RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://frontpagemag.com/2012/dgreenfield/the-new-racial-justice-system/print/

This summer, Obama issued an executive order calling for equal outcomes in school discipline policies. A racial quota system for school bullies requires that disciplinary action be handed out on the basis of race which terminates any behavior-based school discipline system. But the movement for racially equivalent outcomes is going to bigger places than just your local elementary school.

Our criminal justice system punishes crimes based on the harm inflicted on the individual and on society. The redistributive racial justice approach adds another component whose goal is neither the punishment of individual or communal harm, but the balancing out of disparities in racial crime statistics. This can be achieved in one of two ways; either as with bullying, by racially selective punishments linked to a statistical quota or by criminalizing and prosecuting entire categories of offenses based on race.

New York State’s radical Attorney General, Eric Schneiderman, who during the election promised to give Al Sharpton his own office, has been restructuring the drug laws to produce racially equal outcomes. Schneiderman had waged war on the Rockefeller Drug Laws that cracked down on street drugs and pushed aggressively for drug laws that target white offenders by criminalizing prescription drugs.

I-STOP is Schneiderman’s solution, a drug database that monitors everyone’s prescriptions and intimidates doctors into not prescribing painkillers for suffering patients out of fear of criminal prosecution—all in the name of racial justice.

As one article boasts, “The theory behind I-STOP represents a sea change in how drug crimes are handled. Where the Rockefeller laws ended up criminalizing the actions of poor blacks and Hispanics, prescription-drug-monitoring programs like I-STOP are as likely to affect the wealthy as they are to affect the poor.”

Street drugs such as heroin and crack cocaine were heavily prosecuted, not for racial or class reasons, but because of the violent behavior and social problems of their users. Schneiderman’s efforts to decriminalize street drugs did nothing to help minority communities dealing with violent crime and serious social problems caused by drug use and drug trafficking. Dragging wealthy white people into court may make Sharpton’s Attorney General feel smug, but does not accomplish anything either.

I-STOP is part of a wave of racially redistributive measures whose goals go beyond equal access to the justice system and attempt to artificially achieve equal outcomes. Schneiderman’s efforts to shift drug abuse and drug dealing prosecutions from the ghetto to the medical office are an example of how the left uses crime statistics to artificially racially balance outcomes by cracking down on types of offenses based on the racial group statistically likeliest to be guilty of that offense.

This type of tinkering with the gears of the machine produces equal outcomes only by completely destroying the purpose and functionality of the justice system, turning it into a mechanism for imprisoning an equal number of black and white people in order to meet an ideological quota.

These efforts go beyond attempts at erasing disparities in stops, arrests, prosecutions, convictions and sentencings; instead recognizing that the only way to truly achieve equal outcomes is by rigging the game from the start. And beyond the inherent racism of a quota system for crime, the disruptive effects of a racial quota justice system will be far more devastating than even the lenient justice system of the seventies.

For example, while white people were more likely to be arrested as drug users (though not when accounting for the relative percentages of both groups in the population) the number of white and black drug dealers was nearly the same. Considering the dramatic difference in population sizes, the statistics showed that a far higher percentage of the black population is arrested for dealing drugs. If the racially redistributive solution is applied to this disparity, that would lead to drug users receiving heavier punishments than drug dealers to balance out the racial justice scales and achieve equal outcomes.

The traditional racially redistributive justice methodology focused on reducing enforcement, the new approach is not satisfied with decriminalization, but works toward the criminalization of white people. One example of this is the shift from a law enforcement focus on crack cocaine to methamphetamines which has resulted in a 21 percent drop in the number of black people convicted of drug offenses and a 42 percent increase in the number of white people convicted of drug offenses.

The hype over meth being the country’s single largest drug problems has been dealt with elsewhere, but what has not been addressed is the racial motive in promoting a shift from heroin and cocaine dealers and users to meth users and dealers as the leading causes of the country’s social and criminal problems. Part of that shift has been a conscious effort to reinvent drug use as a “hillbilly” or “redneck” social problem backed up by television shows and misleading statistics.

The actual number of meth users remains far lower than the number of cocaine and heroin users, but the war on meth has led right back to a war on prescription and even non-prescription medications.

As a Senator, Obama was one of the sponsors of the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act. That name may not ring a bell, but it’s how cold and allergy medicines became criminalized, why you need photo identification to buy them and why buying more than a 30 day supply can bring a SWAT team to your door if you show up on the cold medicine registry.

A year after the Combat Methamphetamine Epidemic Act was passed; Tim Naveau was arrested in Illinois for buying the Claritin-D tablets that his son needed to take along with him to church camp. The arrest and humiliation of a man for buying slightly more allergy medication than the legal limit was another victory for the new racially redistributive war on drugs.

Racially redistributive justice efforts were unable to change the realities of drug use, so they refocused the drug war away from the crack den and aimed it at the local pharmacy. And the story doesn’t end there. Similar racial statistics are behind the law enforcement shift from stranger rape to date rape and from gangs to white collar crime. Offense categories where minorities score highest are being deemphasized in place of those where they score lower. The quotas for the justice system are being met at the cost of public safety and justice.

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