From the “Adult Shit” music video post-script:

With only 5% of the world’s population, the US has 25% of the world’s prison population.

Today’s level of mass incarceration is unprecedented in history.

There are more black men under correctional control today than there were under slavery in 1850.

4 out of 5 drug arrests are for simple possession, 80% for marijuana. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence.

The “War On Drugs” is economically inefficient. It has failed to reduce drug use and is a human rights disaster.

Treating drug use and addiction as a public health issue is more effective at rehabilitating individuals and benefitting the wider community than criminalization.

…
Enough myths.

Let’s combat the economic and legal conditions and practices that produce racist realities and situations.

Reduce economic inequality.

For more reading on the “drug war” and the usa prison system…

ACLU – Mass Incarceration facts

https://www.aclu.org/combating-mass-incarceration-facts-0

Democracy Now! – Michelle Alexander interview

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/3/4/michelle_alexander_roots_of_todays_cri sis

And, you know, we can look back in history and see this is not the first time we’ve done something like this. Slavery by Another Name is an important book that I think all Americans should read, about how, following the end of slavery, a new system of racial and social control was born, known as “convict leasing.” You know, after the end of slavery, African-American men were arrested in mass, and they were arrested for extremely minor crimes like loitering, standing around, vagrancy or the equivalent of jaywalking—arrested and then sent to prison and then leased to

plantations. ”

…but now the question is: How do we transition from protest politics to long-term movement building?

….

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Well, I thought, you know, what transpired there, where, in papers filed in court, they blame that boy for the fact that the police showed up and killed him within two seconds of their arrival, and said it was his fault, that somehow he had brought this police response upon him, in so many ways, that is an illustration of the larger system of mass incarceration, where those who are targeted and who find themselves behind bars are blamed, and said, “Well, it’s your fault. You brought all of this on yourself.” And, in fact, you know, over the last few decades, I think many in the African-American community have been seduced by the argument that, well, this is all our fault. Somehow we’ve brought mass incarceration upon ourselves. If only we would pull up our pants or stay in school or not experiment with drugs, if only somehow we could be perfect and never make a mistake, that none of this would be happening. But, of course, you know, young white kids who make mistakes, commit misdemeanors and jaywalking and smoke weed, they are able to go off to college if they’re middle-class. But if you’re poor or you live in the hood, the kinds of mistakes that people of all colors and classes make actually cost them their lives. And yet, then we turn around and blame them and say, “This is all your fault.”

….

And, you know, at that time, there were activists who were saying that. You know, at the beginning of the book, I talk about how I saw posted on a telephone pole a sign that said, “the drug war is the new Jim Crow,” and I just dismissed that as nonsense. You know, yeah, our system is biased, but you can’t compare it to Jim Crow or slavery. You know, that’s absurd. But I had a number of experiences that began to open my eyes. And one of them included a young man who came to me with a story of being framed by the police and drugs being planted on him, and I didn’t believe him. And it was only after I came to see that he was telling the truth about vast corruption that was happening in the Oakland Police Department, and that my own biases and stereotypes and my own class privilege had prevented me from hearing him, acknowledging the truth and seeing the reality of what was hidden in plain sight. And that’s really what began my journey of doing an enormous amount of research and trying to listen much more carefully to the stories of those cycling in and out of prison.

….

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: That’s exactly right. No, who do we believe? Who do we listen to? Who do we hear from? Who do we believe? You know, and over the last

few decades, we’ve heard from the police, we’ve heard from politicians, we’ve heard from prosecutors. But very rarely do we hear the stories, you know, in the media, of the people who have been targeted and demonized. And even when we do, how often do we disbelieve them and think, “Oh, it must be exaggeration. It must be over the top”? But what we’ve seen with the Justice Department report, what we see with the overwhelming evidence that I tried to put in my book, is that we need to pay a lot more attention to the stories and the lived experiences of people who have been trapped in the system of mass incarceration.

….

You know, what we see is that this system of mass incarceration, in order to continue to grow, is adapting and is looking for new populations to bring under its control. And particularly the profit motive in the private prison industry is helping to drive much of that impulse. And so, when we talk about ending mass incarceration, we must, in the same breath, talk about ending mass deportation and the criminalization of immigrant communities in the United States today. You know, we see that the same racially divisive politics that gave rise to the war on drugs and the “get tough” movement, those same racially divisive politics are now taking aim at immigrant communities and helping to ensure the continued expansion of the prison-industrial complex, you know, by including immigrants under its control.

…But then when you look at the drug war budget, basically the same ratio of dollars is invested in enforcement, as opposed to treatment and prevention, as under the Bush administrations and earlier administrations. And so, you know, I think that it’s very tempting to imagine that more progress has been achieved when there is an African American in the White House and a black attorney general saying all the right things, but I think we have to not be so easily seduced by the imagery and insist upon the kind of large-scale policy reform and structural reform and in end to the actual war on drugs, not the language.

…The reality is we have been at war with certain communities. Our elected officials declared wars on crime and wars on drugs, which really were not wars on either of those things, but were wars on communities defined by race and class. And that war mentality has infected law enforcement in ways that, you know, seem nearly irreparable. And so, I think it’s important for us to recognize that these biases and stereotypes that exist within law enforcement isn’t simply a product of having to deal with a lot of bad guys on the streets, but it’s the product of a war mentality that has been adopted and institutionalized throughout law enforcement agencies in the United States.

….

But I think we really need to come from the perspective not how do we tinker with this thing or tweak it, but what would a truly just system look like? Would we

criminalize the simple possession of drugs for personal use? Would we do that? Or would we treat drug use and drug addiction as a public health problem rather than a crime? Would we follow the lead of a country like Portugal, which has decriminalized all drugs across the board and stopped caging people who may be in the need of help, and investing in drug treatment and education and support for the communities from which they come? So, we need to end the war on drugs and the war mentality that we have, which means ending zero-tolerance policies. It means transforming our criminal justice system from one that is purely punitive to one that is based on principles of restorative and transformative justice, you know, systems that take seriously the interests of the victim, the offender and the community as a whole. We need to abolish all of the laws that authorize legal discrimination against people who have criminal records, legal discrimination that denies them basic human rights—to work, to shelter, to education, to food. You know, we have to decriminalize—

AMY GOODMAN: To vote?

MICHELLE ALEXANDER: Yes—immigration. We have to grant the right to vote not just to people upon release from prison. You know, so I have trouble with the framing of this as being a movement to end disenfranchisement laws, and say we should be allowing people in prison to vote, like many other Western democracies do. There are often voting drives within prisons in other Western democracies. And here in the United States, we deny people the right to vote not only when they’re in prison, but often when they’re out, and sometimes for the rest of their lives. So, there is so much work to be done in transitioning from a war mentality to a mentality where we extend care, compassion and concern to poor people and people of color, and not respond with a purely punitive impulse.

Forbes – War on Drugs is a War on Minorities and the Poor

http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/06/28/the-war-on-drugs-is-a-war- on-minorities-and-the-poor/

“The global war on drugs has failed, with devastating consequences for individuals and societies around the world,” a recent report from the Global Commission on Drug Policy concludes. “Political leaders and public figures should have the courage to articulate publicly what many of them acknowledge privately: that the evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that repressive strategies will not solve the drug problem, and that the war on drugs has not, and cannot, be won.”

Forbes – Is Drug War Driven Mass Incarceration the New Jim Crow?

http://www.forbes.com/sites/billfrezza/2012/02/28/is-drug-war-driven-mass- incarceration-the-new-jim-crow/

Yet there is no denying that if your goal were to consign African Americans to a permanent underclass—one which the rest of us would be culturally and legally permitted to discriminate against in employment, housing, voting rights, and government benefits—the war on drugs would be a great way to do it.

Alexander spouts statistics with which we are all familiar. Approximately half a million people are in prison or in jail for a drug offense today, compared to around 41,000 in 1980. Four out of five drug arrests are for simple possession, 80% for marijuana. Most people in state prison for drug offenses have no history of violence.

At the end of 2007, more than 7 million Americans were behind bars, on probation, or on parole, many whose initial violation of the drug laws spiraled into a life of crime. This is a level of mass incarceration unprecedented in history. And despite the fact that surveys show that whites are just as likely to use illegal drugs as blacks, one out of every 14 black men was behind bars in 2006, compared to one in 106 white men.

It is that last bit that deserves attention. Through a series of anecdotes accompanied by a steady drumbeat of statistics, Alexander makes a compelling case that one of the key pillars of the fruitless war on drugs is selective enforcement coupled with plea bargain-driven judicial railroading.

Police patrols of inner-city African-American neighborhoods are characterized by a degree of hyper-aggressive vigilance, constitutionally dubious intrusiveness, and occasional brutality that would absolutely not be tolerated in the white suburbs. The vast majority of the people I went to college with smoked marijuana. Were law enforcement evenhanded, instead of growing up to be doctors, lawyers, engineers, and entrepreneurs, we would all be unemployable former felons.

It is this mark of Cain, the brand of the former felon, which Alexander claims is the tool that a racist society uses to turn young black men foolish enough to get involved in drugs into permanent members of the underclass. Unable to re-integrate into society because of the legal and cultural barriers that permit former felons to be treated the way Jim Crow treated African Americans, the 650,000 people released from prison every year are virtually driven into a life of crime through the systematic elimination of other options.

The Economist – Lynching in the South

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21644192-small-towns-find-it- hard-remember-victims-racial-violence-marking-murder

Between 1877 and 1950 almost 4,000 black southerners were lynched, according to a new report by the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), a human-rights group. That is 700 more than previously reported. During the days of Jim Crow, a black man could be murdered for speaking “disrespectfully” or for knocking on the door of a white woman’s house. In 1904 a crowd in Mississippi sipped lemonade and nibbled devilled eggs as they watched a black couple being mutilated and burned. “Our willingness to romanticise this period necessitates that we deal too with the racial terrorism and violence at this time,” says Bryan Stevenson of the EJI.

ACLU – War on Marijuana, Billions Wasted, Racially Biased Arrests

https://www.aclu.org/billions-dollars-wasted-racially-biased-arrests

https://www.aclu.org/report/report-war-marijuana-black-and- white?redirect=criminal-law-reform/war-marijuana-black-and-white

Over-Policing: Between 2001 and 2010, there were over 8 million pot arrests in the U.S. That’s one bust every 37 seconds and hundreds of thousands ensnared in the criminal justice system.

Wasted Time and Money: Enforcing marijuana laws costs us about $3.6 billion a year, yet the War on Marijuana has failed to diminish the use or availability of marijuana.

Staggering Racial Bias: Marijuana use is roughly equal among Blacks and whites, yet Blacks are 3.73 times as likely to be arrested for marijuana possession.

New York Times – History of Lynchings in the South Documents Nearly 4,000 Names http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/10/us/history-of-lynchings-in-the-south- documents-nearly-4000-names.html?_r=0

And just beyond that is Kirvin, where three black men, two of them almost certainly innocent, were accused of killing a white woman and, under the gaze of hundreds of soda-drinking spectators, were castrated, stabbed, beaten, tied to a plow and set afire in the spring of 1922.

…On Tuesday, the organization he founded and runs, the Equal Justice Initiative in Montgomery, Ala., released a report on the history of lynchings in the United States, the result of five years of research and 160 visits to sites around the South. The authors of the report compiled an inventory of 3,959 victims of “racial terror lynchings” in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950.

… The process is intended, Mr. Stevenson said, to force people to reckon with the narrative through-line of the country’s vicious racial history, rather than thinking of that history in a short-range, piecemeal way.

“Lynching and the terror era shaped the geography, politics, economics and social characteristics of being black in America during the 20th century,” Mr. Stevenson said, arguing that many participants in the great migration from the South should be thought of as refugees fleeing terrorism rather than people simply seeking work.

The lynching report is part of a longer project Mr. Stevenson began several years ago. One phase involved the erection of historical markers about the extensive slave markets in Montgomery. The city and state governments were not welcoming of the markers, despite the abundance of Civil War and civil rights movement memorials in Montgomery, but Mr. Stevenson is planning to do the same thing elsewhere.

… Professor Beck, who teaches at the University of Georgia, has not reviewed the new list. But he pointed out that, with racial violence so extensive and carried out in so many different ways, compilers of lists may differ on what constitutes a lynching; the new list, as opposed to some previous ones, includes one-time massacres of large numbers of African-Americans, such as occurred in Arkansas in 1919 and in Louisiana in 1887.

…Among Professor Beck’s findings were that the number of lynchings did not rise or fall in proportion to the number of state-sanctioned executions, underscoring what Mr. Stevenson said was a crucial point: that these brutal deaths were not about administering popular justice, but terrorizing a community.

“Many of these lynchings were not executing people for crimes but executing people for violating the racial hierarchy,” he said, meaning offenses such as bumping up against a white woman or wearing an Army uniform.

…The bloody history of Paris, Tex., about 100 miles northeast of Dallas, is well known if rarely brought up, said Thelma Dangerfield, the treasurer of the local N.A.A.C.P. chapter. Thousands of people came in 1893 to see Henry Smith, a black teenager accused of murder, carried around town on a float, then tortured and burned to death on a scaffold.

Until recently, some longtime residents still remembered when the two Arthur brothers were tied to a flagpole and set on fire at the city fairgrounds in 1920.

New York Times – Lynchings as Racial Terrorism

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/11/opinion/lynching-as-racial- terrorism.html?_r=1

It is important to remember that the hangings, burnings and dismemberments of black American men, women and children that were relatively common in this country between the Civil War and World War II were often public events. They were sometimes advertised in newspapers and drew hundreds and even thousands of white spectators, including elected officials and leading citizens who were so swept up in the carnivals of death that they posed with their children for keepsake photographs within arm’s length of mutilated black corpses.

These episodes of horrific, communitywide violence have been erased from civic memory in lynching-belt states like Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Florida and Mississippi.

…Mr. Stevenson’s organization, the Equal Justice Initiative, took a step in that direction on Tuesday when it released a report that chronicles nearly 4,000 lynchings of black people in 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950. The report focuses on what it describes as “racial terror lynchings,” which were used to enforce Jim Crow laws and racial segregation. Victims in these cases were often murdered without being accused of actual crimes but for minor social transgressions that included talking back to whites or insisting on fairness and basic rights.

…

The report argues compellingly that the threat of death by lynching was far more influential in shaping present-day racial reality than contemporary Americans typically understand. It argues that The Great Migration from the South, in which millions of African-Americans moved North and West, was partly a forced migration in which black people fled the threat of murder at the hands of white mobs.

It sees lynching as the precursor of modern-day racial bias in the criminal justice system. The researchers argue, for example, that lynching declined as a mechanism of social control as the Southern states shifted to a capital punishment strategy, in which blacks began more frequently to be executed after expedited trials. The legacy of lynching was apparent in that public executions were still being used to mollify mobs in the 1930s even after such executions were legally banned.

Despite playing a powerful role in the shaping of Southern society, the lynching era has practically disappeared from public discourse. As the report notes: “Most Southern terror lynching victims were killed on sites that remain unmarked and unrecognized. The Southern landscape is cluttered with plaques, statues and monuments that record, celebrate and lionize generations of American defenders of white supremacy, including public officials and private citizens who perpetrated violent crimes against black citizens during the era of racial terror.”

Mr. Stevenson’s group makes the persuasive argument that this history needs to be properly commemorated and more widely discussed before the United States can

fully understand the causes and origins of the racial injustice that hobbles the country to this day.

History is a Weapon – Lockdown America, Christian Parenti interview

http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/audiocparenti.html

So, more specifically, why does America with 5% of the world’s population have 25% of the world’s prisoners. It wasn’t always like that. When this criminal justice crackdown that we’re living in now began was really in the late sixties and what was going on in the late sixties? Basically the U.S. system faced a dual crisis, political and economic. the political crisis, you’re all familiar with, I’m sure: the civil rights movement, the black power movement, then the anti-war movement adding into that. Also a little known wildcat labor movement that was making things difficult for the captains of industry, massive strikes also making things difficult for the corrupt leadership of the AFL-CIO forcing them to actually act like actual unionists, and of course rioting: massive rioting from 64 on. Every summer huge riots burning down the cities. Black people and white people together, in some situations, shooting back at the police and the national guard. So in other words, the ruling class’s worst nightmare.

….

So in response to the police crisis, Lyndon Johnson, in 1967 proposes legislation, that in ’68 passes the house of representatives as D.C. is literally burning for the second time. Martin Luther King has just been assassinated, there is massive riots, there is like smoke billowing over the congress and these guys are designing this piece of legislation which creates the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, the LEAA, this huge federal bureaucracy, which over the next ten years redistributes about a billion dollars a year to local police to retool and retrain american law enforcement and the judicial system and prisons, to some extent, to deal with the crisis of an incipient revolution which is what they had on their hands at the time.

So the LEAA’s intervention is when we begin to see the contours of the criminal justice system as we know it today. That’s when cops first get radios in their cars, shoulder radios. That’s when they first start using computers. They get body armor. They get helicopters. SWAT teams proliferate. Before the late sixties, there weren’t SWAT teams in every major city, and now there are SWAT teams in every small town as well. That’s when police have to learn how to read; before that the police didn’t have to know how to read. In most states, you needed more training to be a beautician than to be a police officer. Which you might not think is important, but, you know, when you’re actually trying to understand the movement and destroy it and think critically about repressing the people, it helps if your troops can read.

….

So finally you have the fundamental crisis that capitalism always returns to: you have a crisis of overproduction. This is one of the central irrationalities of this system. That when things work out the way they’re supposed to, you run into trouble. When the economy is going well, you inevitably produce too much stuff and therefore you can’t keep producing at the same rate of profitablity, which is the logic, which is the reason that investors invest, that’s what keep capitalism going, is profitability. If that doesn’t occur, then there’s major crisis. Firms go over, millionaires lose their money, investors overreact: there’s unemployment and you get sometimes a radical constriction of the economy into a major recession or depression. And then you get massive scarcity caused by overabundance.

….

So capital tries to attack labor in the Seventies. They try to drive down wages, but it doesn’t work, and the ruling class is trying to figure out “well, why is this?” And there’s no better illustration than this story: in 1969, General Electric, then the fourth largest employer in the country, one of the top blue chip firms, faced a strike against twelve unions that previusly hadn’t gotten along, but they unite, in part driven by their young rank and file, a lot of then coming out of radical movements, coming out of Vietnam, they don’t have deference for authority, they’re not going to take no for an answer and they don’t care. And so the leadership in the union realize

they have to strike. They fight GE, they win this massive strike, and wages go up even though, at the same time, unemployment is going up nationally and there’s supposively a recession going on. So the honchos at GE get together and they look at “well, what happened here?” and they realize the strikers were not only getting their strike benefits from the union, but they were collecting welfare thanks to a recent liberalization in federal law, and they had collected thirty million dollars in welfare. So from the point of view of general electric, this sort of move towards social democracy in the U.S. was basically state-funded class warfare against them. And so what they had to do to actually get the price of labor down was to destroy this social welfare system that was about containing and controlling the poor which was very much a response to the riots and all that stuff before in the thirties and then in the sixties.

So that had to be destroyed. The consensus around that recalibration of the U.S. economy doesn’t really arrive until the late nineteen seventies when Carter appoints Paul Volcker as the chairman of the Federal Reserve and he then ratchets up interest rate from around eight percent to close to sixteen percent which means that people are sometimes paying as high as twenty percent interest. So what that means it’s harder to borrow money to go to school, harder to borrow money to open a new factory or a new small business, whatever whatever. Less jobs, the economy constricts, increased unemployment. The idea was to create a crisis: to engineer a crisis so that the working class would be scared and shut up and work harder for less and I’m not being paranoid and reading into this. At one point, congress asked Volcker, the crisis was getting very very bad, Mexico was threatening to bail out on its ninety billion dollar debt and Volcker goes before congress and they say you have to lower interest rates and stimulate the economy and he says “Well, I can’t do that,” because basically, this is his quote, “the standard of living of the average american worker has to decline, I don’t think you can get around that,” until economic health returns. His colleague in England, where the same policy was being pursued, because this is a world system, Alan Budd, later described the policy this way: “Rising unemployment was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working classes. What was engineered in Marxist terms,” this guy is a Thatcherite conservative, “was a crisis in capitalism which recreated a reserve army of labor and has allowed the capitalist’s to make high profits ever since.” Chief economic adviser to Margaret Thatcher. So that’s then the policy of Reagonomics. You have this incredible recession, second worst recession since the great depression. At the same time, you have an assault on labor. You got the, Reagan fires the air traffic controllers, PATCO, a union that had endorsed him: they go on strike, he fires all eleven thousand of them. He starts stacking the national labor relations board with total conservatives who always rule against labor, deregulates laws around health and safety, deregulates laws around investment so it’s easier to close a factory and move the machinery to mexico where wages are less, you know the whole story. The effect works.

….

Well, one way was welfare, right? Absorb the poor, co-opt the poor, placate the poor, but that was seen to be aiding workers in general, so that’s not an option. Well, what do you do? You switch back to the old-fashioned method of repression, increased demonization. So you get, in the early eighties, a re-engagement with that earlier part of the story of the criminal justice crackdown. and it’s very much about containing and controlling the poor. You get the War on Drugs, ramps up in ’82, first by changing the rules to favor the prosecution. In ’84, there’s the first really big federal crime bill that does a whole bunch of stuff. It creates a lot of grants for local law enforcement, local incarceration, but one of the key things it does is create the Asset Forfeiture laws which is a way of recruiting local police into the drug war, because this is really coming down from the top in certain levels. A lot of local police departments, they didn’t care if you were smoking marijuana, whatever. In the late seventies, twelve states allowed you to grow and smoke marijuana. So it’s hard to get all the cops on board. So you bribe them, right? You say well if you go after the drug dealers, you can take all their cash and their houses and their boats. So you get the assets forfeiture laws which causes this creation of assets forfeitures squads going around taking ninety percent of all the property that they can seize that’s drug tainted. Eighty-six, you get another major crime bill that creates new, twenty nine new mandatory minimums, billions of dollars for grants to the locals. Eighty-eight through ninety-two, more of these crime bills. Ninety-two riots, Clinton comes in. More of the same policies culminating in the ’94 crime bill where there’s thirty billion dollars doled out to the states. Of course, always with strings attached that they must repress poor people more, essentially, right? So you can get the money to build your prison if you have a three-strikes law or truth-in-sentencing law. Which means that in many cases nonviolent offenders on a third or second offense are put away for twenty-five to life. Then you can get extra money from the Feds, etc etc. Ninety-six, effective terrorism anti-death penalty act. Numerous immigration restrictions to militarize the border. And on and on and on, and we’re still in that moment of buildup though it is beginning to plateau to some extent and there is this response to it.

The Economist – Conditions behind bars

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21640359-prisons-profit- stopping-family-visits-screening-visitors

Still, even as one part of the criminal-justice system profits from misery, another abuse may be abating slightly. On January 16th Eric Holder, the soon-to-retire attorney-general, said he would curb joint federal-state “civil forfeiture” actions. This is when the police seize houses, cars, money and other assets that they suspect are the proceeds of crime, without having to prove it. Cash from auctioning these assets often goes to pad police budgets and pay for new kit—a clear conflict of interest, civil libertarians complain. More than 15,000 such seizures occurred in 2010, generating $2.5 billion. Many states will continue to allow them, arguing that they are a useful tool for hobbling drug dealers.

The Economist – Government Outsourcing (British prisons)

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21632600-serco-demonstrates-perils- doing-governments-dirty-work-nobody-said-it-was-easy

The Economist – The Marlboro of Marijuana

http://www.economist.com/news/business/21631041-legal-cannabis-industry- run-minnows-liberalisation-spreads-may-not-last

Would household names really consider selling cannabis? They already have. In 1969 a Philip Morris executive wrote to the Justice Department, requesting a sample of marijuana for testing. In 1970 British American Tobacco put together a blueprint for a “cannabis-loaded cigarette”. Cannabis is certainly controversial. But then so is lung cancer. It may well be that the executives best placed to make a mint from marijuana, once it is fully legal across America, are the Marlboro men themselves.

The Economist – Rehabilitating Young Offenders

http://www.economist.com/news/united-states/21635479-what-has-four-legs- wet-nose-and-helps-young-thugs-grow-up-pups-and-perps

Three-quarters of American prisoners released in 2005 were arrested for a new crime within five years, estimates the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

DrugPolicy.org – Cocaine and Crack Facts

http://www.drugpolicy.org/drug-facts/cocaine-and-crack-facts

Criminal penalties for possession and sale of powder and crack cocaine are severe. Despite recent federal reforms of crack sentencing laws, much higher penalties still exist for possession and sale of crack, despite the fact that, pharmacologically, it is the same drug as cocaine. Possession of 28 grams of crack cocaine yields a five-year mandatory minimum sentence for a first offense; it takes 500 grams of powder cocaine to prompt the same sentence.

Vox – Everyone Does Drugs, But Only Minorities Are Punished For It

http://www.vox.com/2014/7/1/5850830/war-on-drugs-racist-minorities

Once convicted, black drug offenders get longer sentences than white drug offenders

Drug sentences for black men were 13.1 percent longer than drug sentences for white men between 2007 and 2009, according to a 2012 report from the US Sentencing Commission.

….

Mandatory minimum sentences target a drug more often used by black people

Mandatory minimum sentences were established in the 1980s when politicians touted the so-called crack epidemic to show off tough-on-crime stances. But these sentences are set in a way that could target black drug offenders more than white drug offenders.

Take, for instance, the mandatory minimum sentence threshold for crack versus cocaine. Someone would need to possess nearly 18 times more cocaine than crack to get a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.

Black people use crack at higher rates than white people, while white people use cocaine at higher rates than black people. So the tougher sentences on crack make it much easier for law enforcement to come down on black drug offenders.

Crack and cocaine are pharmacologically identical drugs. The difference is crack is mostly smoked, while cocaine is traditionally snorted. Smoking can make the effect more potent, faster acting, and potentially unhealthier, but both drugs essentially have the same effects in the long-term.

….

SWAT team raids disproportionately target black neighborhoods

SWAT raids are much more common in black neighborhoods than white neighborhoods, according to a new report from the American Civil Liberties Union.

….The ACLU found that 62 percent of SWAT raids are used for drug searches, and drug-related SWAT deployments primarily impacted people of color. Combined, the statistics suggest enforcement in the war on drugs hits black people — and their neighborhoods — the hardest.

Bureau of Justice Statistics – ( 2011-2012 Highlights )

http://www.bjs.gov/index.cfm?ty=pbdetail&iid=5218

• At yearend 2012, 414,065 persons were under some form of federal correctional control 62% were in confinement and 38% were under supervision in the community. „„
• Fifteen percent of federal prisoners released in 2010 were returned to federal prison within 3 years. Over half (54%) were returned for supervision violations. „„
• In 2012, five federal judicial districts along the U.S.-Mexico border accounted for 60% of federal arrests, 53% of suspects investigated, and 41% of offenders sentenced to prison. „„
• In 2012, 3,171 suspects were arrested for a sex offense. Defendants convicted of a felony sex offense were the most likely (97%) to receive a prison sentence following conviction. „„
• During 2012, 172,248 suspects were booked by the U.S. Marshals Service, a 2% decline from 179,034 booked in 2010.

0. Bureau of Justice Statistics – Recidivism of State Prisonershttp://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/press/rprts05p0510pr.cfmAmong prisoners released in 2005 in 23 states with available data on inmates returned to prison, about half (50 percent) had either a parole or probation violation or an arrest for a new crime within three years that led to imprisonment, and more than half (55 percent) had a parole or probation violation or an arrest within five years that led to imprisonment.Recidivism rates varied with the attributes of the inmate. Prisoners released after serving time for a property offense were the most likely to recidivate. Within five years of release, 82 percent of property offenders were arrested for a new crime, compared to 77 percent of drug offenders, 74 percent of public order offenders and 71 percent of violent offenders.

   Recidivism was highest among males, blacks and young adults. By the end of the fifth year after release, more than three-quarters (78 percent) of males and two- thirds (68 percent) of females were arrested, a 10 percentage point difference that remained relatively stable during the entire 5-year follow-up period.

   … Recidivism rates declined with age. Within five years of release, 84 percent of inmates who were age 24 or younger at release were arrested for a new offense, compared to 79 percent of inmates ages 25 to 39 and 69 percent of those age 40 or older.

   The arrest of former prisoners after release increased with the extent of their criminal history. Within five years of release, 61 percent of released inmates with four or fewer arrests in their prior criminal history were arrested, compared to 86 percent of those who had 10 or more prior arrests.

Many inmates had multi-state criminal history records. About a tenth (11 percent) of prisoners had an arrest within five years of release in a state other than the one that released them, and nearly a quarter (25 percent) of the released prisoners had a prior out-of-state arrest.

Huffington Post –Drug War and Mass Incarceration by the Numbers

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/08/drug-war-mass- incarceration_n_3034310.html

The pro-reform Drug Policy Alliance estimates that when you combine state and local spending on everything from drug-related arrests to prison, the total cost adds up to at least $51 billion per year. Over four decades, the group says, American taxpayers have dished out $1 trillion on the drug war.

What all that money has helped produce — aside from unchanged drug addiction rates — is the world’s highest incarceration rate. According to the Sentencing Project, 2.2 million Americans are in prison or jail.

….The punishment falls disproportionately on people of color. Blacks make up 50 percent of the state and local prisoners incarcerated for drug crimes. Black kids are 10 times more likely to be arrested for drug crimes than white ones — even though white kids are more likely to abuse drugs.