Throughout American history, few other identity groups have been regulated to second class citizenship more than African Americans. Often, the Hegemonic society of “White America” has oppressed the African American community through overt public policies such as Jim Crow and Segregation. One fairly recent public policy that has inflicted further damage to the black community is the disastrous war on drugs. A historical analysis of the war on drugs shows that it has consistently targeted the African American community, as well as other identity groups and is very little more than a system of subordination used to subject these groups to crippling institutional disadvantages through disproportionate levels of negative interaction with law enforcement,
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The federal and state governments began to regulate and prohibit certain forms of drug use in the early 1900s. The nonmedical use of opiates (mostly morphine and heroin) and cocaine was prohibited in 1914 at the federal level, and by the 1930s marijuana use was prohibited as well. (Nicholas & Churchill 2012) In 1951, the U.S. Congress established harsh mandatory minimum sentences for distribution and possession of marijuana and heroin in the Boggs Act, which mandated 2 to 5-year prison terms for first time drug offenders. This presupposed that cannabis and heroin were equivalent in the harms done by each to the consumer, an idea that has since been all but discredited. After the failed experiment of Prohibition, Harry J. Anslinger proposed a new Bureau of Narcotics, which has led to the eventual establishment of the modern Drug Enforcement Agency of today, that was to be used to combat the use of certain narcotics. From its inception, it was apparent that the focus of this new agency was not so much on the supposed harms of narcotics use, especially cannabis, but on the racial groups associated with said usage. Through the use of widely circulated “infotainment” novels, the idea was pushed that innocent (white) teenagers were corrupted and ruined by the outside influence of urban (usually black) drug pushers. Furthermore, the obvious inequality was apparent in the disparity in the way users were …show more content…
Under the guise of the war on drugs, a new system of mass incarceration has led to what is widely called the “carceral state”. Statistics show that African American men are more than 5 times more likely to be incarcerated in state prisons than their white counterparts, with that number jumping to a staggering 10 times in some states These numbers show an aggregate incarceration rate of 1,408 African American men per 100,000 citizens in the United States, a country the calls itself the “land of the free”. (Nellis 2016) This system is reinforced at all levels of the criminal justice system, with African Americans facing higher arrest rates, higher conviction levels, and much harsher sentencing than their white counterparts. This reality has arisen from supposed public safety programs such as the “Stop and Frisk” policy of New York. This policy allowed a much lower threshold of probable cause in order for police to screen random citizens by conducting body pat downs without the requirement of a warrant. While the policy itself was written to be race neutral, in practice the overwhelming majority of people subjected to these constitutionally questionable searches were African American. In the Reagan administration of the early 1980’s, there was an explosion in the incarceration rates because of the crack cocaine epidemic. Michelle Alexanders book The New Jim crow illustrates the
The federal and state governments began to regulate and prohibit certain forms of drug use in the early 1900s. The nonmedical use of opiates (mostly morphine and heroin) and cocaine was prohibited in 1914 at the federal level, and by the 1930s marijuana use was prohibited as well. (Nicholas & Churchill 2012) In 1951, the U.S. Congress established harsh mandatory minimum sentences for distribution and possession of marijuana and heroin in the Boggs Act, which mandated 2 to 5-year prison terms for first time drug offenders. This presupposed that cannabis and heroin were equivalent in the harms done by each to the consumer, an idea that has since been all but discredited. After the failed experiment of Prohibition, Harry J. Anslinger proposed a new Bureau of Narcotics, which has led to the eventual establishment of the modern Drug Enforcement Agency of today, that was to be used to combat the use of certain narcotics. From its inception, it was apparent that the focus of this new agency was not so much on the supposed harms of narcotics use, especially cannabis, but on the racial groups associated with said usage. Through the use of widely circulated “infotainment” novels, the idea was pushed that innocent (white) teenagers were corrupted and ruined by the outside influence of urban (usually black) drug pushers. Furthermore, the obvious inequality was apparent in the disparity in the way users were …show more content…
Under the guise of the war on drugs, a new system of mass incarceration has led to what is widely called the “carceral state”. Statistics show that African American men are more than 5 times more likely to be incarcerated in state prisons than their white counterparts, with that number jumping to a staggering 10 times in some states These numbers show an aggregate incarceration rate of 1,408 African American men per 100,000 citizens in the United States, a country the calls itself the “land of the free”. (Nellis 2016) This system is reinforced at all levels of the criminal justice system, with African Americans facing higher arrest rates, higher conviction levels, and much harsher sentencing than their white counterparts. This reality has arisen from supposed public safety programs such as the “Stop and Frisk” policy of New York. This policy allowed a much lower threshold of probable cause in order for police to screen random citizens by conducting body pat downs without the requirement of a warrant. While the policy itself was written to be race neutral, in practice the overwhelming majority of people subjected to these constitutionally questionable searches were African American. In the Reagan administration of the early 1980’s, there was an explosion in the incarceration rates because of the crack cocaine epidemic. Michelle Alexanders book The New Jim crow illustrates the