In 2007, only 4% of arrests were for violent crimes; another 12% were for crimes like burglary, theft, and arson; drug offenses (including drunkenness and DUIs) accounted for 31% of arrests. Low income neighborhoods are devastated by the transfer (to put it nicely) of huge numbers of adult males to jails and prisons. Those men are not overwhelmingly committing violent crimes (as stereotype suggest), but are imprisoned because of the intensive policing of drug crimes in those neighborhoods. In another post, we put up a table that showed how the “drug war” that started in the 1980s disproportionately affected blacks.
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