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Originally posted by Chollo Vista
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It's simple, The War on Drugs which was all started by Reagan.
Law enforcement not only disproportionately targeted cities in its new war on drugs
but it also particularly policed the communities of color within them; this, despite extensive
and readily available data that these areas were not where most drug trafficking and
usage took place. As studies done by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National
Household Survey on Drug Abuse noted in 2000, not only did “white students use
cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate
of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students,” but whites between the ages of twelve and seventeen were also “more than a third more likely to have
sold illegal drugs than African American youth.”
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/RACI...nses_1rate.png
Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).
Since blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites on drug charges, they are more likely to acquire the convictions that ultimately lead to higher rates of incarceration. Although the data in this backgrounder indicate that blacks represent about one-third of drug arrests, they constitute 46 percent of persons convicted of drug felonies in state courts. Among black defendants convicted of drug offenses, 71 percent received sentences to incarceration in contrast to 63 percent of convicted white drug offenders. Human Rights Watch analysis of prison admission data for 2003 revealed that relative to population, blacks are 10.1 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison for drug offenses.23" - See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Race....lFvNAqc9.dpuf
The war on drugs has vilified the black community more than ever.
The social mobility of black Americans has suffered collateral damage from the “War on Drugs.” Being convicted of a crime has devastating effects on the employment prospects and incomes of ex-felons and their children, as my Brookings colleagues and other scholars have found. These findings are often used to motivate efforts to reduce criminal behavior. They should also motivate changes in our criminal justice system, which unfairly punishes black Americans—often for victimless crimes that whites are at least as likely to commit.
Imprisoning One in Three Black Men
An estimated one-third of black male Americans will spend time in state or federal prison at some point in their lifetime – more than double the rate from the 1970s and over five times higher than the rate for white males.
What’s driving the imprisonment of black men? Arrest data show a striking trend: arrests of blacks have fallen for violent and property crimes, but soared for drug related crimes. As of 2011, drug crimes comprised 14 percent of all arrests and a miscellaneous category that includes “drug paraphernalia” possession comprised an additional 31 percent of all arrests. Just 6 percent and 14 percent of arrests were for violent and property crimes, respectively.
The black share of people arrested for drug offenses has ranged from 23 percent (in 1980) to 41 percent (in 1991). Blacks remain far more likely than whites to be arrested for selling drugs (3.6 times more likely) or possessing drugs (2.5 times more likely).
…Even Though Whites Are Equally Likely to Sell and Use Drugs
Here’s the real shock: whites are actually more likely than blacks to sell drugs and about as likely to consume them.
Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).
As for drug use, just 10 percent of blacks report using illegal drugs within the last month, which is not statistically different than the rate for whites. Among college students, 25 percent of whites reported illegal drug use within the last month but just 20 percent of black students. I find a higher percentage of whites than blacks report ever consuming illegal drugs.
Drug-Related Incarceration Damages Upward Mobility
In her new book, legal scholar Michelle Alexander offers a thorough examination of the relationship between law, policing and race. It is a complex story. But one thing is clear. The drug war has a profoundly negative effect on racial equality, and on rates of upward mobility.
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/socia...ility-rothwell
As a study of several of America’s largest cities revealed in 1996, however, a
majority of employers “would not knowingly hire an ex-offender.” Several studies indicate
that the formerly incarcerated could have their employment options reduced by as much
as 59 percent and, if hired, their annual income reduced by as much as 28 percent, and
their hourly wages reduced by as much as 19 percent
The nation’s welfare system failed
to mitigate much of this post-incarceration poverty because, after passage of the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, offenders with drugrelated
felonies were saddled with “a lifetime ban on eligibility for tanf [Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families] . . . and food stamps.” Even when the formerly incarcerated
still qualified for federal and state aid, there was increasingly less to receive over the course
of the later postwar period. Almost a decade before the Clinton administration chose to
“end welfare as we know it” in the mid-1990s, expenditures on incarceration had already
“surpassed afdc [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] by 130 percent and food
stamps by 70 percent.”25
There was clear evidence that free-world wages had been cut and jobs had been eliminated as a result of prison labor in the later postwar period as well. Free-world workers who made circuit boards at Lockhart Technologies in Austin, Texas, for example, found themselves unemployed in the mid-1990s because their company figured out that it was more cost-effective to reopen in a private prison thirty miles away. The prison had designed a facility to the company’s specifications and charged it rent of only $1.00 per year. In that same decade a major hospital in Eugene, Oregon, “canceled its contract with a unionized linen service to redirect the work to a prison laundry,” while a recycling plant in Georgia laid off its free-world employees so that it could replace “them with prison laborers from a nearby women’s prison.” Konica Corporation was also drawn to prison labor and eventually gave its copier repair jobs to workers behind bars, because it could pay them between 35 and 47 cents an hour. As the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, which represented laid-off workers whose jobs had gone to prisoners in that state, put it, “‘These aren’t phantom jobs—these are real jobs, real people.
Prison labor was attractive to American employers for more reasons than lower wages; they also did not have to deal with sick days, unemployment insurance, or workman’s compensation claims, and they had few liability worries when it came to toxins or accidents in prison workplaces. Conditions were soon so bad in some prison workplaces that the health of guards and inmates alike suffered. Indeed, when complaints finally led to an investigation of a computer recycling operation within several federal prisons, Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors found “no evidence that actions were taken to prevent exposure to lead at the outset in the chip recovery process” and further that “no medical exams (including physical examinations) are done on inmates.” That employers could dodge safety regulations in prison shops undermined the free-world working class as significantly as did wage competition. In short, because prisoners were unable to demand decent working conditions, and employers saved a substantial amount of money on health and safety protections when they hired them, workers in the free world also found it increasingly difficult to insist upon a safe workplace for fear of losing their jobs.”42
They also struck gold when it came to building and managing prisons. Indicative of how lucrative the expansion of the carceral state could be, by 2007 Colorado was paying out “almost 95 million dollars a year in taxpayer money to corporate jailers,” and one of the nation’s eighteen private-sector, for-profit, prison-building and management companies, Corrections Corporation of America, posted “revenues of over $1.4 billion” that year. Crime, and more precisely mass incarceration, also meant major profits for companies that could provide prison goods and services—items ranging from telephones to tampons and tasers
The benefits of mass incarceration were also obvious to employers who saw prison expansion as an antidote to the shrinking migrant labor pool of the later postwar period. From Maryland’s crab industry to farms in states such as Colorado, employers flocked to prisoner-workers when their access to cheap immigrant labor began to dry up. Indeed, prisons and the labor they could provide were touted as more lucrative than moving operations to maquiladoras or sweatshops. As one study for the National Institute of Justice put it, “inmates represent a readily available and dependable source of entry-level labor that is a cost-effective alternative to work forces found in Mexico, the Caribbean Basin, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Rim countries.” Such marketing did not escape the notice of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which grimly summed up the situation in 1992: “Convict labor is thus used to directly compete with organized labor and drive down wages.” Even in federal prisons where private companies were required to pay “wages at a rate which is not less than that paid for work of a similar nature in the locality,” unions quickly realized that “employers often do not comply with the prevailing wage requirement of the law.”44
While mass incarceration undercut the postwar gains of the American labor movement by dampening the wages of all free-world workers, it particularly eroded the economic standing of African Americans. Even though many thought that “the wage gap between black and white young men” had narrowed substantially over the postwar period, the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans not only hid black unemployment and thus masked real income inequality but it also ensured that such inequality would deeper over time since blacks faced a more severe “wage penalty” than whites when they were finally freed.45 Not only did black men find less work than white men when they tried to reenter the free-world labor force, but when they did secure employment their hourly wages were at least “10 percent lower after prison than before.”46 Mass incarceration also widened the income gap between white and black Americans because the infrastructure of the carceral state was located disproportionately in all-white rural communities. The Adirondack district of upstate New York only had two prisons in the early 1970s, but by the late 1990s it had eighteen correctional facilities and another under construction. Republican state senator Ronald Stafford had worked hard to secure these many new penal institutions because his district—formally a vibrant mining, logging, dairy farming, and manufacturing area—endured a per capita income “40 percent lower than the state’s average.” Seeking similar economic relief, the small midwestern town of Ionia, Michigan, eventually housed six state prisons, and the state of California, which had built only twelve prisons between 1852 and 1964, built twenty-three more after 1984.47 Whenever a prison came to a rural white community it certainly created jobs, and given that a corrections officer’s salary could be 50 percent higher than that paid to most other unskilled workers, this expansion of the carceral state had the potential to benefit key segments of America’s white working class. By 2006 the department of corrections had become California’s “largest state agency,” employing 54,000 people; across the nation as a whole, state, federal, and private penal facilities were employing more people than any Fortune 500 company. Not only did whites enjoy new employment options with the boom in prison growth but areas that received new penal facilities also reaped other less obvious benefits simply because prisoners inflated the region’s population. In 1990, when the presence of a large prison artificially boosted the census population of Coxsackie, New York, by 27.5 percent, its recorded median income dropped substantially from what it had been in the previous census year. As a result, the overwhelmingly white resident population became “eligible to receive more funding from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development,” such as that which came from Community Development Block Grants.4
Prisons not only impoverished people, leading them to commit more crimes of necessity, but they also made people more violent and antisocial. Not surprisingly then, the homicide rate jumped from 6.8 per 100,000 in 1967, when Lyndon B. Johnson was heading into his last year in office, to 10.5 per 100,000 in 1991, after more than a decade of solidly conservative rule, a thorough retreat from the liberal welfare state, and the unprecedented buildup of the carceral state. Moreover, while the violent crime rate in 1965 was 200.2 per 100,000, it grew to 556.6 in 1985 and to 684.6 in 1995
Is that enough prejudice/racist policy for you?
Law enforcement not only disproportionately targeted cities in its new war on drugs
but it also particularly policed the communities of color within them; this, despite extensive
and readily available data that these areas were not where most drug trafficking and
usage took place. As studies done by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the National
Household Survey on Drug Abuse noted in 2000, not only did “white students use
cocaine at seven times the rate of black students, use crack cocaine at eight times the rate
of black students, and use heroin at seven times the rate of black students,” but whites between the ages of twelve and seventeen were also “more than a third more likely to have
sold illegal drugs than African American youth.”
http://www.ssc.wisc.edu/~oliver/RACI...nses_1rate.png
Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).
Since blacks are more likely to be arrested than whites on drug charges, they are more likely to acquire the convictions that ultimately lead to higher rates of incarceration. Although the data in this backgrounder indicate that blacks represent about one-third of drug arrests, they constitute 46 percent of persons convicted of drug felonies in state courts. Among black defendants convicted of drug offenses, 71 percent received sentences to incarceration in contrast to 63 percent of convicted white drug offenders. Human Rights Watch analysis of prison admission data for 2003 revealed that relative to population, blacks are 10.1 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison for drug offenses.23" - See more at: http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cms/Race....lFvNAqc9.dpuf
The war on drugs has vilified the black community more than ever.
The social mobility of black Americans has suffered collateral damage from the “War on Drugs.” Being convicted of a crime has devastating effects on the employment prospects and incomes of ex-felons and their children, as my Brookings colleagues and other scholars have found. These findings are often used to motivate efforts to reduce criminal behavior. They should also motivate changes in our criminal justice system, which unfairly punishes black Americans—often for victimless crimes that whites are at least as likely to commit.
Imprisoning One in Three Black Men
An estimated one-third of black male Americans will spend time in state or federal prison at some point in their lifetime – more than double the rate from the 1970s and over five times higher than the rate for white males.
What’s driving the imprisonment of black men? Arrest data show a striking trend: arrests of blacks have fallen for violent and property crimes, but soared for drug related crimes. As of 2011, drug crimes comprised 14 percent of all arrests and a miscellaneous category that includes “drug paraphernalia” possession comprised an additional 31 percent of all arrests. Just 6 percent and 14 percent of arrests were for violent and property crimes, respectively.
The black share of people arrested for drug offenses has ranged from 23 percent (in 1980) to 41 percent (in 1991). Blacks remain far more likely than whites to be arrested for selling drugs (3.6 times more likely) or possessing drugs (2.5 times more likely).
…Even Though Whites Are Equally Likely to Sell and Use Drugs
Here’s the real shock: whites are actually more likely than blacks to sell drugs and about as likely to consume them.
Whites were about 45 percent more likely than blacks to sell drugs in 1980, according to an analysis of the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth by economist Robert Fairlie. This was consistent with a 1989 survey of youth in Boston. My own analysis of data from the 2012 National Survey on Drug Use and Health shows that 6.6 percent of white adolescents and young adults (aged 12 to 25) sold drugs, compared to just 5.0 percent of blacks (a 32 percent difference).
As for drug use, just 10 percent of blacks report using illegal drugs within the last month, which is not statistically different than the rate for whites. Among college students, 25 percent of whites reported illegal drug use within the last month but just 20 percent of black students. I find a higher percentage of whites than blacks report ever consuming illegal drugs.
Drug-Related Incarceration Damages Upward Mobility
In her new book, legal scholar Michelle Alexander offers a thorough examination of the relationship between law, policing and race. It is a complex story. But one thing is clear. The drug war has a profoundly negative effect on racial equality, and on rates of upward mobility.
http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/socia...ility-rothwell
As a study of several of America’s largest cities revealed in 1996, however, a
majority of employers “would not knowingly hire an ex-offender.” Several studies indicate
that the formerly incarcerated could have their employment options reduced by as much
as 59 percent and, if hired, their annual income reduced by as much as 28 percent, and
their hourly wages reduced by as much as 19 percent
The nation’s welfare system failed
to mitigate much of this post-incarceration poverty because, after passage of the Personal
Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996, offenders with drugrelated
felonies were saddled with “a lifetime ban on eligibility for tanf [Temporary Assistance
for Needy Families] . . . and food stamps.” Even when the formerly incarcerated
still qualified for federal and state aid, there was increasingly less to receive over the course
of the later postwar period. Almost a decade before the Clinton administration chose to
“end welfare as we know it” in the mid-1990s, expenditures on incarceration had already
“surpassed afdc [Aid to Families with Dependent Children] by 130 percent and food
stamps by 70 percent.”25
There was clear evidence that free-world wages had been cut and jobs had been eliminated as a result of prison labor in the later postwar period as well. Free-world workers who made circuit boards at Lockhart Technologies in Austin, Texas, for example, found themselves unemployed in the mid-1990s because their company figured out that it was more cost-effective to reopen in a private prison thirty miles away. The prison had designed a facility to the company’s specifications and charged it rent of only $1.00 per year. In that same decade a major hospital in Eugene, Oregon, “canceled its contract with a unionized linen service to redirect the work to a prison laundry,” while a recycling plant in Georgia laid off its free-world employees so that it could replace “them with prison laborers from a nearby women’s prison.” Konica Corporation was also drawn to prison labor and eventually gave its copier repair jobs to workers behind bars, because it could pay them between 35 and 47 cents an hour. As the Ohio Civil Service Employees Association, which represented laid-off workers whose jobs had gone to prisoners in that state, put it, “‘These aren’t phantom jobs—these are real jobs, real people.
Prison labor was attractive to American employers for more reasons than lower wages; they also did not have to deal with sick days, unemployment insurance, or workman’s compensation claims, and they had few liability worries when it came to toxins or accidents in prison workplaces. Conditions were soon so bad in some prison workplaces that the health of guards and inmates alike suffered. Indeed, when complaints finally led to an investigation of a computer recycling operation within several federal prisons, Occupational Safety and Health Administration inspectors found “no evidence that actions were taken to prevent exposure to lead at the outset in the chip recovery process” and further that “no medical exams (including physical examinations) are done on inmates.” That employers could dodge safety regulations in prison shops undermined the free-world working class as significantly as did wage competition. In short, because prisoners were unable to demand decent working conditions, and employers saved a substantial amount of money on health and safety protections when they hired them, workers in the free world also found it increasingly difficult to insist upon a safe workplace for fear of losing their jobs.”42
They also struck gold when it came to building and managing prisons. Indicative of how lucrative the expansion of the carceral state could be, by 2007 Colorado was paying out “almost 95 million dollars a year in taxpayer money to corporate jailers,” and one of the nation’s eighteen private-sector, for-profit, prison-building and management companies, Corrections Corporation of America, posted “revenues of over $1.4 billion” that year. Crime, and more precisely mass incarceration, also meant major profits for companies that could provide prison goods and services—items ranging from telephones to tampons and tasers
The benefits of mass incarceration were also obvious to employers who saw prison expansion as an antidote to the shrinking migrant labor pool of the later postwar period. From Maryland’s crab industry to farms in states such as Colorado, employers flocked to prisoner-workers when their access to cheap immigrant labor began to dry up. Indeed, prisons and the labor they could provide were touted as more lucrative than moving operations to maquiladoras or sweatshops. As one study for the National Institute of Justice put it, “inmates represent a readily available and dependable source of entry-level labor that is a cost-effective alternative to work forces found in Mexico, the Caribbean Basin, Southeast Asia, and the Pacific Rim countries.” Such marketing did not escape the notice of the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, which grimly summed up the situation in 1992: “Convict labor is thus used to directly compete with organized labor and drive down wages.” Even in federal prisons where private companies were required to pay “wages at a rate which is not less than that paid for work of a similar nature in the locality,” unions quickly realized that “employers often do not comply with the prevailing wage requirement of the law.”44
While mass incarceration undercut the postwar gains of the American labor movement by dampening the wages of all free-world workers, it particularly eroded the economic standing of African Americans. Even though many thought that “the wage gap between black and white young men” had narrowed substantially over the postwar period, the disproportionate incarceration of African Americans not only hid black unemployment and thus masked real income inequality but it also ensured that such inequality would deeper over time since blacks faced a more severe “wage penalty” than whites when they were finally freed.45 Not only did black men find less work than white men when they tried to reenter the free-world labor force, but when they did secure employment their hourly wages were at least “10 percent lower after prison than before.”46 Mass incarceration also widened the income gap between white and black Americans because the infrastructure of the carceral state was located disproportionately in all-white rural communities. The Adirondack district of upstate New York only had two prisons in the early 1970s, but by the late 1990s it had eighteen correctional facilities and another under construction. Republican state senator Ronald Stafford had worked hard to secure these many new penal institutions because his district—formally a vibrant mining, logging, dairy farming, and manufacturing area—endured a per capita income “40 percent lower than the state’s average.” Seeking similar economic relief, the small midwestern town of Ionia, Michigan, eventually housed six state prisons, and the state of California, which had built only twelve prisons between 1852 and 1964, built twenty-three more after 1984.47 Whenever a prison came to a rural white community it certainly created jobs, and given that a corrections officer’s salary could be 50 percent higher than that paid to most other unskilled workers, this expansion of the carceral state had the potential to benefit key segments of America’s white working class. By 2006 the department of corrections had become California’s “largest state agency,” employing 54,000 people; across the nation as a whole, state, federal, and private penal facilities were employing more people than any Fortune 500 company. Not only did whites enjoy new employment options with the boom in prison growth but areas that received new penal facilities also reaped other less obvious benefits simply because prisoners inflated the region’s population. In 1990, when the presence of a large prison artificially boosted the census population of Coxsackie, New York, by 27.5 percent, its recorded median income dropped substantially from what it had been in the previous census year. As a result, the overwhelmingly white resident population became “eligible to receive more funding from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development,” such as that which came from Community Development Block Grants.4
Prisons not only impoverished people, leading them to commit more crimes of necessity, but they also made people more violent and antisocial. Not surprisingly then, the homicide rate jumped from 6.8 per 100,000 in 1967, when Lyndon B. Johnson was heading into his last year in office, to 10.5 per 100,000 in 1991, after more than a decade of solidly conservative rule, a thorough retreat from the liberal welfare state, and the unprecedented buildup of the carceral state. Moreover, while the violent crime rate in 1965 was 200.2 per 100,000, it grew to 556.6 in 1985 and to 684.6 in 1995
Is that enough prejudice/racist policy for you?
So Reagan should have been pro-drugs
If you were responfor combating drugs, you wouldn't start in the inner cities?
Where would you start?
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