>>> in California, a black person is 10 times more likely to serve prison time for a marijuana arrest than a non-black offender. And across the US, black offenders are 3.7 times more likely than white offenders to be arrested for possession.
While these numbers are prtty shocking, when you look at WHY this is happening, it's pretty obvious why the numbers are so skewed.
Generally speaking cops tend to focus on high crime areas, which tend to be where low income, minority residents live. As such, the odds you're going to stop someone who's black and poor who just happens to have some weed on them grows exponentially.
Add in other issues like COMSTAT tracking and making police departments more accountable for their the cost of their resources to tax payers. They also have to prove they are indeed lowering crime means they're almost forced to arrest and convict low level offenders to prove they're doing their jobs. This then makes departments institute arrest quotas, and questionable tactics like stop-and-frisk.
The last point is also the federal government and their grants they give to high performing departments. If you're department is on the dole for federal money, you think they're going to do anything which would jeopardize that? The very nature of taking federal money makes them do anything to make it look like the tax payers money is doing some good.
All of these make the low-income minorities very susceptible to being arrested and then convicted by a system which is very much stacked against them.