"Law enforcement not only disproportionately targeted cities in its new war on drugs but it also particularly policed the communities of color within them; this, despite exten-sive and readily available data that these areas were not where most drug trafficking andusage took place. As studies done by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the Na-tional Household Survey on Drug Abuse noted in 2000, not only did “white students use cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students,” but whites between the ages of twelve and seventeen were also “more than a third more likely to havesold illegal drugs than African American youth.”15 In the 1980s alone, however, African Americans’ “share” of drug crimes jumped from 26.9 percent to 46.0 percent, and arrest-ed black juveniles “were 37 percent more likely to be transferred to adult courts, where they faced tougher sanctions.” If convicted, African Americans of every age “were more likely than whites to be committed to prison instead of jail, and they were more likely to receive longer sentences."

Why Mass Incarceration Matters: Rethinking Crisis, Decline, and Transformation in Postwar American History by Heather Ann Thompson