Our nation keeps setting records — but not the type of records to make us proud. These are records of national shame.

For the first time in our history, the estimated number of arrests for drug possession surpassed one million in 1994, according to the FBI annual crime report.

Most such arrests waste time and money — and divert police from dealing with serious crimes. If there is any place to compromise in the drug war, it is to eliminate most of these million arrests and, at the very least, stop wasting prison and jail cells on nonviolent drug users.

Other shameful records: The U.S. Justice Departmentjust reported that, for the year ending June 30, 1995, there was a record increase — 89,707 — in the number of state and federal prison inmates. And, for the first time, the number of state prison inmates went over one million — 1,004,608. Add 99,466 federal inmates to that and the total number of prisoners was 1,104,074. The U.S. incarceration rate of 565 per 100,000 population is the 'highest in the world, at least among those nations keeping accurate records. Yes, we're number one.

The number of black inmates in both prisons and jails (which held an additional 483,717 inmates either awaiting sentencing or serving short sentences) has grown faster than the number of whites. As a result, 6.8 percent of all black male adults are behind bars, compared with less than one percent of white male adults. Just think: One in every 15 black males is incarcerated!

An even more disturbing record: Though blacks as a whole are only 12 percent of the overall U.S. population, for the first time, at the end of 1994 there were more black adult males behind bars than whites: 683,200 blacks compared with 674,400 whites. As Marc Mauer reports in this edition (see pages 11-13), the war on drugs is the chief architect of these records.

I am not one of those critics who put the whole burden for these doleful records on government policies. I place a good deal of the blame on the individuals — black, white, brown or polka dot —who decided to break the law and place themselves at risk of arrest. However, there is no doubt that government policies create the conditions and incentives that entice ordinary people into committing crimes. The drug war makes some chemicals more valuable than gold. Without overlooking the individual criminal's role, I hold the government primarily responsible for clinging to its war on drugs with little regard for the destructive fallout from that war.

It seems to me that this is what the Million Man March — which set its own record — was saying on October 16: Both individual behavior and governmentpolicies must be changed. Nowhere is the need for reform more urgent for the African-American community than in the field of injection-related spread of HIV. On top of all that I have already mentioned, the disproportionate number of African-Americans afflicted with AIDS is chilling, as Dawn Day documents in her latest report (see pages 4, 8). Higher rates of drug enforcement in the black community are one key to the higher AIDS rates there.

The multiple layers of discrimination, disparity and destructiveness evident in these records cannot be tolerated much longer by a civilized society. How much time is left for America?