The Cleveland Plain Dealer looked at hundreds of drug cases there to determine whether white defendants are treated differently than blacks. Guess what they found: If you’re white, it’s all right. Indeed, the PD found that since 2000, a black person in Cleveland’s Cuyahoga Co. is 12.7 times more likely than a white person to be sent to state prison on drug charges.
The paper focused on drugs cases, “which not only dominate local court dockets but also are characterized far more than most violent or property crimes by judgment calls and policy decisions at virtually every level of the system.”
Read the Plain Dealer‘s story here.
Kind of reminds me of a similar project we undertook in 2004, looking at the way black defendants fared in drug cases in Williamson Co. You can read that story here.
This article appears in October 17 • 2008.