Fourth Amendment law makes wealthier suspects better off than they otherwise would be, and may make poorer suspects worse off. And Fourth Amendment law heightens the tendency of the police to target the kinds of drug markets that prevail in poor black neighborhoods. Privacy, in Fourth Amendment terms, is something that exists only in certain types of spaces; not surprisingly, the law protects it only where it exists. And the kinds of crimes wealthier people tend to commit require greater invasions of privacy by the police to catch perpetrators. By raising the cost of the tactics that most intrude on privacy, Fourth Amendment law lowers the cost of other tactics, and those are the tactics that are most useful in uncovering the crimes of the poor. These tendencies operate at the margin; their precise effects are unknown, and probably unknowable. Still, it is plausible to be lieve that Fourth Amendment law has contributed to the creation of a prison population increasingly dominated by blacks punished for crack offenses.
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