Profiling, or determining a set of characteristics a group of criminals are likely to share, has been justified by police forces as a way to fight the war on drugs. However, all too often the profiles are not terribly accurate and applied unfairly to one group over another. A detailed study in New Jersey done in 2001 showed that state troopers were pulling over more Blacks than whites or Hispanics, and then asking the driver to let them do a "consent" search of the car. Statistics on this practice showed that 81% of the cars pulled over were driven by blacks or

Possession of drugs is one of the most common reasons for a person to be sent to jail because of the war on drugs. North Carolina, for instance has found that although its black population has remained stable for the last 35 years, today there are three times as many blacks in jail as there were 35 years ago. The reasons are not entirely clear, but racial profiling is one reason believed to contribute to those numbers (Muschick, 2001).

Hispanics, even though the state police knew that whites were statistically more likely to be transporting drugs. In fact in this study, 25% of whites had drugs in the car while only 13% of blacks and 5% of Hispanics did (Snow, 2001).

Any time a person is jailed, it immediately causes financial hardship for that person and family, particularly if the person was the breadwinner of the family. Once that person is released, it is much harder to get a good-paying job because of the criminal record (Muschick, 2001). It leads to a vicious cycle of poverty. Unfortunately, one way to earn mor

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