by Glenn C. Loury

About the author: Glenn C. Loury is a professor of economics and the director of the Institute on Race and Social Division at Boston University.

As everyone knows, America’s eternal war on drugs has inflicted collateral damage of immense proportions on black males. Over the last decade, the prison population has exploded with mostly young, non-white, inner-city males caught in the drug trade. In 1992 alone, two-thirds of those admitted to state prisons for drug offenses were black. And the number of black males held in prisons, as a proportion of the adult population, nearly doubled from 3.5 percent in 1985 to 6.7 percent in 1994. (The corresponding number for whites in 1994 was only 0.9 percent.)

Predictably, some academics and civil rights advocates have decried this trend. In his book Malign Neglect: Race, Crime...