Anyone who has kept tabs on Wisconsin government recently would most likely conclude the state Capitol, state and local police and even the court system must be chock-full of racists. After all, according to dual reports written by Human Rights Watch and The Sentencing Project published by the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel Monday, blacks are 42 times more likely to be sent to prison for a drug offense than their white counterparts, making Wisconsin’s drug sentencing disparity the highest in the nation. The painful saga continues: According to the reports, blacks in Milwaukee are seven times more likely to be arrested for drug-related crimes, despite the fact that blacks and whites use the same amounts of drugs.

My colleague Ms. Shah would like you to believe that this is the figurative smoking gun, and that racism, despite the best efforts of Martin Luther King Jr. and his modern successors, is a beast that is alive and well.

To be fair, racism in Wisconsin’s justice system most certainly exists among a number of egregious criminals hiding behind a badge. But to expound on the cruelties of a few to argue that the justice system of an entire state is racist is nothing more than an abominable fashion statement, made solely for the benefit of angry constituencies.

Most poignant of all, however, is the manner in which being labeled some form of a subliminal racist has put a cultural taboo on the concept of further inquiry.

With that in mind, here it goes.

If one looks toward the argument that the law itself is racist, comparative analysis of the sentences meted out for methamphetamine and crack cocaine shows that the laws against crack cocaine are as racist against blacks as those for methamphetamine are against whites and Hispanics. And, at the federal level, during the brutal urban scourge of the 1980s for which crack was largely responsible, it was black U.S. congressmen calling for harsh sentences. Alton Waldon, a congressman from Queens at the time, declared, “For those of us who are black, this self-inflicted pain is the worst oppression we have known since slavery. … Let us … pledge to crack down on crack.”

Another troubling problem with the narrative of a racist justice system is the fact that, to some extent, police do simply what society tells them to do. The reports cited in the Journal Sentinel mention some possible justifications for the prison disparity. One of them is the fact that violence in inner-city neighborhoods where crack is sold is significantly more of a problem than the upper-class suburbs and rural areas, populated primarily by whites and hospitable to powder cocaine, marijuana and methamphetamine.

Because police tend to devote their limited resources toward areas where violence is the biggest problem and away from areas in which victimless crime predominates — which they should — the disparity is an inevitability as opposed to a consciously racist plot.

It also makes empirical sense that majority black inner-city communities should be better protected — yes, I said protected — by police than the white-bred suburbs where drug violence is comparatively negligible.

This is the gaping hole in the fantasy of Wisconsin’s supposedly racist justice system: If a drug as devastating as crack cocaine is going to be illegal, it had better be pretty damned illegal.

The prevailing theory goes something like this: Drug is bad. Make drug illegal. For some darned incomprehensible reason, people start killing each other once drug is made illegal because they have no means of recourse in legal system. Enforce said drug law as harshly as possible so that socially optimal amount of death can occur as result of aforementioned drug law.

But there is an alternative, and it does not lie in ineffectually fiddling around with the number of years for which society decides to imprison its criminals.

This alternative lies in the vision of a time when, instead of shooting my drug dealer from the window of a car with the Tech 9 (which I, as a skinny white suburbanite who enjoys tennis, will never own), I can take him to court.

Better yet, there may come a time when the drug dealers of tomorrow can operate from behind the glass windows of a pharmacy, instead of the corner of University and Park streets near the front entrance of Chadbourne between five and seven p.m. on Fridays and Saturdays. Look for the skinny white kid holding a tennis racquet and twiddling self-consciously with the collar of his golf shirt. Cash only.

Sam Clegg ([email protected]) is a freshman majoring in economics and political science.