Study ranks our county fifth for U.S. pot arrests
By Bobby Bryant
Editor
Did you hear that Darlington County is No. 5 in the nation in its rate of arrests for marijuana possession? A study says so. But there’s more to the story. The issue began buzzing last week, when Florence TV station WBTW did a long story on marijuana arrests in the United States and in South Carolina. A key part of the story was a study by the American Civil Liberties Union examining which U.S. counties have the highest rates of arrest for possessing pot. The ACLU argues that by making marijuana possession a crime, state governments unfairly and needlessly pull thousands of people into the criminal-justice system – most of them young people – and brand them with a criminal record that makes it much tougher to get jobs. The ACLU’s report found that four of the Top 10 counties in the nation for rates of arrest for marijuana possession (per 100,000 people) were in South Carolina. Chester County was No. 1, Newberry County No. 3, Darlington County No. 5 and Marion County No. 7. However, the ACLU report is nearly a year old – it was released in April 2020 – and that section of the report uses 3-year-old data, from 2018. Some law-enforcement leadership in Darlington County has changed hands since then; in 2018, the county sheriff was Tony Chavis; the new sheriff, James Hudson, took office at the beginning of this year. No arrests made under his administration are reflected in the ACLU report. (WBTW did note the dates of the report and the data, but it’s easy for such fine points to be missed.) Hudson said he finds the ACLU’s report less than compelling. The sheriff says he doesn’t buy it. “I would find that inaccurate information,” the sheriff said. “I don’t know where they’re getting that information.”
