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On Sunday, the Washington Post featured an essay by two experts, Marc Mauer, executive director of The Sentencing Project, and David Cole, a Georgetown law professor, who in "Five Myths about Americans in Prison" examined the role of race in incarceration.

These men show that not only are people of color stopped more frequently by police, their communities, particularly with anti-drug efforts, receive far more attention from police. And black men are often charged and prosecuted differently than their White counterparts.

Mauer and Cole attempt to dispel the myth that there is a disproportionate number of Black people in prison because Black people commit more crimes.

They point out that although Whites and African Americans use and sell drugs at about the same rates, Black men in 2003 were almost 12 times as likely to go to prison as White men. Although Black people are 12 percent of the population and 14 percent of drug users, according to Mauer and Cole, they comprise 34 percent of those arrested for drug offenses and 45 percent of those incarcerated in state prisons for such offenses.

Both men attribute disparities in incarceration rates in part to the way urban Black communities are policed.

"Police find drugs where they look for them," they wrote. "Inner-city, open-air drug markets are easier to bust than those that operate out of suburban basements. And numerous studies show that minorities are stopped by police more often than Whites."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/keith-r...10.html

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Two black males wearing ski masks reportedly robbed the Mileage gas station on Front Street in Albert Lea Friday night before assaulting one of the workers and then leaving the store.