Paper Info
Title
Racial Disparities in the Enforcement of Marijuana Violations in the US.
Abstract
Racial disparities in US drug arrest rates have been observed for decades, but their causes and policy implications are still highly contested. Some scholars have argued that these disparities largely reflect differences in drug use between racial groups, while others have hypothesized that discriminatory enforcement policies and police practices may play a significant role. We analyze racial disparities in the enforcement of marijuana violations in the US. Using data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) and the National Survey on Drug Use and Health (NSDUH) programs, we investigate whether marijuana usage and purchasing behaviors can explain the racial disparities. We examine potential driving mechanisms for these disparities and the extent to which county-level socioeconomic factors correlate with county-level disparity. We find that the significant racial disparities in reported incidents and arrests cannot be explained by differences in marijuana days-of-use alone. Differences in frequency and the location of buying marijuana partially explain the observed disparities. We observe an increase in racial disparities across most counties over the last decade, with the greatest increases in states that legalized the use of marijuana within this timeframe. Income, high school graduation rate, and rate of employment positively correlate with higher racial disparity, while the rate of incarceration is negatively correlated. We discuss the implications of the observed racial disparities in the context of algorithmic fairness.
Year
DOI
Venue
2022
10.1145/3514094.3534184
AAAI/ACM Conference on AI, Ethics, and Society (AIES)
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
0
6
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bradley Butcher100.34
Chris Robinson200.34
Miri Zilka301.35
Riccardo Fogliato400.34
Carolyn Ashurst501.01
Adrian Weller614127.59