Almost 30 years ago, Richard Nixon’s domestic policy advisor revealed that the “War on Drugs” began as a racially-motivated campaign to criminalize African Americans.
Today, around 50 percent of inmates at the Harris County Jail are Black.
Newly-elected district attorney Sean Teare, sworn into office on Jan. 4, aims to mitigate this disparity by creating diversion programs for juvenile first-time offenders. Teare, whose own mother struggled with a heroin addiction, championed these programs at the Houston Chronicle’s virtual Zoom webinar on Jan. 17.
“If you give someone a felony conviction for one bag of coke [cocaine] at 17, you’ve basically thrown their life away,” Teare said. “There’s no chance that they go to any continuing education in college of any kind. They can’t get an apartment. They’re not going to get a decent job. We can protect the community and not create the next generation by saddling young and first-time offenders with criminal convictions.”
Despite drug use being approximately the same between the two groups, research shows that African Americans are arrested more frequently and punished more severely than white people for drug crimes.
“I think the death penalty should be reserved for the worst of the worst,” Teare said. “If we can get people off of that path early and in a meaningful way and set them up for success, we have reduced the number of people that we should be scared of out there.”
Teare noted the drug offense diversion programs across the U.S. that he plans to model while in office. He claimed that instituting these programs would also aid in the court backlog.
“Our jail is so full because it’s taking three to six years to try our cases–we’ve got to cut down on that,” Teare said. “When we do that, then you start to end the humanitarian crisis that’s going on in the Harris County Jail right now. You start to see victims receive the justice that they want in a very timely, meaningful way.”
Teare says he hopes to start implementing these changes by mid-February. To learn more about Teare and his agenda as district attorney, visit seanteareforda.com.
