the recreational use of marijuana, and 28 states and the District have legalized the use of medical marijuana.

But his rhetoric against weed seems to get stronger with each speech. In Richmond, he cast doubt on the use of medical marijuana and said it “has been hyped, maybe too much.”

 Sessions represents the ignorance embracing, racist GOP at its worst.  Like many who feign religious piety, Sessions is a foul individual.  Calling him a modern day Pharisee is too kind.  Recreational use of marijuana needs to be legalized, as does medical marijuana.   

Changing America's Insane Marijuana Laws

While west coast states seem to finally recognize that the so-called "war on drugs" has been a farce and an utter failure, states like Virginia lag behind.  The result is a swelling prison population and the disproportionate criminalization of black males in particular and often strips them of their voting rights.  This later effect likely delights the Virginia Republican Party which, candidly, would disenfranchise all blacks and minorities if it could devise a way to do so. In the city of Norfolk a movement has sprung up to decriminalize the personal use of marijuana, motivated by (i) a recognition of the havoc the current draconian laws are having on minority populations, and (ii) the hypocrisy of demonizing marijuana when the death toll and societal damage from alcohol is much worse.  A column in the New York Times looks at the long over due move to change marijuana laws which should never have been enacted in the first place.  Here are highlights:

The budtenders of the Rose City are relentlessly helpful with tips pairing a marijuana strain that is “equal parts fruity and musky” with a stimulating Sichuan dish. As Oregon, the place where empires once clashed over the global trade of beaver furs, glides into a second year of legalized recreational pot, the state is determined to show the world that a certain kind of drug prohibition belongs in history’s Dumpster.

Soon, with the likely passage of legal pot in California next month, all of the West Coast — from the tundra of Alaska to the sun-washed suburbs of San Diego — will be a confederacy of state-regulated marijuana use.

Across the Pacific, a completely a different view of drug use is playing out in the horror of the Philippines. That country is ruled by Rodrigo Duterte, a crude and brutal strongman known as the Donald Trump of the Philippines. Under his watch, more than 3,500 suspected drug users and dealers have been killed. Many of those murders are “extrajudicial,” as the State Department calls them.

Heroin is the drug of choice in small towns in New England and wide-open rural areas across the country. Blacks and Latinos use and sell drugs at roughly the same rate as whites, but 57 percent of the people locked up for a drug offense in 2014 were nonwhite.
Perhaps because so many addicts are white and suburban, or white and rural, there is now a rare bipartisan consensus emerging for wholesale reform of the drug laws.

We can start, nationwide, with marijuana. Though legalization is not without its problems — a spike in emergency room visits attributed to edible pot, persistent black market dealers — it’s mostly been no big deal. Across the legalized West, consumers frequent their corner pot shop to talk varietals and buzz strength. Homegrown gardeners pass on suggestions to avoid bud rot as harvest nears. Tax revenue from sales — though not a panacea — flows to schools and roads and treatment programs.

It all works, for the most part. And when California, now the world’s sixth largest economy, passes its legal pot measure in November as expected, it will truly be game over for this absurd form of prohibition.

So why are nearly 600,000 people arrested in the United States for simple possession of marijuana every year? And why is pot still illegal on the federal level? People in the loop of this policing circle know it is an absurd and Sisyphean use of law enforcement.

A clear majority of Americans now favor pot legalization. The problem is the federal government, which still classifies marijuana as a Schedule 1 drug, alongside heroin and L.S.D. If pot was legalized nationwide, with a tax on every sale designated for treatment, it would free up the police to get at serious crimes, while ensuring that no addict would be denied treatment for lack of funds. As with most social reforms, it only seems impossible until it’s obvious.

A Doctor's Case for Marijuana Decriminalization

The City of Norfolk, Virginia recently discussed seeking legislation from the Virginia General Assembly to decriminalized marijuana or at least amend Virginia's draconian marijuana laws. Norfolk has the distinction of the highest number of marijuana arrests which disproportionately impact black male.  It's as if the pattern is part of a Republican plan to arrest, convict and criminalize blacks to keep them off of the voter rolls.  The reality is that the Virginia GOP increasingly survives due solely to gerrymandered districts and all out efforts to disenfranchise minority voters and younger voters. A piece in Salon authored by a doctor looks at the idiocy of the federal government's refusal to change marijuana as a Schedule I drug.  Here are article excerpts:

On August 11th, the Drug Enforcement Administration announced its decision to keep marijuana classified as a Schedule I drug. The federal government has historically referred to this category as the “most dangerous” group of substances, including drugs like heroin and bath salts.

As a resident physician specializing in mental health, I can’t make much sense of this.

Every day, I talk to patients about substance abuse. Whether evaluating patients in clinic, in the emergency department or on inpatient units, my colleagues and I screen patients for substance use. It’s a vital component of any clinical interview, particularly in mental health care, and helps us understand patients’ habits and their risks for medical complications.

During my medical training, I’ve learned which substances to worry about and which ones matter less.

Alcohol is usually the first substance I ask about. Many people have seen drinking go wrong, be it a friend making a bad decision or a family member struggling with alcoholism. But clinicians see the worst of this on the front lines.

Intoxicated patients stream into emergency departments after crashing their cars, inhaling their own vomit or falling into a coma. According to the National Institutes of Health, alcohol-related conditions contributed to more than 1.2 million emergency department visits in 2010. The Centers for Disease Control reports excess alcohol consumption causes roughly 88,000 deaths in the United States each year.

It’s not only alcohol that clinicians worry about. Cocaine can cause heart attacks, kidney failure and complications during pregnancy like placental abruption. Methamphetamine can trigger an assortment of responses, from hyperthermia to violent agitation to cardiogenic shock. Opioids like morphine can plunge patients into respiratory failure and kill them. Intravenous drug use puts patients at risk for hepatitis, endocarditis or even brain abscesses.

But, for most health care providers, marijuana is an afterthought.

We don’t see cannabis overdoses. We don’t order scans for cannabis-related brain abscesses. We don’t treat cannabis-induced heart attacks. In medicine, marijuana use is often seen on par with tobacco or caffeine consumption — something we counsel patients about stopping or limiting, but nothing urgent to treat or immediately life-threatening.

The federal government’s scheduling of marijuana bears little relationship to actual patient care. The notion that marijuana is more dangerous or prone to abuse than alcohol (not scheduled), cocaine (Schedule II), methamphetamine (Schedule II) or prescription opioids (Schedules II, III, and IV) doesn’t reflect what we see in clinical medicine.

Chuck Rosenberg, acting head of the DEA, explained the decision to keep marijuana as a Schedule I drug was based more “on whether marijuana, as determined by the FDA, is a safe and effective medicine.”

Regulations have prevented U.S. researchers from answering this question over the last several decades. As written in a recent editorial in The New York Times, “the government itself has made it impossible to do the kinds of trials and studies that could produce the evidence that would justify changing the drug’s classification.”

Yet, according to a 2015 systematic review, studies from around the world suggest cannabis and cannabinoid therapies may help patients in a number of ways. These include treating chronic pain, muscle spasms, debilitating side effects of chemotherapy like nausea and weight loss from HIV infection. Dozens of U.S. states have listened to such findings in recent years and passed legislation approving the use of medical marijuana.

[O]ur nation’s substance policies should be grounded in the realities of clinical practice.

In hospitals across the country, patients writhe in agony from alcohol withdrawal, turn violent from crystal meth and struggle to breathe after overdosing on prescription opioids. These are the cases that keep health care providers on edge. These are the patients we follow closely. When our pagers go off, we hurry to the bedside, give medications, alert security or even begin resuscitation.

With marijuana? Not so much.

States Are Losing Billions of Dollars by Keeping Marijuana Illegal

When it comes to marijuana laws, Virginia is among the more regressive states.  Locally, Norfolk leads Virginia in marijuana arrests, with blacks disproportionately subject to such arrests.  Since possessing small amounts of marijuana can lead to a felony conviction, one net effect is to disenfranchise more blacks - something that is a top priority for Virginia Republicans who increasingly try to use voter disenfranchisement to counter demographics that trend in favor of Democrats.  But there is another consequence of this draconian approach - which is popular, of course, with the white Christofascists that comprise the core of the Virginia GOP base: lost revenues and increased costs for prisons.   Virginia is not alone in this wrongheaded policy and a piece in the Washington Post looks at how states are throwing away billions of dollars in potential revenue.  Here are excerpts:

The federal government and most states are throwing away $28 billion in yearly tax revenue by not legalizing marijuana, according to a new analysis from the Tax Foundation, an independent think tank.

The bulk of that revenue -- $20.5 billion of it -- would accrue to states through the collection of excise taxes on marijuana sales, general sales taxes, and income and payroll taxes levied on workers and businesses in a mature legal marijuana industry.

The federal government would take in another $7.5 billion, primarily from income and payroll taxes, and $500 million in excise taxes if marijuana were to be taxed the same way tobacco is.

These are estimates relying on a certain number of assumptions about the size of the marijuana market ($45 billion in sales annually) and the ways that governments decide to tax the sale of the drug. For instance, if the federal government decided to slap a 10 percent surtax on marijuana sales rather than a tobacco-style per-pound tax, that $500 million excise tax figure would grow to $5.3 billion.

$28 billion is nothing to scoff at. The Tax Foundation analysis points out that marijuana tax revenues in Colorado and Washington are exceeding projections by a considerable margins. Colorado initially projected it would receive $70 million in annual taxes on marijuana sales and excise taxes, but it is on track to pull in $140 million this year. The money goes to fund things like school construction and drug abuse-prevention campaigns.

[A]s the Tax Foundation analysis points out, people are already using and abusing marijuana -- regardless of legality. According to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, over 13 percent of Americans age 12 and older, 0r 35 million people, used marijuana in 2014. And 4.2 million of them met criteria for substance abuse or dependence.

We're already paying the social cost of marijuana abuse, in other words. Increased tax revenues could help offset those costs.

And marijuana prohibition carries a whole host of costs of its own -- roughly a half- billion dollars a year to arrest people for simple marijuana possession. Billions more to arrest and prosecute people who sell and traffic the drug. And the difficult-to-quantify cost of restricting the ability of millions of people who would prefer to use a drug that, by any reasonable metric, is considerably less harmful than alcohol. 

America's Misplaced War on Marijuana

As noted in other posts, a majority of Americans believe that the nation's marijuana laws need to be changed.  As they exist currently, Virginia's marijuana laws produce thousands of citizens each year permanently marked by a criminal record - even for possessing small amounts of the substance.  All of this despite the fact that no research exists that has demonstrated that marijuana use has any where near the health issues of tobacco - which can still be legally purchased - which costs the nation billions of dollars in otherwise avoidable health care costs and lives ended prematurely.  Talk about having your priorities backwards.  A column in the Washington Post looks at these misplaced priorities.  Here are highlights:

In January [1964], the surgeon general announced that scientists had found conclusive evidence linking smoking to cancer and thus launched our highly successful 50-year public- health fight against tobacco. In August, the North Vietnamese fired on a U.S. naval ship in the Gulf of Tonkin, which led to the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the public phase of the Vietnam War. Alongside an accelerating deployment of conventional troops would come their widespread use of marijuana and heroin.

By 1971, cigarette ads had been banned from radio and television, the surgeon general had called for regulation of tobacco, and cigarette smoking had begun its long decline. T he impact of drug use among troops and returning veterans provoked President Richard M. Nixon to declare a war on drugs.  This was followed, of course, by the 1973 passage of the Rockefeller Drug Laws in New York. These set the model for criminalization and increasing penalties for the country as a whole, especially regarding drugs.

In the contrast between what has happened since 1964 with tobacco, on the one hand, and marijuana, cocaine, heroin and other banned substances, on the other, we have an instructive lesson in the comparative effects of choosing a public-health or a criminalization paradigm for dealing with addictive substances.

The approach to tobacco has worked. Between 1964 and 2014, smoking rates declined by half; . . . . The progress against smoking has been steady and impressive. It’s an altogether different tale with banned substances. While levels of illegal drug use have risen and fallen since 1971, current levels are equivalent to those we had in the mid-1970s. 

There is an even starker contrast in how perceptions of the risks of smoking and of illegal drugs have changed. In 1975, 51.3 percent of 12th-graders thought that smoking one or more packs of cigarettes a day posed great risk; by 1991 that number was 69.4 percent, by 2014 it was 78 percent. With illegal drugs, arrows move the opposite direction or stay essentially flat.

In other words, for all the money spent and lives ruined through violence and criminalization, we have made zero headway against illegal drugs.

So what did we do about smoking? Tobacco control has focused on prevention and cessation.

Beginning in 1964, public- health campaigns worked toward the “denormalization” of smoking, in the words of the 2014 Report of the Surgeon General

What we have done with marijuana and the other illegal drugs is, of course, invest heavily in criminal justice.

According to a 2011 Justice Department report, addressing illegal drugs cost the nation $193 billion in 2007.  . . . . this criminalization means a massive overload on the judicial system.

Rather than using the FBI to bust up fancy tunnel networks, we should legalize marijuana and decriminalize other drugs, and then tax and sue drug producers to generate revenue to support public health campaigns against their products, agencies to regulate them and treatment for those who suffer from addiction. Legalizing and decriminalizing drugs doesn’t mean giving up on the fight against them, and we have the lesson about what works right in front of our eyes.

Add to the ass backward approach taken on marijuana the unequal arrest rates for young black males and what we have is a disaster.  Conservatives are anti-drug yet whine and bitch about blacks not working when the failed war on drugs has made many nearly unemployable.  The cynic in me at times wonders if this hasn't worked more to hold back blacks than the foul Jim Crow laws.  The drug laws need to change now.

Why So Many Black Women Are Dying of AIDS

In a recent VEER Magazine piece I criticized Virginia's idiotic marijuana laws that serve little purpose other than to make otherwise law abiding citizens into criminals, often sending them to prison and destroying their ability to ever secure quality jobs upon their released.  No segment of the population is hit harder by these laws than young black males who lack legal counsel and get convicted whereas whites with legal counsel either secure reduced sentences or have their sentences dropped after good behavior.  I've seen it happen sitting in court with clients with code violations, so those who deny this reality are living in a fantasy world or lying to themselves. The havoc wreaked on the black community is immense, not that most Republicans give a damn since many are racists themselves or pander to racists in the party base.  As an article in the New York Times indicates, there is another sinister and deadly outcome from such failed criminal justices policies: rampant HIV/AIDS among black women.  The article looks at the failure of criminal justice in this nation and the bigotry that is fueling the HIV/AIDS epidemic.  Unfortunately, the article fails to look at the homophobia of black churches that only worsens the problem by pushing black males to be "on the down low."  Here are article highlights:

[I]t is critical that we do not overlook the significant evidence showing that the end result of these practices — the mass incarceration of nonwhite men — may also be fueling an urgent public health crisis among some of the most disadvantaged members of our society.

Although African-Americans represent about 12 percent of the United States’ population, they account for roughly half of all new infections and deaths from H.I.V./AIDS. The H.I.V. infection rate among black women is 20 times higher than for white women . . . . “If H.I.V./AIDS were the leading cause of death of white women between the ages of 25 and 34, there would be an outraged outcry in this country.”

Because most gay men do not have female sexual partners and there are relatively low rates of infection among nonblack women, and because rates of injection drug use or unprotected sex among black women are no higher than for other groups, the rapid increase in H.I.V./AIDS cases among black women has been hard to account for. But several public health studies now suggest that because people tend to select sex partners from within their own communities, higher rates of H.I.V. among men who have been in prison may raise the risk of infection in their community.

A study conducted by two professors of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, determined that from 1970 to 2000, a period in which the incarceration rates for black men skyrocketed to roughly six times the rate for non-Hispanic white men, the H.I.V./AIDS infection rate for black women rose to 19 times the rate for non-Hispanic white women. Using various sources of data to investigate the connection between these developments, they concluded that “higher incarceration rates among black males explain the lion’s share of the black-white disparity in AIDS infection rates among both men and women.” 

[I]ncarceration is a risk factor for H.I.V. infection for the following reasons: There is a higher prevalence of H.I.V. among prison populations; there are higher than average rates of sexual assault and coercive sex among men in prison; inmates have little access to condoms; injectable drugs and tattooing are risk factors that also occur in prisons; and when people are released from prison they typically have inadequate access to health care and treatment because of unemployment and poverty.

These facts suggest that an important contributor to the H.I.V. crisis among black women may be hyper-incarceration.  . . . . Outside of prison, African-Americans have the same (or lower) rates of risky sex or drug use as other Americans. Explanations like these reinforce homophobic and racist “blame the victim” attitudes. They have also impeded disease reduction by wrongly identifying vectors of transmission.

There is an urgent need for new policy approaches. We should demand rigorous enforcement of the standards mandated by the 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act in order to significantly reduce sexual assaults and coercive sexual practices inside our prisons. We also need to insist that condoms be distributed inside all prisons, and that incarcerated individuals have access to H.I.V. testing and treatment before and after their release. Finally, we must continue to work to eliminate racial profiling in our criminal justice system, and significantly reduce incarceration rates by revising laws and punishment practices that unnecessarily send so many nonviolent lawbreakers to prison.

For those with their heads in the sand, HIV/AIDS in the black community is a huge problem in the  Hampton Roads area.  Pretending that the problem does not exist or ignoring the factor that Virginia's failed criminal justice system is playing in exacerbating the problem is idiocy and/or out right bigotry.. 

Virginia's Misguided War on Marijuana

In my November, 2015, column in VEER Magazine I noted that changes in Virginia's marijuana laws over the next two years were unlikely and looked at the way in which archaic marijuana laws were causing Virginia's prisons to burst at their seams:

What does all of this portent for Virginia with respect to reform of the marijuana laws?  Most likely nothing will occur during the next two years given the Republican Party control of the House of Delegates.  Sadly, most members of the Virginia GOP must swear fealty to The Family Foundation which not only opposes changes to the marijuana laws but would ban all gambling, including the Virginia Lottery, and ban alcohol sales.  What is unfortunate is that doing nothing means another 40,000+ Virginians will have arrest records for marijuana offenses, with blacks being disproportionately impacted. 

In 2012, the year for which the most recent data is available, there were 23,423 marijuana related arrests in Virginia, 20,914 for possession and 2,509 for selling marijuana.  Under § 18.2-250.1, Code of Virginia, possession of marijuana is punishable by up to 30 days in jail and a fine up to $500 for the first offense and up to one year in jail and a fine up to $2,500 for subsequent offenses.  Under § 18.2-248.1, the delivery or sale of one-half ounce of marijuana or less is punishable by up to one year in jail and a fine up to $2,500. For greater than one-half ounce, the penalties increase to a possible 1 - 10 years in prison and a fine up to $2,500.  Is there any wonder why our jails and prisons are overflowing?  Wake up!

From what I have observed, the police seem to disproportionately target blacks, especially young black males, the majority of whom cannot afford legal counsel.  White defendants who appear with legal counsel typically get off with suspended sentences which are dismissed after a year of good conduct.  Black males without counsel typically get convicted and thereafter have permanent criminal records which are impediments to many employment opportunities.  Meanwhile, conservatives and Republicans whine about the poor - read blacks - not being gainfully employed, yet Virginia's outdated marijuana laws help to insure these types of criminal convictions will bar gainful employment.