Last year, the California taskforce on reparations came out with this final report, including calculations for a variety of injustices done to Black Americans throughout the course of history. The taskforce made “an economically conservative initial assessment of what losses, at a minimum, the State of California caused or could have prevented, but did not.” Below is the taskforce’s assessment just for mass incarceration and over-policing. They also assessed for housing discrimination, unjust property takings and devaluation of African-American businesses. They also added that their list was not exhaustive and that the delay of reparations is in itself an injustice that causes more suffering.

The “War on Drugs” began in 1971. Established research shows that although people of all races use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates, the federal and state governments disproportionately target African Americans for drug-related arrests. To measure racial mass incarceration disparities in the 49 years of the War on Drugs from 1971 to 2020, the Task Force’s experts estimated the disproportionate years spent behind bars for African American compared to white non-Hispanic drug offenders, and multiplied them with what a California state employee would have earned in a year on aver age (since incarcerated persons were forced, unpaid “employees” of the state). The Task Force’s experts then added compensation for loss of freedom, comparable to Japanese American World War II prisoners, and arrive at $159,792 per year of disproportionate incarceration in 2020 dollars. 

1. The Task Force’s experts used total California arrest figures for felony drug offenses and African American drug felony arrests from 1971 to 2020, to compute the African American percentage. 

2. The Task Force’s experts then computed the difference between the percentage of African American drug felony arrests and the estimated African American population percentage for each year. The difference between the two provides an estimate of the percent age of excess African American felony drug arrests. 

3. The Task Force’s experts obtained the number of African American excess felony drug arrests by multiplying the percentage of excess African American felony drug arrests times the total number of felony drug arrests. 

4. The Task Force’s experts then multiplied African American excess felony drug arrests by the average drug possession-related prison term of 1.48 years and the annual reparations amount of $20,000, and add the annual amounts up over the entire time period from 1971 to 2020, to arrive at a total sum of $227,858,891,023 in 2020 dollars. 

5. Disproportionate law enforcement reduced the quality of life for all African American Californian descendants who lived in California during the “War on Drugs.” The Task Force’s experts therefore divided the total sum by the estimated 1,976,911 African American California residents who lived in the state in 2020, for an amount per recipient of $115,260 in 2020 dollars, or $2,352 for each year of residency in California from 1971 to 2020. The Task Force also recommends that African American California residents who served time for the possession or distribution of substances now legal (e.g., cannabis) should additionally be entitled to sue for compensation for their time in prison, or that the State of California create a special compensation fund to allow for specific redress of that specific harm.