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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsWhy the Drug War Has Been a Forty-Year Lynching
http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/33251-why-the-drug-war-has-been-a-forty-year-lynchingFurther federal uniform crime report statistics compiled by www.freepress.org indicate that, between 2008 and 2014, another 9,166,000 were arrested for drug possession.
Taken together, than means well over 40,000,000 American citizens have been arrested for drugs in the four decades since Nixons announcement.
It is a staggering number: more than 10% of the entire United States, nearly four times the current population of Ohio, far in excess of more than 100 countries worldwide.
A number that has gutted the African-American community. A national terror campaign far beyond the reach of even the old KKK.
Justice Department statistics indicate than half of those arrests have been for simple possession of marijuana.
According to US Bureau of Justice statistics, between 1980 and 2013, while blacks were 12% of the population, blacks constituted 30% of those arrested for drug law violations and nearly 40% of those incarcerated in all U.S. prisons. Thus some 20,000,000 African-American men have been sent to prison for non-violent crimes in the past forty years.
If the Hispanic population is added in, as much as 60% of drug arrests are of racial or ethnic minorities.
On the 40th anniversary of the Drug War in 2010, the Associated Press used public records to calculate that the taxpayer cost of arresting and imprisoning all these human beings has been in excess of $1,000,000,000.
Sending them all to college would have been far cheaper. It also would have allowed them to enhance and transform their communities.
Instead, they were taken from their families. Their children were robbed of their parents. They were assaulted by the prison culture, stripped of their right to vote and stopped from leading the kind of lives that might have moved the nation in a very different direction.
msongs
(67,421 posts)eridani
(51,907 posts)erronis
(15,306 posts)That, for the most part have no skills. And at worst have a criminal record which will prevent them from ever landing a job.
And into a market that can't even hire college graduates. And if they do, pay a sub-living wage.
Right. So part of the plan to incarcerate a huge segment of the population (and mainly non-white) was to get them off the streets, behind bars, and having their care and institutionalization paid for by the stupid taxpayer. And the CCA/EON/etc. corps would reap the benefits.
So how does freeing prisoners, closing facilities (which hire otherwise unemployable "correction" officers) - how is that going to help the Makers - the Mitt RMoney types? If there's no Money in it, they won't go along.
truedelphi
(32,324 posts)All love the drug wars.
And recently, Obama's DEA has flaunted Congressional Act HR 538 - which prohibits any hassling, persecuting, or prosecuting any individuals in any state where the medicinal drug laws apply.
So despite the DOJ lying through their teeth to Federal District Court Judge Breyer that 538 doesn't apply to them, Breyer handed them their ass in a truss.
questionseverything
(9,656 posts)she will not even support medical mj not alone for rec use
truedelphi
(32,324 posts)She must absolutely walk the walk that they tell her to walk. (Though she is allowed to tell the voters any lies they will believe, in order to get elected.)
questionseverything
(9,656 posts)part the for profit prison gravy train
part is just the control the ptb have with something commonly used being made illegal
Admiral Loinpresser
(3,859 posts)Fumesucker
(45,851 posts)malaise
(269,087 posts)Thanks for this - rec
Cal33
(7,018 posts)nothing, outside of board and lodging of the worst type.
NonMetro
(631 posts)The war on drugs costs about $40 billion per year in combined state and federal spending.
http://www.drugsense.org/cms/wodclock
Akamai
(1,779 posts)"Anybody who thinks this is the wrong fight for the NAACP should take a peek at this note from the diary of H.R. Haldeman, President Nixon's chief of staff, referring to the launch of the war on drugs 40 years ago.
""[President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the blacks," Haldeman wrote. "The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to."
"That system turned out to be the War on Drugs, with marijuana being put in the same category as such drugs as heroin and morphine. Nixon's White House counsel, John Ehrlichman, verified the intention of the War on Drugs in a 1995 interview with author Dan Baum, author of Smoke and Mirrors: The war on drugs and the politics of failure.
""Look, we understood we couldn't make it illegal to be young or poor or black in the United States, but we could criminalize their common pleasure," Ehrlichman confessed. "We understood that drugs were not the health problem we were making them out to be, but it was such a perfect issue for the Nixon White House that we couldn't resist it.""
from: http://www.metrotimes.com/detroit/joining-the-fight/Content?oid=2148184
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How odious! Well, yes -- after all, he was a Republican president.
AZ Progressive
(3,411 posts)to them?
What fuckin evil assholes these Republicans are!
RadiationTherapy
(5,818 posts)or you can sell drugs. Shitty, soul-eating jobs will be all you qualify for. You will be treated like shit because they know your options are extremely compromised. It will suck and grind you down so far that you may wonder if prison was better.
spanone
(135,851 posts)Octafish
(55,745 posts)By Michelle Alexander
EXCERPT...
The uncomfortable truth, however, is that crime rates do not explain the sudden and dramatic mass incarceration of African Americans during the past 30 years. Crime rates have fluctuated over the last few decadesthey are currently at historical lowsbut imprisonment rates have consistently soared. Quintupled, in fact. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs. Drug offenses alone account for about two-thirds of the increase in the federal inmate population and more than half of the increase in the state prison population.
The drug war has been brutalcomplete with SWAT teams, tanks, bazookas, grenade launchers, and sweeps of entire neighborhoodsbut those who live in white communities have little clue to the devastation wrought. This war has been waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth. Any notion that drug use among African Americans is more severe or dangerous is belied by the data. White youth, for example, have about three times the number of drug-related visits to the emergency room as their African American counterparts.
That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nations prisons and jails, overflowing as they are with black and brown drug offenders. In some states, African Americans comprise 80 to 90 percent of all drug offenders sent to prison.
This is the point at which I am typically interrupted and reminded that black men have higher rates of violent crime. Thats why the drug war is waged in poor communities of color and not middle class suburbs. Drug warriors are trying to get rid of those drug kingpins and violent offenders who make ghetto communities a living hell. It has nothing to do with race; its all about violent crime.
Again, not so. President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by desegregation, busing, and affirmative action. In the words of H.R. Haldeman, President Richard Nixons White House Chief of Staff: (T)he whole problem is really the blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.
A few years after the drug war was announced, crack cocaine hit the streets of inner-city communities. The Reagan administration seized on this development with glee, hiring staff who were to be responsible for publicizing inner-city crack babies, crack mothers, crack whores, and drug-related violence. The goal was to make inner-city crack abuse and violence a media sensation, bolstering public support for the drug war which, it was hoped, would lead Congress to devote millions of dollars in additional funding to it.
The plan worked like a charm. For more than a decade, black drug dealers and users would be regulars in newspaper stories and would saturate the evening TV news. Congress and state legislatures nationwide would devote billions of dollars to the drug war and pass harsh mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimessentences longer than murderers receive in many countries.
CONTINUED...
http://reimaginerpe.org/20years/alexander
PS: Thank you for keeping up the good fight, eridani! The bastards are on the run. May their long travails end in prison where they belong.