Warehousing Minority Males

There are currently 500,000 nonviolent drug offenders wasting away in our prisons and jails. Most share two characteristics--they are black or Latino, and they are male.

Judge Jim Gray, Libertarian Party candidate for US Senate in California, and David Borden, Executive Director of the Drug Reform Coordination Network, are two of America's leading opponents of the misguided and damaging "War on Drugs."

Gray, a former prosecutor who once held the record for the largest drug prosecution in the Los Angeles area, says the "War on Drugs...has not done any good" and that drug money has "turned a disease into a plague."

Borden believes that "mandatory minimum sentences and inflexible sentencing guidelines condemn numerous low-level offenders to years or decades behind bars, often based solely on the word of compensated, confidential informants" and that "prohibition creates a lucrative black market that soaks our inner cities in violence and disorder, and lures young people into lives of crime."

Gray, the author of Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed And What We Can Do About It, and Borden joined Glenn on His Side with Glenn Sacks on Sunday, March 14 to discuss the harm the War on Drugs has wrought both on minority men and on society as a whole. To listen to the archive of the show, click here and scroll down to "Listen to the Show."

To learn more about the harm caused by the drug war, go to StoptheDrugWar.org and also see David Borden's "Open Letter to DC Chief Judge Rufus G. King III," "The 2005 Federal Anti-Drug Budget: More of the Same, and Some Hidden Costs" and "What's the Real Reason?"

Also, see Jim Gray's book Why Our Drug Laws Have Failed And What We Can Do About It and his article This Time It Matters (Liberty Magazine, 5/1/03).