The war on drugs has been wreaking havoc on communities of color for decades, but a new federal study reveals how America’s drug laws — and the more recent crackdown on immigration — are still disproportionately affecting young blacks and Latinos.The study, conducted by the U.S. Sentencing Commission and viewable in its entirety below, focuses on “youthful offenders,” defined as being age 25 or younger, in the federal justice system. There were more than 18,000 such offenders between 2010 to 2015, accounting for about 18 percent of the total number of people who faced federal prosecution.The numbers in the report are sobering.
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- 92 percent of the offenses committed by youthful offenders were nonviolent
- 43 percent involved individuals with no criminal history
- The most common charges were for drugs — and nearly 40 percent of those prosecutions were related to marijuana
- More than 57 percent of the youthful offenders were Hispanic; 21 percent were black.