by Hugh B. Price

About the author: Hugh B. Price is president of the National Urban League, a community service agency that aims to eliminate institutional racism in the United States.

Civil rights leaders like Jesse Jackson, political officeholders, and many others throughout black America have said for years that Jim Crow is alive and well in America’s criminal justice system.

They’ve criticized the harsher sentences imposed on African-Americans arrested for possession of crack cocaine, compared with those imposed on whites arrested for possession of powdered cocaine. They’ve questioned the disproportionate number of African-Americans on the death rows of the nation’s prisons.

Now, a new study sponsored by the Department of Justice and six national foundations adds startling new information to the growing evidence that racism...