Harry Levine
2008 Scholar and Advocate
From 1997 to 2006, the New York City Police Department arrested and jailed more than 360,000 people for possessing small amounts of marijuana—ten times more arrests than in the previous decade—most of them young Black and Latino men. Yet rates of marijuana use peaked in the early 1980s and have never again neared those levels, and white residents are consistently shown to have the highest rates of marijuana use. Expanding upon his previous work on the topic, Harry Levine will conduct new research on the racial bias in marijuana arrests and in other misdemeanor policing and prosecution practices. Levine is Professor of Sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York. He received his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Berkeley. Much of his research and writing has focused on drugs, alcohol, and food in social and political contexts. Among other works, he is the author of The Discovery of Addiction: Changing Conceptions of Habitual Drunkenness in America, The Secret of World Wide Drug Prohibition: The Uses of and Varieties of Drug Prohibition, and, with Craig Reinarman, Crack in America: Demon Drugs and Social Justice. He has received several awards for his work and in 2007 received the Alfred R. Lindesmith Award for Distinguished Scholarship. |
Soros Justice Fellowships
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