Michelle Alexander’s “The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste” has been making the rounds of late. In the essay, based on her book of the same name, Alexander makes two key posits: that the United States has “a nearly fanatical desire to cling to the myth that we as a nation have ‘moved beyond’ race” and, indirectly, that drug legalization may address criminal justice inequalities people of color experience.
Predictably, drug legalization advocates back assertions of racism and the drug war. Over-the-top, hyper-violent police conduct related to drug arrests and MTV covering Tupac Shakur’s mother Afeni Shakur’s recent drug arrest are just two recent though disparate examples that cast further aspersions on drug prohibition. But is the drug legalization movement really a solution to a problem that is at the root of such examples, namely ongoing racism, which is seldom addressed?
Though Alexander is most certainly right the United States promotes post-racialism when racial justice clashes remain prominent in the news and elsewhere, the crimes committed upon communities of color do not necessarily reach a legalization conclusion. Drug laws may be draconian, but to use examples of abuse is rather easy. The animal rights movement, for instance, uses horrible images of mistreatment to advocate for equality between humans and other creatures. Such is old rhetorical sleight of hand, yet it’s still just that — sleight of hand.
There are three good reasons for people of color to question the drug legalization movement.
1.) Drug legalization does not change the nature of policing.
As tomdispatch and many others acknowledge, there are problems with budgets and prisons. No one disputes this issue. A pathological obsession with mandating long sentences and death penalties in the U.S. has reached unmanageable proportions. Everything from the law of parties to legalized brutality such as castration shore up the public’s basest desires for justice at any cost. For people of color, however, the issue is not merely out-of-control drug policy, but a racist criminal justice system few are simply willing to say is racist and needs immediate redress.
The drug legalization movement, for people of color, represents a classic quandary as far as longterm political strategy: focusing on dealing with symptoms of a problem rather than taking on the problem (in this case, white racism and, more broadly, white supremacy and neocolonialism) directly. Most of these good, sincere efforts are not grounded in history, or recognize people of color faced mass criminalization before prohibition.
Of policing, Kristan Williams, author of Our Enemies in Blue: Police and Power in America, says:
Sovereignty, and even states, are older than the police. “European kingdoms in the Middle Ages became ‘law states’ before they became ‘police states,’” meaning that they made laws and adjudicated claims before they established an independent mechanism for enforcing them. Organized police forces arose specifically when traditional, informal, or community-maintained means of social control broke down. This breakdown was always prompted by a larger social change, often by a change which some part of the community resisted with violence, such as the creation of a state, colonization, or the enslavement of a subject people. In other words, it was at the point where authority was met with resistance that the organized application of force became necessary.
The aims and means of social control always approximately reflect the anxieties of elites. In times of crisis or pronounced social change, as the concerns of elites shift, the mechanisms of social control are adapted accordingly. So, in the South, following real or rumored slave revolts, the institution of the slave patrol emerged. White men were required to take shifts riding between plantations, apprehending runaways and breaking up slave gatherings.
Later, complex factors conspired to produce the modern police force. Industrialization changed the system of social stratification and added a new set of threats, subsumed under the title of the “dangerous classes.” Moreover, while serious crime was on the decline, the demand for order was on the rise owing to the needs of the new economic regime and the ideology that supported it. In response to these conditions, American cities created a distinctive brand of police. They borrowed heavily from the English model already in place, but also took ideas from the office of the constable, the militia, and the semi-professional, part-time enforcement bodies like the night watch and the slave patrols.
Every drug legalization advocacy argument implies by omission that liberalizing drug laws to the nth degree tomorrow will free people of color from overpolicing, racial profiling and institutional violence. Law enforcement has been guilty of atrocious behavior during the drug war. Yet is anyone in a community of color sincerely of the belief police will not abuse people of color, railroad us or continue to treat people of color like criminals because someone can smoke pot or shoot heroin up without legal sanction?
Drug legalization advocates, by failing to address the epidemic of police violence as a whole visited on communities of color, live in an illusion if they believe other justifications won’t be created. Consider some of the more famous police brutality cases outside of Rodney King — Abner Louima, Sean Bell, Ida Lee Delaney… the list goes on.
2.) Drug legalization movements avoid larger problems faced by people of color.
The drug-law process is broken, but, as profound as the criminalization may be, people of color face institutional problems far more deep, including the criminal justice system itself.
Disenfranchisement of people of color is on display in many instances. Issues such as economics are creating an “ethnic recession” for people of color, while health care, legislation or not, is a crisis for people of color. Globalization is decimating the Third World, and what U.S. companies and comprador elements have wrought there — lack of opportunities and transnational migration as a result — is now appearing in immigration fights. The Black is Back Coalition frames the political terrain this way:
Unemployment and an imposed drug economy, the ongoing theft of value through home foreclosure and other means, reveal the use of our people as a reserve labor force as well as a reserve source of capital accumulation. The police murder of our young men and the denial of any meaningful health care – all of these factors contribute to our ability to characterize our status in the U.S. as subjects rather than citizens.
Drug legalization movements seek to involve people of color by citing criminal justice statistics, but such movements do not genuinely address institutional racism that is at hand. In that sense, groups like the Drug Policy Foundation of Texas are not uncommon. Money is spent on outreach, but little seems to be invested in the communities of color affected by these issues.
When was the last time, if ever, you saw a drug-law group unite with communities of color around education, housing, employment discrimination or any of a number of issues people of color deal with day-to-day? Virtually all drug legalization advocacy groups post on their websites how felony drug laws disenfranchise Black men. How many of them are in the communities providing jobs for these men, or helping families fighting to meet basic needs when these men face employment discrimination, can’t find jobs, etc.?
The problem with drug legalization for people of color is such a movement is a single-issue matter and, like most single-issue stuff, is intended to get a large number of people to stand with its cause, without much consideration to the realities potential supporters face. Such an observation is not solely one of drug legalization groups, but needs discussion.
3.) The potential impact of drug legalization on poor communities of color needs to be openly debated.
Carefully chosen language (“drug policy reform,” “opposed to the drug war”) by drug legalization groups should not mask the endgame for many organizations of legalization of marijuana and, in some cases, all drugs. Many sell a libertarian-capitalist’s wet dream, in which government can regulate and tax narcotics like alcohol and cigarettes and underground businesses can be legitimized. Mom and pop dope dealers get to set up shop and everyone gets to be an entrepreneur. And the forest animals even come out for a big singing number at the end.
Does anyone really believe that ideal?
I make no bones about my dog in this fight: I have no interest backing anyone’s profit-making pangs coming at the expense of poor people. One need only walk through a community of color to see the spoils of vulture capitalism: large corporations who do nothing for the Black and Brown community heavily marketing alcohol, cigarettes and various medications to communities of color all over the United States. If you live in or have lived in a community of color, you know what it is like to live in the nursery of Adam Smith and Ayn Rand’s love child: profiteering gone amok, unchecked and with tacit support of the majority population who believe it is okay for the poor to have crap they don’t need piled into their communities, that people wanting to make a buck off them can do what they please so long as they don’t promise to cure anything or give them something that makes an arm fall off, and everyone else pretends like this is the way it is supposed to be.
In a capitalist framework, those with the money and resources — in the case of drug legalization, most assuredly Big Pharma or whatever industry moves first — can swing the campaign donations, lobbyists, advertising and favorable regulations to ensure they and they alone maintain hegemony over an industry while those without the resources can be criminalized and swept aside. We see this today in every market, from alcohol to medicinal treatments, and it is naive to think legalized marijuana and other drugs would be any different. That means economically disadvantaged people of color will remain an incarcerated underclass and those with power, generally white, will not face the same sanction, while the streets of communities of color face another flood of marketing and unnecessary products.
More importantly, drug legalization speaks to larger questions of political objectives. The Black Panther Party, in pamphlets like Capitalism Plus Dope Equals Genocide [PDF], called the drug culture a result of social pressures on people of color to seek escapes from the racism and discrimination faced.
A characteristic feature of class and racial oppression is the ruling class policy of brainwashing the oppressed into accepting their oppression. Initially, this program is carried out by viciously implanting fear into the minds and sowing the seeds of inferiority in the souls of the oppressed. But as the objective conditions and the balance of forces become more favorable for the oppressed and more adverse to the oppressor, it becomes necessary for the oppressor to modify his program and adopt more subtle and devious methods to maintain his rule. The oppressor attempts to throw the oppressed psychologically off-balance by combining a policy of vicious repression with spectacular gestures of good-will and service.
Moreover, the Party pointed out drug use was provided as an option to people of color as a means of numbing them to the hardships they faced, and to keep them distracted from fighting against their own oppression. In speaking about Timothy Leary, Eldridge Cleaver acknowledged occasional marijuana use by Panthers, but called the drug culture a counterrevolutionary betrayal of the goals of Black liberation. The concept of the period was that drug use had a tendency to weaken users and made them less intellectually and physically capable of defending themselves and their communities.
Do drug legalization movements offer anything to people of color? It’s positive to have the public talking about policing. It is also good to see a larger dialog about criminal justice. However, drug legalization movements must consider the bigger picture for communities of color to be truly relevant.
What is needed is a more clear movement — one that isn’t positioned, as so many tragically are, on the presumption that one’s freedom is predicated on legal sanctions and tax breaks for small businesspeople. We also must be honest that a mass anti-racist movement will mean an end to abuses against people of color more than a drug legalization movement ever will.
People of color need to look critically at these movements. What are they practically doing for the community? What will such advocacy, if it comes to pass, mean for communities of color under the current system of law and politics? Pressing ourselves with harder questions, rather than passively supporting relaxed drug laws without considering who profits, is a good start.
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Great article! Very accurate points. I especially unite with the third point. I don’t understand what would make people believe that mega capitilists won’t corner the market for drugs. If they are as profitable on the street as they are now, and capitalists are willing to blow up babies with the legitimacy of the state, what would stop them to willingly monopolizing drug culture.
This is idiocy
Not to mention the legalization movement’s close ties to libertarianism, including those who oppose all gun control, anti-discrimination laws, equalized school funding, abortion access, prison reform, justice reform and many other important issues. I got chewed out for complaining about a politician’s other positions by one group, because “we’re only here to talk about legalization.”
A movement has to come with solidarity if it wants my support.
Great piece!! I agree that there are major problems with the idea of allowing corporations (or the government) to sell and market drugs. However, I will most likely never ever entertain the notion that someone should be arrested or forcibly detained for drug use, that includes being forced into rehab. That does pose a problem for me b/c I hate the idea of corporations having yet another addictive substance they can push, especially to poor POC.
I am a supporter of legalized drugs and drug policy reform (not one in the same for me), and I think it is disenginous to try to argue the racial angle in order to pander. It is a matter of prison reform, economic reform, and personal freedom (from state imprisonment and persecution), but a lot of the people involved need to stop tokenizing POC. They seriously just about embody the stereotypical libertarian who is little more than a Republican that wants to do drugs.
I don’t think that anyone believes that legalization will make racist enforcement go away. I do think that it will remove one of the tools for selective application that law enforcement has at it’s disposal.
Also, and speaking as a person of color, I dislike your insinuation that communities of color need to be protected from their own choices. The legalization movement is based on the idea that I should be able to decide what to put in my own body. People make bad choices, but that doesn’t mean that they should be denied that choice.
The title of the article is very misleading. The first two reasons are the same reason: legalization will not change the underlying issues in society. Anyone making the claim that legalization will make wholesale change is fooling themselves. However, the same thing can be said about the Civil Rights Amendment – just because PoCs can vote doesn’t change the racist underpinning of the society at large. Does that mean that it’s a bad idea to pass the Amendment?
As to your third point, it is a fair point to say that there needs to be discussion and debate about what effect it will have on disadvantaged communities. That, however, is the case for any piece of legislation. A more meaningful question is “will the legislation unfairly target disadvantaged communities?” While you’ve made many suppositions that it could, there’s no evidence offered to say that it will.
The point that your article misses is that the goals of the legalization movement are not to address racial inequalities – it’s to enact sensible and evidence-based drug policies that address the realities of drug use rather than enforcing an ideological position. If there is a vocal group saying that the purpose of legalization is to benefit minority groups, I’ve never heard them. Such legislation will undoubtedly have an impact, but if the choice is between the current system and one in which drug possession isn’t an automatic jail sentence, it’s an easy choice to make.
@Mellar: I do not think the issue is one of protecting people of color from their own choices, but protecting the common welfare from the pure greed previous decriminalization efforts, such as alcohol, have rendered. I believe it is important people of color think critically, especially when the idea that our freedom is a matter of our ability to purchase anything is implicit in the notion of choice. The reality is capital, industry, the state and communities have a much more intricate relationship than that, and we need to openly consider outcomes.
@Crommunist: The drug legalization movement, in focusing on an issue that disproportionately affects people of color but not saying really anything about racial justice, in itself, says a lot.
“but protecting the common welfare from the pure greed previous decriminalization efforts, such as alcohol, have rendered.”
As oppose to the pure greed, violence, and rise of organized crime the criminalization of alcohol created? Conundrums like these further convince me that there is something fundamentally wrong with a capitalist free market system. But I do not think it will be fixed by criminalization of certain things. The people pushing drugs and violence into communities are very much as capitalistic as any corporation, though in most cases with less power and reach. There must be a way to stop forcibly locking people up for the substances they choose to consume, without giving free reign to companies to profit from another addictive substance/item. I do agree, that it is not a focus of the current legalization movement b/c it is populated by Ayn Rand loving libertarians.
@Ernesto Aguilar – Any social welfare issue will disproportionately affect PoCs. They will also disproportionately affect poor people and women. The outcome of the legislation is that the inequalities in these groups will be reduced. That’s all they’re designed to do. It is unreasonable to criticize a legislative approach for failing to do something that it does not purport to address. The solution to the racial problem is not a legislative issue. The solution to drug issues is.
I am sympathetic to your position that not enough is being done to highlight racial inequalities, but that’s not the fault of this particular movement, it’s a larger issue. You are right to raise awareness, but that has nothing to do with the content or substance of the decriminalization approach.
Thank you for posting this! I have always felt a cringe whenever someone talks about legalizing drugs. I couldn’t really put it into words but this totally makes sense. Also I have found it to be highly interesting that there has been such a huge push (at least in my area) for the pretty much outright banning of cigarettes and yet at the same time a push to legalize marijuana. It seems almost hypocritical in away. Though I do think it is possible that marijuana does has some medical use.
@Crommunist – You wrote, “The outcome of the legislation is that the inequalities in these groups will be reduced”.
The article specifically addressed this fallacy. The drug war is an instrument for social control. If the drug war could hypothetically be ended, another social control mechanism would be sought by the ruling class. Just like slavery was instituted. And when that fell apart, Jim Crow was instituted. Trying to argue Black people into subverting our primary issue, white supremacy, in order to support the largely white legalization movement is a losing strategy for that movement.
If the largely white legalization movement wants to be effective it will take on destroying white racism.
@marcg
I suppose your argument is valid as long as you think that “outcome” means the same thing as “purpose”.
Also, slavery went, and Jim Crow went in. And then Jim Crow went and bussing went in. Then bussing went and something else went in. And at each one of those steps, the lot of the marginalized improved. Those were issues that were specifically targeted at minority groups and PoCs.
I also wasn’t aware that black people were only allowed to care about one issue at a time. This is news to me. I should tell the rest of my family, they’ll be just as surprised.
Destroying white racism (which makes me cringe every time I hear it) is certainly an admirable goal, but it doesn’t have to be the only goal. And speaking as someone who is active in the legalization movement in a city where the majority of drug users are white, I can tell you that you’re way off base if you think that the goal is to free po’ oppressed black folk. It’s to enact sensible laws.
The logic of this article is bugged. Taking the points one by one:
1.) Drug legalization does not change the nature of policing.
The drug war apparatus is the most racist part of the criminal justice apparatus:
“black men are admitted to state prison on drug charges at a rate that is 13.4 times greater than that of white men. In large part because of the extraordinary racial disparities in incarceration for drug offenses, blacks are incarcerated for all offenses at 8.2 times the rate of whites.”
Human Rights Watch, “Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs” (Washington, DC: Human Rights Watch, 2000).
http://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2000/usa/Rcedrg00.htm#P54_1086)
Yes, more will need to be done to “change the nature of policing” but doesn’t this seem like a good place to start?
After all, rougly half of americans are already in favor of leagalizing marijuana.
2.) Drug legalization movements avoid larger problems faced by people of color.
There are more than 160,000 black and latino men locked down on drug charges in state prisons alone, and countless more whose lives have been wrecked by the legal repercussions of having a drug felony on their record. This “larger problems” talk is like saying to all their families “sorry y’all, would love to help out, but we’ve gotta get to the root problems first.”
3.) The potential impact of drug legalization on poor communities of color needs to be openly debated.
Let’s take weed, because it is the only drug with a real chance of being legalized any time soon. Can you imagine it being MORE accessible in the hood than it is now? Would having a dispensary replace a liquor store be a bad thing in terms of health and violence in the community? And yes, capitalists will market and profit from it as long as they’re around, but the main reason they elected not to do so in the first place (aside from the fact that it was associated with the brown people who gave it the name marijuana), is that ITS A WEED. Anyone can grow it on their fire escape. Doesn’t require a lot of brewing equipment or chemical know how.
Seems to me like a no-brainer to support drug legalization.
Thank you for the critique!
Alcohol and cigarettes are among the many products regulated to an extent that the cost of production virtually guarantees those with the resources will be the only ones able to create or supply. Tobacco can be grown by anyone, for instance, but not everyone is (or can be) in the business of manufacturing cigarettes for sale. To believe big business would have no interest in a ‘weed’ that can be grown on a fire escape critically misses how the drive for profit and free markets work.
To be clear, nowhere in this piece was it stated that there are not prosecutorial disparities, incarceration issues, etc. Citing Kristian Williams’ work, which acknowledges racism in criminal justice long before drug prohibition, I hinted at the complexities of this issue. Moreover, I believe the legalization movement loves talking about criminal justice to people of color because we are affected, but it has a blindspot to how criminal justice impacts us far more.
Lastly, it is terribly patronizing to communities of color to assume that all we really care about is ourselves, our personal situations and getting relief for our own problems first and, in essence, fuck everyone else. It presumes we are incapable of “this ‘larger problems’ talk,” that those who ask it do not care, and that political questions should be marginalized for communities of color. I understand some folks do not want to have that conversation. However, if one is averse to that conversation, replying to such a discussion with essentially “this discussion is not important” is counterintuitive.
Many of us spend years in movements working on X-issue and Y-issue and A-reform or B-campaign, but unless we are willing to have that uncomfortable conversation, we continue to chase fix after fix after fix without ever talking about the root causes. While I appreciate some people just don’t want to have that chat — too political, too confrontational, etc. — I humbly submit this site is not the place to avoid it or attempt to silence that. Thanks.
Hi, I appreciated this article – I am a white queer trans person with disabilities and I didn’t get the impression that it argues for a single-oppression focus as suggested by the above commenter.
One thing that concerns me is how drug legalization advocates, besides the visible violence of the drug trade here, miss the role of cartels, paramilitaries, mafiosi, etc. have in profiting from U.S. drug consumption. I think drug prohibition is obviously a miserable failure and has racist roots and implementation, but frankly I care more about the fact that somewhere around 27,000 Mexicans have died in the past three and a half years in order to supply the U.S. with drugs than about middle class white college kids getting popped for weed.
Ernesto,
Just to clarify, I am not arguing in favor of a single-issue approach for anyone. Precisely the opposite, I mean to suggest that the drug war is a vital point of intervention in unraveling the whole ball of wax– capitalism, imperialism, racism, and that to dismiss it as purely the concern of the libertine middle class is a strategic mistake. As Betsy points out, the illegal status of drugs in the US has terrible effects south of the border, in terms of tens of thousands of senseless deaths as well as in the political landscapes of Mexico, Colombia, Panama, Bolivia, Peru, etc.
I’d encourage folks to check out the work of the Drug Policy Alliance, central to the reform of the Rockefeller laws here in NY, and who were among several groups advocating a anti-racist awareness to discussions of drug policy at the recent US SOcial Forum.
p.s. Apologies to Ernesto for the combative tone of my previous post, didn’t realize the piece was written for this blog, thought it was just linked form elsewhere. I appreciate the wealth of good content, links, and discussion on this site and the hard work that goes into maitaining it.
Please tell me it worked right? I dont want to sumit it again if i do not have to! Either the blog glitced out or i am an idiot, the second option doesnt surprise me lol. thanks for a great blog!
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As a person of color who has been fighting police brutality, the prison industrial complex, mandatory minimum sentences, and police brutality for over 25 years I really don’t get this article. Is it a straight edge perspective? (a perspective dominated by whites and which is outdated).
Let us be clear, I have conducted numerous studies and statistical analyses that confirm what millions around the world now know. Every 1 dollar spent on treatment saves four in incarceration and law enforcement. That is proven all over the world. It is a fact. I you want our communities to be less policed and less incarecerated, and less addicted then you must cut enforcement of addicts and drugs and increase spending in treatment. No prohibition of any substance has ever worked. The highest percentage of alcoholics in US history was during prohibition.
Are you calling Angela Davis white? I have participated in Critical Resistance conferences in New Orleans and the clear majority of folks I interacted with were other people of color. The clear majority of the participants including Ms. Davis were clear that mandatory minimums were the most aggravating factors in empowering the police to run roughshod in our communities at this time. It may be that once drugs are decriminalized that the authorities will adopt a new strategy to incarcerate our communites, When that time comes we fight!
Now, let’s go on to the overwhelming majority of people of color being murdered under the auspices of the “drug war”. The people of Latin America, Haiti, Colombia, Mexico, Bolivia, Venezuela, Peru, Ecuador, and on and on. The heaviest police brutality on the planet is carried out by US funded thugs in Colombia, Brazil, Mexico, Peru, Guatamala, and every country that takes drug interdiction money. Hundreds of thousands are being murdered by US funded paramilitaries. Indigenous people, Afro Colombians, Afro Brazilians, and all the poor of these countries are being lorded over by US CIA and military trainers who back one gruop of drug dealers backed by the government over leftist guerrillas fighting US imperialism and corporate dominance. All of this under the auspices of International US hegemony. So how do you figure it is whote people who are the legalization movement.
Hugo Chavez (indigeous and African decent) and Evo Morales (indigenous) have decrimilaized the use of Coca and pushed the US drug war out of their countries for the first time in decades. The result? Housing, food, health care, education and humna rights. Brought about by people of color taking their destinies in their hands. A part of the solution is ENDING THE DRUG WAR!! Ending imperialism is the rest of the solution.
The fact is that certain college educated and status quo defacto “leaders” of our communiies have been participating in the most insane geocidal imrpisonment of people of color for 3 decades now. Marching with police through our streets demanding mandatory minimums. Happy? How did that work? Who is really benefitting? The white power structure and CORPORATE PRISON INDUSTRY. Who lobbies the heaviest for mandatory minmums? Corrections Corporation of America, Sodexo Marriott and others who benefit from high incarceration rates. Yes we need to reform the whole legal system. True. But the largest chunk of what pigs need to empower them to run rough shod over us is the drug war and now “homeland security”.
I could go on and on and on. The drug war is a war against indigenous people, African Americans, Latinos, and all poor people. This article makes no real points with me and I have been overpoliced! I have been beaten, arrested, and detained merely for what I said. Family members have been almost mmurdered and put in the hospital. So I just don’t get it.
If the point is we need to reign in police? Agreed. How does it help to make a statement against decriminalization in that effort? I don’t get it.
Reading the article again let me be clear. You have a picture of someone smoking a joint. Is the marijuana legalization movement a bunch of half stepping predominantly hippies? Yep. Are you saying “legalization of drugs won’t bring down capitalism”? If so, you are right. But ending the drug war in Bolivia sure has made installing socialism a much easier transition. Pulling US troops out of the region who would be meddling in Bolivian affairs.
Is it saying “if drus are legalized police wil still look for excuses to racially profile and brtalize people”? True again but remember this. FOR EVERY DOLLAR SPENT ON TREATMENT (real treatment not AA) 4 are not spent in policing and incarceration.
From Citizens Against Police Abuse (an African American led response not to the drug war, but 15 African American men shot unarmed in 3 years)
The “drug war” makes the police a military brigade against the people, mostly people of color:
•Both local and national politicians have given police departments the impossible task of fighting a “war” against drugs. When the government uses words like “war” it means that there has to be an army (the police) that fights an enemy (the people). This failed “war” puts both police officers and citizens at risk.
•People sell drugs to make money and people often do drugs out of desperation and hopelessness. Locking up petty street corner dealers and drug addicts doesn’t get rid of drugs in the community; it only puts people who are sick and poor in jail. The only way to eliminate drugs as a community problem is through drug treatment programs and resident-driven economic development. Education, training and jobs that pay a “living wage” are some real solutions.
•The drug war disproportionately affects people of color. In 2003 in the US- an estimated 12 % of black males, 4 % of Hispanic males and 1.6 % of white males in their twenties and early thirties were in prison or jail.
•The drug war provides the prisoners for the prison industry that has increasingly become privatized and made into a moneymaking business. (See: The War on Drugs)
Our extensive study as a part of our demands for a total reform of policing in Louisville included this study we conducted: http://www.louisvillepeace.org/CAPA/drug_war.html
The main focus of our study shows how the drug war drives the prison industrial complex not a desire for drugs to be legal.
No legalization will not destroy capitalism but it would end aid and a civil war in Colombia that props up a dictatorship that murders hundreds of thousands. It would mean the US would no longer be incarcerating hundreds of thousands disproportionately African American, Latino, and native American inmates. The drug war is one of the tools capitalists use to retain power. Ending the drug war would take thousands of jack booted thugs off the street or in the least disempower their raids and road blocks in communities.
Anyway, ok so hippies that want to legalize pot are not marxists. As if Marx was a person of color. Indigenous people were living in Anti-authoritarian communist cultures before the word existed. And they used coca, marijuana, and many other substances medicianlly. Never had any problems till the ships started landing from Europe. We had no money, no banks, no capitalism, no alcoholism, and no need for the little red book to empower us to live in effective communist cultures. So should I write an article called “Three reasons the Marxist movement is racist?”, It would be ill informed, but it would make some strong points about the origins of true communism being long before Marx was born.
“Is it a straight edge perspective?”
No. An anti-capitalist one. As an anti-capitalist, I am not interested in creating wealth for drug dealers, U.S. drug farmers and Big Pharma by legalizing their businesses. I agree policing and the criminal justice as praticed must change. I believe it is naive to assume legalizing drugs ensures people of color won’t still be subject to racist policing and courts — history does not bear such out to be accurate.
“No prohibition of any substance has ever worked.”
Nor has any full legalization, I would presume, if the actual necessity is spending on human services, like treatment.
“Are you calling Angela Davis white?”
I do not recall calling Angela Davis white. I don’t think she is white, but assumed that to be obvious.
Various points made conflate issues without really addressing what I wrote. I didn’t write that there aren’t significant matters of corruption and underground industries in Latin America and elsewhere. Nor am I saying there isn’t racism in the criminal justice system. I am saying legaization does not address the matter of ongoing racism. However, my three main points are bulleted. I thought they were fairly clear, via the numbering.
“So how do you figure it is whote people who are the legalization movement.”
I’m familiar enough with these movements to understand the majority of leaders, organizers, speakers, activists, et al. in the North American drug legalization movement (the start of my piece departs from recent writings on this issue in the United States) -are- white. If you don’t think such is true, I’m open to hearing more. If you are stating the majority of people organizing within the North American drug legalization movement are people of color, that should be explicit. I haven’t seen it.
“Hugo Chavez (indigeous and African decent) and Evo Morales (indigenous) have decrimilaized the use of Coca and pushed the US drug war out of their countries for the first time in decades. The result? Housing, food, health care, education and humna rights. Brought about by people of color taking their destinies in their hands. A part of the solution is ENDING THE DRUG WAR!! Ending imperialism is the rest of the solution.”
This claim misrepresents political positioning that is, foremost, anti-imperialist and anti-interventionist. To reduce gains to drug legalization and not to a massive reform agenda and socialism, as the leaders themselves have both spoken of as vital, is misleading. Neither credits gains to drugs. Morales, in many interviews, talks about its conflict with the U.S. over cocoa not as drug self-determination, but as resisting U.S. attempts to control the country and worries over loan arrangements. Chavez and Morales have been successful because they are anti-imperialists and sought to create a society that serves its people.
“ending the drug war in Bolivia sure has made installing socialism a much easier transition”
Morales was elected by Bolivia’s people on a broad platform of reforms. That transition was sealed by an overwhelming majority supporting him. Strong South American economic relations and a political opportunity (strong populist sentiments, pushbacks against the IMF from neighbors, etc.) have made such changes possible. In truth, the South American political climate is far more complex than many in the United States understand it to be.
“No legalization will not destroy capitalism but it would end aid and a civil war in Colombia that props up a dictatorship that murders hundreds of thousands.”
This statement is misinformed about a.) the political situation in Colombia, which is more about the civil war than the drug trade… many of the drug interdiction monies are used to fight the guerrillas; and b.) unintentionally slips into U.S. claims the biggest resistance movements (FARC and others) are simply narco-terrorists out to protect the drug trade.
“Indigenous people were living in Anti-authoritarian communist cultures before the word existed. And they used coca, marijuana, and many other substances medicianlly. Never had any problems till the ships started landing from Europe. We had no money, no banks, no capitalism, no alcoholism, and no need for the little red book to empower us to live in effective communist cultures.”
I can only encourage you to do more reading on indigenous cultures in North America. These ideas of indigenous people as gentle folk living without rules, authority, currency, commerce, ideology and politics, doing peyote and weed for transcendence, are fabrications that infantalize First Nations people. I don’t assume you are presenting such intentionally — a lot of people are taught these myths. However, we’re taught indigenous people are people without a complex society, infrastructure and culture for a reason: it’s easier to use them and discard them.
“So should I write an article called “Three reasons the marxist movement is racist?””
I am sure the right wing blogosphere has plenty of that, but be my guest.
“It would be ill informed, but it would make some strong points about the origins of true communism being long before Marx was brn.”
Would suggest the tales of simple brown natives living without restrictions and doing drugs all day be left out. Good luck.
You aren’t the only anti-capitalist in the world? I am one as well.
“Would suggest the tales of simple brown natives living without restrictions and doing drugs all day be left out.” You actually wrote at that?
Well Mr, conquistador, there was nothing simple about it and we had very clearly defined societies. No one said anything about doing drugs all day? You an opus day maoist? manifest destiny and all that was wonderful?
So getting back to the facts. I am an anti-imerialist and I am am an anticapitalist and furthermore I am for self determination. Meaning I really don’t care what designs you have for me. I don’t need you to tell me how and when to do anything in my life.
So why don’t we deal with simple points you failed to address.
1) Chavez and Morales did decriminalize Coca for sale and traditional indigenous use. I have many comrades from the region and they use coca daily in the way it was intended. I am not saying this fact is the backbone of Bolivarianism, I am saying it is a fact they did it and the indigenous people (simple brown people Mr conquistador) are very happy they did
2) They did tell the US to take plan Columbia and stuff it as it was being used to militarize the region and as an excuse to attack the FARC. Who are not drug dealers but the fact is that the US uses the drug war as the pretext for all this aid and involvement.
3) I never said I was FOR the corporate sale of addictive drugs, at all. I spoke for the decriminalization of drugs and for the end of mandatory minimum sentences.
4) You never addressed my points about the corporate prison industry? About how they are the chief proponents of and lobbyists for the drug war?
5)You never addressed the fact that for every 1 dollar spent on drug treatment 4 is saved in incarceration and policing? Less prisons, less pigs on the street.
6) I am not a f%%king idiot I have friends who have died in the jungles of Columbia working for indigenous people’s rights who were also anti-imperialists. We were aware of the situation in Colombia 30 years ago and are quite clear it is not about drugs. I never said it was. The US is using the drug war as an excuse to send arms ,aid , and the CIA there because they botched the wars in Central America and they need a new excuse. In the 80s we worked closely with youth of the FMLN and are very well aware of what is going on. We are not and have never been misinformed by anyone but the CIA and the agents of imperialism.
7) Under the auspices of the drug war very close friends I have known for 25 years are being dragged into court and accused of material support of terrorism for simply going to Colombia to learn the true story of the FARC and people fighting imperialism. We are aware and well briefed of the situation.
8)How do you get simple brown people with no rules running around doing drugs all day? out of:
“Indigenous people were living in Anti-authoritarian communist cultures before the word existed. And they used coca, marijuana, and many other substances medicianlly.
Medicinally. MEDICINALLY. My god you do admit Coca is an anesthesia? Don’t you? You belong in an NA eeting not a serious socialist or communist party. Just kidding but calm the hell down.
9)Where did I say I supported drug farmers? corporate pharma? or any capitalist. I said nothing of the kind. I am focused on breaking down the drug war and the corporate prison industry in my response. At no point do you really take on these issues at all. Are you a corrections officer or some socialist DEA agent. The drug war is one of many tools capitalists are using aaginst idigenous people and the poor. We are fighting all of them. I am not a “legalization activist”. I am an anti-imperialist. Anti-police, anti-prison, activist that is working for systemic change at the core of every facet of this rotten corrupt Eurocentric fish.
Anyway Cortes, you complex conquistadors did so much good here. Thanks for the genocide? Just responding in kind to your “simple brown people” remarks. sic.
Look let me be the first to tone it down a notch since I came out of the gate so fast.
I agree that the marijuana legalization legislation on the ballot in Cali was one that was written by the growers who are turning this into an industry. that would have been screwed up and not the best outcome.
You said and i agree with:
“In a capitalist framework, those with the money and resources — in the case of drug legalization, most assuredly Big Pharma or whatever industry moves first — can swing the campaign donations, lobbyists, advertising and favorable regulations to ensure they and they alone maintain hegemony over an industry while those without the resources can be criminalized and swept aside. ”
Ok? I agree with that statement. People deserve the right to grow and utilize their own medicines and not be forced to make a bunch of rich people richer.
That said where do you come down on the corporate prison industry. The incarceration rates we are experiencing in this country today of Native people, African Americans, Latino’s, and poor whitesare the direct result of our current drug laws this is indisputable fact. Where do you come down on that fight. That is the dog I have in this fight. I have many friends and family in prison whithering away. I want them out. They are only guilty of self medicating. So where do you come down on that.
Where do you come down on people utilizing whatever plants of medicines they wish to. I could list off hundreds of plants that I personally harvest for medicine and food from the forest now. Today. Not a long time ago before Columbus. Only 30-40 cause intoxication. Should I be followed around and arrested for folowing traditions handed down to me int he way I wish?
You cannnot outlaw plants and never will. Anyone with a little knowledge of the land can get “high” anytime they want. You want to police that? Just curious.
If your point is. We have to be careful what we wish for the legalization will like the end of prohibition put rich white people in a position to heavily push drugs in our communities while we continue to be poor and suffer? If that is your point then you have a point and the recent ballot measure in Cali proves your point. Why would we need growers to givve us pot. Any fool can grow pot. The growers wrote that ballot measure so that they could control and push marijuana and monopolize it.
If those are your points great.If your article is also aimed at people like Angela Davis and many others like myself who have been fighting police brutality and the prison industrial complex? Then we will have to severely disagree. I guess the more I read your article I just wish you could havwe made your point while recognizning the important work many people of color are doing to fight the drug war, to fight against the corporate prison industry,to fight mandatory minimums,and to fight against plan Colombia and the ravages of the US war against the indigenous people and the poor of all of Latin America? These folks are hardly white. No one I know who is fighting for reductions in mandatory sentencing for Crack is white. Not one, and I know alot.
anyway respect. Could ya cut the simple brown people bit? It’s beneath you.
Not to Ernesto but earlier comments? So if you are someone who gathers your own herbs and medicines and s against the government prohibiting you from practicing your culture you are now alligned with the libertarans?
The left used to stand for people’s individual liberties, I didn’t get the memo that if you were against the government breaking your door down becuase you collected herbs, that made you a libertarian.
The left will never be united if we are going to continue to represent pro policing of people’s lifestyles.
“You actually wrote at that?”
Yes. Sarcasm.
“You an opus day maoist? manifest destiny and all that was wonderful?”
It was a sarcastic comment based on a remark that indigenous people had no authority, et al. — a remark that is historically false and taps into myths indigenous people are simple folk.
“Chavez and Morales did decriminalize Coca for sale and traditional indigenous use.”
I didn’t dispute that. I dispute your implication decriminlization resulted in “housing, food, health care, education and humna rights. Brought about by people of color taking their destinies in their hands.” This misses the massive agendas that won both men support. They were not single-issue candidates.
“They did tell the US to take plan Columbia and stuff it as it was being used to militarize the region and as an excuse to attack the FARC.”
And I replied to what was originally written — implications Bolivian cocoa laws hastened socialism, which is incorrect.
“I never said I was FOR the corporate sale of addictive drugs, at all.” / “Where did I say I supported drug farmers? corporate pharma? or any capitalist. I said nothing of the kind.”
Herein lies, to me, one of the major flaws of legalization, which I wrote about in my piece: in lieu of lacking an anti-coporate/anti-small-business agenda, drug legalization merely opens the door for the powerful to profit. They have the resources to ensure their hegemony in an open market.
“You never addressed my points about the corporate prison industry? About how they are the chief proponents of and lobbyists for the drug war?”
Citation? I heard private prison industries had lobbyists, but would like to learn more about how they advocate for the drug war. I would assume you are correct, but am interested in knowing.
“You never addressed the fact that for every 1 dollar spent on drug treatment 4 is saved in incarceration and policing?”
I agree with that, but that’s an argument for better resource allocation, not legalization. Our current resources should be devoted more toward treatment.
“I am not a f%%king idiot”
Apologies if you believe I do. My points are offered because there were a number of simplifications of issues to make a point about North American drug legalization, not the textures or even the accuracy of the issues being cited.
“How do you get simple brown people with no rules running around doing drugs all day? out of: ‘Indigenous people were living in Anti-authoritarian communist cultures before the word existed. And they used coca, marijuana, and many other substances medicianlly.’”
I didn’t. I got it out of “Indigenous people were living in Anti-authoritarian communist cultures before the word existed. And they used coca, marijuana, and many other substances medicianlly. Never had any problems till the ships started landing from Europe. We had no money, no banks, no capitalism, no alcoholism, and no need for the little red book to empower us to live in effective communist cultures.”
These ideas, while historically false, more importantly rely on myths — that indigenous people are simple brown people with no rules, laws, etc. In the North American rubric, it’s ultimate freedom to aspire to. But it’s also a gross simplification of indigenous culture.
“That said where do you come down on the corporate prison industry.”
I am not in favor of it. Where I disagree with the legalization movement is in racism and criminal justice. They claim there is a direct correlation between drug laws and incarceration, but avoid talking about institutional racism. While that is accurate, a white supremacist criminal justice system disproportionately impacts people of color in literally every sector of policing — from targeting students to sentencing. The real issue is racism in society.
“Where do you come down on people utilizing whatever plants of medicines they wish to.”
I would have to know the specifics. Generally I don’t believe anyone has a right to do whatever they want, as the societal impact and benefits outweigh same.
“If your article is also aimed at people like Angela Davis and many others like myself who have been fighting police brutality and the prison industrial complex? Then we will have to severely disagree.”
Note the headline states questioning the legalization movement. The piece is aimed at anyone who considers themselves part of the grouping.
I will be more than happy to get you that information. I didn’t come to this issue from the legalization tip. Came to it on the Police Brutality and prison justice tip. That is how I came to these issues.
“Where do you come down on people utilizing whatever plants of medicines they wish to.”
I would have to know the specifics. Generally I don’t believe anyone has a right to do whatever they want, as the societal impact and benefits outweigh same.
Seriously? You see yourself living in a wold where you and whoever would follow me around to police my herb gathering activities? Really?
I don’t believe anyone has the right to do whatever they to do either?
But when it comes to my life and my culture, when I am doing something that has no connection to you or anyone else? You see a scenario where you are busting into my home to seize my sweetflag, choke cherries, mushrooms, sage, goldenseal, goldenrod, marijuana, california poppy, and on and on? What possible reason might you haveto want to polie that? As if our jails aren’t full enough?
FYI the other issue the Private prison Industry is hammering and it makes sense is their support for AZ 1070 and bills at the Federal level that would incarcerate a high number of potential deportees. From Think Progress:
Prison Industry Funnels Donations To State Lawmakers Introducing SB1070-Like Bills Around The Country
In December 2009, the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) — a powerful front group that helps corporate representatives craft template legislation for state lawmakers, funded partially by the private prison industry — hosted Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce (R) and began debate on legislation that would provide broad powers to local police to arrest anyone who might look like an immigrant. ALEC then distributed the template legislation to its members. The January/February 2010 edition of ALEC’s magazine highlights the draft version of SB1070 — the “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act” — as model legislation.
In April of this year, Pearce then introduced ALEC’s template as the infamous SB1070 law. Notably, the ALEC task force which helped Pearce devise his racial profiling law included Laurie Shanblum, a lobbyist from the mega-private prison corporation Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) which previously played a role in privatizing many of Texas’ prisons. An investigation from Arizona’s KPHO-TV found more ties between SB1070 and the private prison industry: Paul Senseman, Gov. Janet Brewer’s (R-AZ) deputy chief of staff was a former lobbyist for CCA (his wife is still a lobbyist for CCA) and Chuck Coughlin, Brewer’s campaign chairman, runs the lobbying firm in Arizona that represents CCA. In These Times reporter Beau Hodai, who also reported much of SB1070′s connections to the private prison industry, has a chart to explain the relationship.
CCA is set to receive well over $74 million in tax dollars in FY2010 for running immigration detention centers. In a presentation given earlier this year, Pershing Square Capital, a hedge fund with a large financial stake in CCA, suggested that CCA’s profitability depends on increasing numbers of immigrants sent to prison. Many of the legislators helping to earn CCA more profits with radical anti-immigrant bills mirroring SB1070 have been recipients of private prison industry cash or have worked closely with the CCA-funded ALEC organization:
– TENNESSEE: Earlier this year, legislators in Tennessee passed an immigration bill with provisions “similar to, but less harsh than, those of SB 1070, including requiring city and county jails in the state to report any person who may be in violation of immigration laws to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.” But that wasn’t enough: right-wing local lawmakers also passed a resolution honoring Arizona’s SB1070, and a delegation of state lawmakers promised to introduce an anti-immigrant bill even “broader” than SB1070 in 2011. Many of the leading local lawmakers who voted for the anti-immigrant bill and resolution received thousands of dollars from CCA’s political action committee in the past two years, including State Reps. Gerald McCormick ($250), Barrett Rich ($500), Eric Watson ($250) and State Sens. Bill Ketron ($1,000), Jim Tracy ($500), Dolores Gresham ($1,000), Bo Watson ($500), and Jack Johnson ($500). Tracy, who sponsored the resolution honoring Arizona’s SB1070, also received $2,000 directly from CCA founder Tom Beasley, reports the Nashville City Paper. CCA retains five lobbyists in the state and spent at least $50,000 this year to lobby on immigration and other issues.
– OKLAHOMA: Rep. Mary Fallin (R-OK), who won her party’s nomination to run for governor this year, received the maximum donation permitted by law from CCA. State Rep. Randy Terrill (R-OK), who announced that he was planning an “Arizona-Plus” immigration bill that would be harsher than SB1070, is a proud member of the CCA-funded American Legislative Exchange Council.
– COLORADO: A group of Republican lawmakers in Colorado, after a research trip to Arizona this summer, have stated that they plan on passing a SB1070 law in Colorado next year. CCA’s lobbyists in Colorado have raised funds for many of the lawmakers in the group. CCA lobbyist Margy Christiansen raised $400 State Rep. Randy Baumgardner, one of the leaders of Colorado’s Arizona expedition, and CCA lobbyist Jason Dunn raised $150 for State Sen. Mike Kopp, the Republican minority leader who is promising to promote an SB1070 bill next session.
– FLORIDA: During the gubernatorial primary campaign between disgraced businessman Rick Scott and Attorney General Bill McCollum (R-FL), the prospect of importing Arizona’s SB1070 became a prominent issue in the race, with both candidates promising to bring a version of the law to the state. While many Florida Republicans recoiled at the idea, which stands to alienate many Hispanic voters, a cadre of state lawmakers and candidates for the state legislature, most funded by the prison industry, announced their support for an SB1070-type law. State Rep. Bill Snyder, who has received $500 from CCA, pledged to introduce a bill more draconian than SB1070. State House candidate Ben Albritton, another outspoken supporter of SB1070, took $500 from CCA, and State Rep. Joe Negron, who has been working with Snyder to sponsor the bill, received $1,000 from the Geo Group, another major private prison contractor which operates immigrant detention centers. Overall, the Republican Party of Florida has been the biggest recipient of prison industry cash in the past two years: $37,000 from CCA and $145,000 from the Geo Group.
– PENNSYLVANIA: In the Key State, State Rep. Daryl Metcalfe (R-PA) introduced the ALEC-drafted “Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act,” one month before State Sen. Russell Pearce (R-AZ) introduced his version of the bill in Arizona. Metcalfe is a highly active member of ALEC. He was paid $1,500 by ALEC just to attend its meetings with CCA lobbyists on how to draft the law.
In Tennessee, the average daily number of immigration detainees sank to 40 in FY2009, down from 95 in FY2008. This may change with CCA’s aggressive lobbying for more laws encouraging aggressive arrests of immigrants or people who look like immigrants. Charles Maldonado, who has reported on CCA’s corrupting influence at the Nashville City Paper, notes that CCA may see new business at its West Tennessee Detention Facility with the passage of more SB1070-related laws.
ALEC, with funds from several private prison companies, helped sponsor “truth-in-sentencing” and “three-strikes-you’re-out” laws all over the country for the past two decades. These laws have greatly increased incarceration rates, and have contributed to America’s distinction of having the largest prison population in the world.
From The Atlantic Weekly:
THe Prison Industrial Complex
Correctional officials see danger in prison overcrowding. Others see opportunity. The nearly two million Americans behind bars — the majority of them nonviolent offenders — mean jobs for depressed regions and windfalls for profiteers
by Eric Schlosser
(The online version of this article appears in three parts. Click here to go to part two. Click here to go to part three.)
N the hills east of Sacramento, California, Folsom State Prison stands beside a man-made lake, surrounded by granite walls built by inmate laborers. The gun towers have peaked roofs and Gothic stonework that give the prison the appearance of a medieval fortress, ominous and forbidding. For more than a century Folsom and San Quentin were the end of the line in California’s penal system; they were the state’s only maximum-security penitentiaries. During the early 1980s, as California’s inmate population began to climb, Folsom became dangerously overcrowded. Fights between inmates ended in stabbings six or seven times a week. The poor sight lines within the old cellblocks put correctional officers at enormous risk. From 1984 to 1994 California built eight new maximum-security (Level 4) facilities. The bullet holes in the ceilings of Folsom’s cellblocks, left by warning shots, are the last traces of the prison’s violent years. Today Folsom is a medium-security (Level 2) facility, filled with the kind of inmates that correctional officers consider “soft.” No one has been stabbed to death at Folsom in almost four years. Among its roughly 3,800 inmates are some 500 murderers, 250 child molesters, and an assortment of rapists, armed robbers, drug dealers, burglars, and petty thieves. The cells in Housing Unit 1 are stacked five stories high, like boxes in a vast warehouse; glimpses of hands and arms and faces, of flickering TV screens, are visible between the steel bars. Folsom now houses almost twice as many inmates as it was designed to hold. The machine shop at the prison, run by inmates, manufactures steel frames for double bunks — and triple bunks — in addition to license plates.
Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
See the editors’ profile of Andrew Lichtenstein, the photographer whose work appears with this article.
Related links:
The Privatization Channel
“The purpose of The Privatization Channel is to provide a highly diverse audience of academics, correctional practitioners, investors, policy makers, and the general public with easy access to the most comprehensive, objective, reliable, and timely information that is available about correctional privatization both within and beyond the boundaries of the United States.”
The Prison Privatization Research Site
A University of Connecticut sociology professor’s collection of statistics, studies, reports, essays, and lists of suggested books pertaining to the pros and cons of prison privatization.
JusticeWeb
“A networking tool and a library of information for organizations and individuals addressing prisons and related justice issues. JusticeNet distributes regular news, updates, alerts, and analysis about prison, police, and other justice issues.”
The Corrections Connection
An online magazine focusing on the prison industry: “The largest online resource for news and information in corrections.”
Private Corrections Links
A collection of links to sites pertaining to prison privatization.
Prison Reform: Working for Just & Effective Systems
Changemakers.net, an online journal focusing on the promotion of social change around the world, devotes its April, 1999 edition to the issue of prison reform.
From the archives:
“A Model Prison,” by Robert Worth (November, 1995)
McKean, a federal correctional institution, does everything that “make ‘em bust rocks” politicians decry — imagine, educating inmates! — and it works.
“Why Prisoners Riot,” by H.W. Hollister (October, 1955)
“Maybe it is time, now that everyone else has had his say on the continuing problem of prison riots, that a former convict should make some observations on the subject.”
“Prison Progress,” by Brice P. Disque (March, 1922)
“The time has come to do away with the title of ‘warden’ and the designations of ‘prison,’ ‘penitentiary,’ and the rest, and to start a new and enlightened era with a ‘President of State Industries.’”
“Humanizing the Prisons,” by Morrison I. Swift (August, 1911)
“The State of Vermont contains a prison where the inmates are treated upon a novel plan. They are trusted and treated like other human beings.”
From Atlantic Unbound:
Online Conference: “Prisons in America,” (November, 1995)
“Should the goal of incarceration be to deter criminals? To punish them? To rehabilitate them? Or just to warehouse them safely away from law-abiding society?” The transcript of an online conference with Robert Worth, author of “A Model Prison.”
Less than a quarter mile from the old prison is the California State Prison at Sacramento, known as “New Folsom,” which houses about 3,000 Level 4 inmates. They are the real hard cases: violent predators, gang members, prisoners unable to “program” well at other facilities, unable to obey the rules. New Folsom does not have granite walls. It has a “death-wire electrified fence,”
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Documenting the Prison-Industrial Complex
A series of photographs by Andrew Lichtenstein.
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set between two ordinary chain-link fences, that administers a lethal dose of 5,100 volts at the slightest touch. The architecture of New Folsom is stark and futuristic. The buildings have smooth gray concrete façades, unadorned except for narrow slits for cell windows. Approximately a third of the inmates are serving life sentences; more than a thousand have committed at least one murder, nearly 500 have committed armed robbery, and nearly 200 have committed assault with a deadly weapon.
Inmates were placed in New Folsom while it was still under construction. The prison was badly overcrowded even before it was finished, in 1987. It has at times housed more than 300 inmates in its gymnasiums. New Folsom — like old Folsom, and like the rest of the California prison system — now operates at roughly double its intended capacity. Over the past twenty years the State of California has built twenty-one new prisons, added thousands of cells to existing facilities, and increased its inmate population eightfold. Nonviolent offenders have been responsible for most of that increase. The number of drug offenders imprisoned in the state today is more than twice the number of inmates who were imprisoned for all crimes in 1978. California now has the biggest prison system in the Western industrialized world, a system 40 percent bigger than the Federal Bureau of Prisons. The state holds more inmates in its jails and prisons than do France, Great Britain, Germany, Japan, Singapore, and the Netherlands combined. The California Department of Corrections predicts that at the current rate of expansion, barring a court order that forces a release of prisoners, it will run out of room eighteen months from now. Simply to remain at double capacity the state will need to open at least one new prison a year, every year, for the foreseeable future.
Today the United States has approximately 1.8 million people behind bars: about 100,000 in federal custody, 1.1 million in state custody, and 600,000 in local jails. Prisons hold inmates convicted of federal or state crimes; jails hold people awaiting trial or serving short sentences. The United States now imprisons more people than any other country in the world — perhaps half a million more than Communist China. The American inmate population has grown so large that it is difficult to comprehend: imagine the combined populations of Atlanta, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Des Moines, and Miami behind bars. “We have embarked on a great social experiment,” says Marc Mauer, the author of the upcoming book The Race to Incarcerate. “No other society in human history has ever imprisoned so many of its own citizens for the purpose of crime control.” The prison boom in the United States is a recent phenomenon. Throughout the first three quarters of this century the nation’s incarceration rate remained relatively stable, at about 110 prison inmates for every 100,000 people. In the mid-1970s the rate began to climb, doubling in the 1980s and then again in the 1990s. The rate is now 445 per 100,000; among adult men it is about 1,100 per 100,000. During the past two decades roughly a thousand new prisons and jails have been built in the United States. Nevertheless, America’s prisons are more overcrowded now than when the building spree began, and the inmate population continues to increase by 50,000 to 80,000 people a year.
The economist and legal scholar Michael K. Block, who believes that American sentencing policies are still not harsh enough, offers a straightforward explanation for why the United States has lately incarcerated so many people: “There are too many prisoners because there are too many criminals committing too many crimes.” Indeed, the nation’s prisons now hold about 150,000 armed robbers, 125,000 murderers, and 100,000 sex offenders — enough violent criminals to populate a medium-sized city such as Cincinnati. Few would dispute the need to remove these people from society. The level of violent crime in the United States, despite recent declines, still dwarfs that in Western Europe. But the proportion of offenders being sent to prison each year for violent crimes has actually fallen during the prison boom. In 1980 about half the people entering state prison were violent offenders; in 1995 less than a third had been convicted of a violent crime. The enormous increase in America’s inmate population can be explained in large part by the sentences given to people who have committed nonviolent offenses. Crimes that in other countries would usually lead to community service, fines, or drug treatment — or would not be considered crimes at all — in the United States now lead to a prison term, by far the most expensive form of punishment. “No matter what the question has been in American criminal justice over the last generation,” says Franklin E. Zimring, the director of the Earl Warren Legal Institute, “prison has been the answer.”
N January 17, 1961, President Dwight D. Eisenhower used his farewell address to issue a warning, as the United States continued its cold war with the Soviet Union. “In the councils of government,” Eisenhower said, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower had grown concerned about this new threat to democracy during the 1960 campaign, when fears of a “missile gap” with the Soviet Union were whipped up by politicians, the press, and defense contractors hoping for increased military spending. Eisenhower knew that no missile gap existed and that fear of one might lead to a costly, unnecessary response. “The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist,” Eisenhower warned. “We should take nothing for granted.”
Three decades after the war on crime began, the United States has developed a prison-industrial complex — a set of bureaucratic, political, and economic interests that encourage increased spending on imprisonment, regardless of the actual need. The prison-industrial complex is not a conspiracy, guiding the nation’s criminal-justice policy behind closed doors. It is a confluence of special interests that has given prison construction in the United States a seemingly unstoppable momentum. It is composed of politicians, both liberal and conservative, who have used the fear of crime to gain votes; impoverished rural areas where prisons have become a cornerstone of economic development; private companies that regard the roughly $35 billion spent each year on corrections not as a burden on American taxpayers but as a lucrative market; and government officials whose fiefdoms have expanded along with the inmate population. Since 1991 the rate of violent crime in the United States has fallen by about 20 percent, while the number of people in prison or jail has risen by 50 percent. The prison boom has its own inexorable logic. Steven R. Donziger, a young attorney who headed the National Criminal Justice Commission in 1996, explains the thinking: “If crime is going up, then we need to build more prisons; and if crime is going down, it’s because we built more prisons — and building even more prisons will therefore drive crime down even lower.”
The raw material of the prison-industrial complex is its inmates: the poor, the homeless, and the mentally ill; drug dealers, drug addicts, alcoholics, and a wide assortment of violent sociopaths. About 70 percent of the prison inmates in the United States are illiterate. Perhaps 200,000 of the country’s inmates suffer from a serious mental illness. A generation ago such people were handled primarily by the mental-health, not the criminal-justice, system. Sixty to 80 percent of the American inmate population has a history of substance abuse. Meanwhile, the number of drug-treatment slots in American prisons has declined by more than half since 1993. Drug treatment is now available to just one in ten of the inmates who need it. Among those arrested for violent crimes, the proportion who are African-American men has changed little over the past twenty years. Among those arrested for drug crimes, the proportion who are African-American men has tripled. Although the prevalence of illegal drug use among white men is approximately the same as that among black men, black men are five times as likely to be arrested for a drug offense. As a result, about half the inmates in the United States are African-American. One out of every fourteen black men is now in prison or jail. One out of every four black men is likely to be imprisoned at some point during his lifetime. The number of women sentenced to a year or more of prison has grown twelvefold since 1970. Of the 80,000 women now imprisoned, about 70 percent are nonviolent offenders. About 75 percent have children.
The prison-industrial complex is not only a set of interest groups and institutions. It is also a state of mind. The lure of big money is corrupting the nation’s criminal-justice system, replacing notions of public service with a drive for higher profits. The eagerness of elected officials to pass “tough-on-crime” legislation — combined with their unwillingness to disclose the true costs of these laws — has encouraged all sorts of financial improprieties. The inner workings of the prison-industrial complex can be observed in the state of New York, where the prison boom started, transforming the economy of an entire region; in Texas and Tennessee, where private prison companies have thrived; and in California, where the correctional trends of the past two decades have converged and reached extremes. In the realm of psychology a complex is an overreaction to some perceived threat. Eisenhower no doubt had that meaning in mind when, during his farewell address, he urged the nation to resist “a recurring temptation to feel that some spectacular and costly action could become the miraculous solution to all current difficulties.”
Liberal Legacy
HE origins of the prison-industrial complex can be dated to January of 1973. Senator Barry Goldwater had used the fear of crime to attract white middle-class voters a decade earlier, and Richard Nixon had revived the theme during the 1968 presidential campaign, but little that was concrete emerged from their demands for law and order. On the contrary, Congress voted decisively in 1970 to eliminate almost all federal mandatory-minimum sentences for drug offenders. Leading members of both political parties applauded the move. Mainstream opinion considered drug addiction to be largely a public-health problem, not an issue for the criminal courts. The Federal Bureau of Prisons was preparing to close large penitentiaries in Georgia, Kansas, and Washington. From 1963 to 1972 the number of inmates in California had declined by more than a fourth, despite the state’s growing population. The number of inmates in New York had fallen to its lowest level since at least 1950. Prisons were widely viewed as a barbaric and ineffective means of controlling deviant behavior. Then, on January 3, 1973, Nelson Rockefeller, the governor of New York, gave a State of the State address demanding that every illegal-drug dealer be punished with a mandatory prison sentence of life without parole.
Rockefeller was a liberal Republican who for a dozen years had governed New York with policies more closely resembling those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt than those of Ronald Reagan. He had been booed at the 1964 Republican Convention by conservative delegates; he still harbored grand political ambitions; and President Nixon would be ineligible for a third term in 1976. Rockefeller demonstrated his newfound commitment to law and order in 1971, when he crushed the Attica prison uprising. By proposing the harshest drug laws in the United States, he took the lead on an issue that would soon dominate the nation’s political agenda. In his State of the State address Rockefeller argued not only that all drug dealers should be imprisoned for life but also that plea-bargaining should be forbidden in such cases and that even juvenile offenders should receive life sentences.
The Rockefeller drug laws, enacted a few months later by the state legislature, were somewhat less draconian: the penalty for possessing four ounces of an illegal drug, or for selling two ounces, was a mandatory prison term of fifteen years to life. The legislation also included a provision that established a mandatory prison sentence for many second felony convictions, regardless of the crime or its circumstances. Rockefeller proudly declared that his state had enacted “the toughest anti-drug program in the country.” Other states eventually followed New York’s example, enacting strict mandatory-minimum sentences for drug offenses. A liberal Democrat, Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill, led the campaign to revive federal mandatory minimums, which were incorporated in the 1986 Anti-Drug Abuse Act. Nelson Rockefeller had set in motion a profound shift in American sentencing policy, but he never had to deal with the consequences. Nineteen months after the passage of his drug laws Rockefeller became Vice President of the United States.
When Mario Cuomo was first elected governor of New York, in 1982, he confronted some difficult choices. The state government was in a precarious fiscal condition, the inmate population had more than doubled since the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws, and the prison system had grown dangerously overcrowded. A week after Cuomo took office, inmates rioted at Sing Sing, an aging prison in Ossining. Cuomo was an old-fashioned liberal who opposed mandatory-minimum drug sentences. But the national mood seemed to be calling for harsher drug laws, not sympathy for drug addicts. President Reagan had just launched the War on Drugs; it was an inauspicious moment to buck the tide.
Unable to repeal the Rockefeller drug laws, Cuomo decided to build more prisons. The rhetoric of the drug war, however, was proving more popular than the financial reality. In 1981 New York’s voters had defeated a $500 million bond issue for new prison construction. Cuomo searched for an alternate source of financing, and decided to use the state’s Urban Development Corporation to build prisons. The corporation was a public agency that had been created in 1968 to build housing for the poor. Despite strong opposition from upstate Republicans, among others, it had been legislated into existence on the day of Martin Luther King Jr.’s funeral, to honor his legacy. The corporation was an attractive means of financing prison construction for one simple reason: it had the authority to issue state bonds without gaining approval from the voters.
New Prison construction, Franklin County, N.Y.
(Click on the photo above to see a larger version.)
Over the next twelve years Mario Cuomo added more prison beds in New York than all the previous governors in the state’s history combined. Their total cost, including interest, would eventually reach about $7 billion. Cuomo’s use of the Urban Development Corporation drew criticism from both liberals and conservatives. Robert Gangi, the head of the Correctional Association of New York, argued that Cuomo was building altogether the wrong sort of housing for the poor. The state comptroller, Edward V. Regan, a Republican, said that Cuomo was defying the wishes of the electorate, which had voted not to spend money on prisons, and that his financing scheme was costly and improper. Bonds issued by the Urban Development Corporation carried a higher rate of interest than the state’s general-issue bonds.
Legally the state’s new prisons were owned by the Urban Development Corporation and leased to the Department of Corrections. In 1991, as New York struggled to emerge from a recession, Governor Cuomo “sold” Attica prison to the corporation for $200 million and used the money to fill gaps in the state budget. In order to buy the prison, the corporation had to issue more bonds. The entire transaction could eventually cost New York State about $700 million.
The New York prison boom was a source of embarrassment for Mario Cuomo. At times he publicly called it “stupid,” an immoral waste of scarce state monies, an obligation forced on him by the dictates of the law. But it was also a source of political capital. Cuomo strongly opposed the death penalty, and building new prisons shielded him from Republican charges of being soft on crime. In his 1987 State of the State address, having just been re-elected by a landslide, Cuomo boasted of having put nearly 10,000 “dangerous felons” behind bars. The inmate population of New York’s prisons had indeed grown by roughly that number during his first term in office. But the proportion of offenders being incarcerated for violent crimes had fallen from 63 percent to 52 percent during those four years. In 1987 New York State sent almost a thousand fewer violent offenders to prison than it had in 1983. Despite having the “toughest anti-drug program” and one of the fastest-growing inmate populations in the nation, New York was hit hard by the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the violent crime that accompanied it. From 1983 to 1990 the state’s inmate population almost doubled — and yet during that same period the violent-crime rate rose 24 percent. Between the passage of the Rockefeller drug laws and the time Cuomo left office, in January of 1995, New York’s inmate population increased almost fivefold. And the state’s prison system was more overcrowded than it had been when the prison boom began.
Y using an unorthodox means of financing prison construction, Mario Cuomo turned the Urban Development Corporation into a rural development corporation that invested billions of dollars in upstate New York. Although roughly 80 percent of the state’s inmates came from New York City and its suburbs, high real-estate prices and opposition from community groups made it difficult to build correctional facilities there. Cuomo needed somewhere to put his new prisons; he formed a close working relationship with the state senator Ronald B. Stafford, a conservative Republican whose rural, Adirondack district included six counties extending from Lake George to the Canadian border. “Any time there’s an extra prison,” a Cuomo appointee told Newsdayin 1990, “Ron Stafford will take it.”
Stafford had represented this district, known as the North Country, for more than two decades. Orphaned as a child, he had been adopted by a family in the upstate town of Dannemora. The main street of the town was dominated by the massive stone wall around Clinton, a notorious maximum-security prison. His adoptive father was a correctional officer at Clinton, and Stafford spent much of his childhood within the prison’s walls. He developed great respect for correctional officers, and viewed their profession as an honorable one; he believed that prisons could give his district a real economic boost. Towns in the North Country soon competed with one another to attract new prisons. The Republican Party controlled the state senate, and prison construction became part of the political give and take with the Cuomo administration. Of the twenty-nine correctional facilities authorized during the Cuomo years, twenty-eight were built in upstate districts represented by Republican senators.
When most people think of New York, they picture Manhattan. In fact, two thirds of the state’s counties are classified as rural. Perhaps no other region in the United States has so wide a gulf between its urban and rural populations. People in the North Country — which includes the Adirondack State Park, one of the nation’s largest wilderness areas — tend to be politically conservative, taciturn, fond of the outdoors, and white. New York City and the North Country have very little in common. One thing they do share, however, is a high rate of poverty.
Twenty-five years ago the North Country had two prisons; now it has eighteen correctional facilities, and a nineteenth is under construction. They run the gamut from maximum-security prisons to drug-treatment centers and boot camps. One of the first new facilities to open was Ray Brook, a federal prison that occupies the former Olympic Village at Lake Placid. Other prisons have opened in abandoned factories and sanatoriums. For the most part North Country prisons are tucked away, hidden by trees, nearly invisible amid the vastness and beauty of the Adirondacks. But they have brought profound change. Roughly one out of every twenty people in the North Country is a prisoner. The town of Dannemora now has more inmates than inhabitants.
The traditional anchors of the North Country economy — mining, logging, dairy farms, and manufacturing — have been in decline for years. Tourism flourishes in most towns during the summer months. According to Ram Chugh, the director of the Rural Services Institute at the State University of New York at Potsdam, the North Country’s per capita income has long been about 40 percent lower than the state’s average per capita income. The prison boom has provided a huge infusion of state money to an economically depressed region — one of the largest direct investments the state has ever made there. In addition to the more than $1.5 billion spent to build correctional facilities, the prisons now bring the North Country about $425 million in annual payroll and operating expenditures. That represents an annual subsidy to the region of more than $1,000 per person. The economic impact of the prisons extends beyond the wages they pay and the local services they buy. Prisons are labor-intensive institutions, offering year-round employment. They are recession-proof, usually expanding in size during hard times. And they are nonpolluting — an important consideration in rural areas where other forms of development are often blocked by environmentalists. Prisons have brought a stable, steady income to a region long accustomed to a highly seasonal, uncertain economy.
Anne Mackinnon, who grew up in the North Country and wrote about its recent emergence as New York’s “Siberia” for Adirondack Life magazine, says the prison boom has had an enormous effect on the local culture. Just about everyone now seems to have at least one relative who works in corrections. Prison jobs have slowed the exodus from small towns, by allowing young people to remain in the area. The average salary of a correctional officer in New York State is about $36,000 — more than 50 percent higher than the typical salary in the North Country. The job brings health benefits and a pension. Working as a correctional officer is one of the few ways that men and women without college degrees can enjoy a solid middle-class life there. Although prison jobs are stressful and dangerous, they are viewed as a means of preserving local communities. So many North Country residents have become correctional officers over the past decade that those just starting out must work for years in prisons downstate, patiently waiting for a job opening at one of the facilities in the Adirondacks.
http://www.correctionscorp.com/
America’s Leader
in Partnership Corrections
Welcome to CCA, the nation’s leading provider of correctional solutions to federal, state and local government.
Our company – the first of its kind – was founded in 1983. Our approach to public-private partnership in corrections combines the cost savings and innovation of business with the strict guidelines and consistent oversight of government. This has produced proven results for more than a quarter-century.
CCA designs, builds, manages and operates correctional facilities and detention centers on behalf of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the United States Marshals Service, nearly half of all states and nearly a dozen counties across the country.
CCA benefits America by protecting public safety, employing the best people in solid careers, rehabilitating inmates, giving back to communities, and bringing innovative security to government corrections – all while consistently saving hardworking taxpayers’ dollars.
We are America’s Leader in Partnership Corrections.
CCA lobbys to take over the Bureau of Indian Affairs Prison System
CCA Spent $2.5 million on Lobbying Federal Government in 2007
Mon, 03/03/2008 – 5:03pm — Bob
Via the T. Don Hutto blog, Forbes has an article detailing that Corrections Corporation of America, operator of many private prisons in Texas including the T. Don Hutto family prison, spent a whopping $2.5 million lobbying the federal government in 2007. This amount is on top of the $180,000-$235,000 that CCA spent lobbying in Texas in 2007.
According to the article, the lobbying came in three major areas: 1) lobbying to privatize the Bureau of Indian Affairs prison system, 2) lobbying against the Public Safety Act which would outlaw private prisons, and 3) lobbying against the Private Prison Information Act which would give the public the same access to private prison information as public prisons.
In addition to lobbying Congress, CCA lobbied the Bureau of Indian Affairs, the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Justice and other federal agencies. Homeland Security and DOJ are big targets for private prison corporations because they hand out lucrative federal detention contracts, which have become a boom industry for private prisons as the immigration law becomes more punitive.
The article goes on to list some of CCA’s lobbyists who include such well-heeled folks as:
Bart VerHulst, previously chief of staff for former Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn.;
Mike Quinlan, former director of the Federal Bureau of Prisons; and
Gus Puryear, previously counsel to Frist and an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney.
Followers of private prison news may know that Gus Puryear, in addition to being a former CCA lawyer and lobbyist and aid to Frist and Cheney, is a current nominee for the federal judgeship in Nashville. His nomination has drawn considerable opposition.
One of the ironies of the private prison industry is that, because the company’s profit is all garnered through government contracts, all $2.5 million spent by CCA on lobbying was originally government money that CCA made off previous government contracts. We’ll keep you updated on further news about private prison corporations lobbying.
From The Texas Prison Bidness Website (that is where you live right?)
CCA releases their 2010 first quarter federal lobbying expenditures
Sat, 05/15/2010 – 2:36pm — Andrew
Corrections Corporation federal lobbying figures were recently released for the first quarter of 2010, and CCA was reported to have spent a quarter of a million dollars this quarter alone. According to Forbes (Associated Press, “Corrections Corp. spent $250,000 on 1Q lobbying,” May 13, 2010):
The company reported lobbying officials on provisions in a Homeland Security funding bill dealing with immigration detentions. It also lobbied on Justice Department funding related to private prisons.
Corrections Corp. also lobbied on a bill by Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee, D-Texas, to require private prison operators to comply with open-records laws. And it lobbied on a bill by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas, to let states request the jamming of wireless signals in prisons. Federal law lets federal agencies jam phone signals, but doesn’t extend that power to state or local agencies. Hutchison’s bill passed the Senate last year but is stalled in the House…
…Corrections Corp. lobbied Congress, the Homeland Security Department and the Bureau of Prisons.
At this current rate of $250,000 in a quarter, CCA would continue their trend of spending around $1 million each year on Federal-level lobbying efforts. As this graphic from Open Secrets illustrates, CCA had a significant drop in lobbying expenditures around the time of the economic recession’s start, and if the other three 2010 quarters play out like the first one, we can expect to see a similar number for this year.
Another consistent factor withing the lobbying sphere is H.R. 1889. CCA has been lobbying against the Private Prison Information Act since 2007. This act, if passed, would subject private prisons to the same laws as public prisons with regards to the retrieval of federal information. This resolution is the same one mentioned in the Associated Press article, written just a few days ago.
I was interested to see if CCA’s trend of the steady funding of Federal lobbying was also true on the Texas State level. What I found was a smaller effort to lobby Texas officials (the maximum value of contracts column refers to the total maximum payments given to the lobbyists via their contracts, and the lobbyist contracts column refers to the number of registered lobbyists in the State of Texas).
From Critical Resistance Website FAQs: A large percentage of those in Critical Resistance are Communists, Socialists, and People of Color
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS:
QUESTION: But, what about the murderers, rapists and pedophiles?
Obviously, murder, rape and the sexual abuse of children are very serious problems, and obviously, acts of great harm bring up feelings of anger and fear. Given how grave these problems are, we need to examine whether locking someone in a cage is the best way to prevent these harms?
Public Policy 101 dictates that the solution needs to address the problem. It is disastrous public policy to propose ill suited solutions simply because you don’t solve the problem.
It is also important to note that of the approximately 2.5 million people locked in US prisons and jails only a very small number – about 1 % — are there for these horrendous offenses. Many people do not believe that locking someone in a cage is an answer to drug addiction or poverty. If locking someone up does not address these problems, why would locking someone in a cage be any more of an effective answer to harm between people?
Prisons are not about reducing harm in our communities and in fact, our own experiences and studies have found that imprisonment actually serves to destabilize our communities. Prisons are violent institutions that only perpetuate violence and prisons as a public policy solution have failed to create safe communities.
QUESTION: If prisons and policing aren’t the answers, then what?
The answer lies in developing systems of harm prevention and when harm still occurs, because it will, systems of accountability and ways to address the causes of the harm that do not rely on the failed, back end response of locking someone up.
Even the most horrendous forms of harm do not happen without a reason. Awareness of why harm occurred is the first step in preventing future harms. For example, we know that people who commit acts of harm often have been harmed themselves in the past. We also can not see individual acts of harm in isolation, as disconnected with the larger the world, the social and economic conditions that lead to harm.
Abolition does not mean that we don’t hold people accountable for their actions. But punishment creates the opposite of accountability — a sense of social isolation instead of responsibility to others. If anything, punishment makes future harm more likely since it encourages people to lash out. People who have seriously harmed another need appropriate forms of support, supervision and social and economic resources.
We don’t claim to have all the answers. In reality, we know that the dominance of prisons as an response to harm has kept many alternatives from developing. But we also do know that alternatives exist. In post-apartheid South Africa, for example, rather than try, punish and potentially imprison those who had done harm to others under apartheid, the new government set up a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. The Commission heard testimony of people who took responsibility for their actions and were held accountable without imprisonment. While the system may not have functioned perfectly, it does provide an alternative model for even horrendous offenses such as the genocide that occurred under apartheid.
QUESTION: Isn’t abolition utopian folly? Abolition doesn’t seem like a real possibility in my lifetime or ever?
Abolition is not utopian folly. In the history of the world, there have been many institutions that appeared unchangeable. The Roman Empire lasted a millennium before it fell and, just 25 years before its fall, its expansion was extraordinary.
Until the late 18th century, when the British slavery abolitionist movement began, the idea of eliminating one of the fundamental aspects of the British Empire’s economy was unimaginable. Yet through persistent effort, 12 individuals who first met in a London print shop in 1787 managed to create enough social turbulence that 51 years later, the slave ships stopped sailing, and slavery was abolished in Britain.
In the US, the first slavery abolitionists arose with the American Revolution, but it took almost a century to abolish slavery in the US. Meanwhile, slavery abolitionists were represented in the dominant media as extremists and fanatics.
Similarly, segregation ruled the South until it was outlawed almost a century after the abolition of slavery. Many who lived under Jim Crow could not envision a legal system not specifically defined by racial inequality.
Inventor Buckminster Fuller compared the potential impact of a single individual on large societal problems to that of a ship’s rudder: The rudder is relatively tiny, but by creating turbulence in the water it moves the ship.
Historian Adam Hoschschild wrote: “The fact that the battle against slavery was won must give us pause when considering great modern injustices, such as the gap between rich and poor, nuclear proliferation and war. None of these problems will be solved overnight, or perhaps even in the fifty years it took to end British slavery. But they will not be solved at all unless people see them as both outrageous and solvable.”
QUESTION: But how will we be safe without prisons and policing?
Take a minute and think about what makes you feel safe – your home? Your family? Your friends? While some people may say that prisons and police in your community make you feel safe, many of us most impacted by prisons and policing will not.
We see that prisons and rampant policing have served to destabilize our communities, largely communities of color and poor communities – removing family members from our communities, draining resources for essential social services, and pushing us to fear each other.
We know that crime rates began to fall long before the prison boom of the 1980′s. We know that states with more people in prison and more prisons did not experience any more dramatic drops in crime than states with lower incarceration rates and fewer prisons. Similarly, we know that counties in California that chose to not strictly enforce that state’s Three Strikes law experienced drops in crime similar to counties that strictly enforced the law. In short, we know that prisons don’t make us safe. And we know that having our basic needs met does make us feel safe.
First, to be clear:
I agree with the implication that the private-prison industry is out of control.
I agree that budgetary priorities are misdirected.
I agree there is a significant profit motivation that drives lobbying, etc.
I agree the criminal justice system needs immediate redress.
However, none of these are what I actually wrote about, which we’re not refuting.
Where I do not agree is that drug legalization is a solution for any of these matters in a society that is, at its core, unwilling and unable to deal with fundamental questions of race and white supremacy. I believe, if it isn’t drugs, people of color will be policed for another reason (as history bears out). I believe the drug legalization movement is a soft capitalist one, which indirectly seeks a space to make a place for individual entrepreneurs, small farmers and big business to profit.
If you do not agree with the thesis of what I wrote, it would help me to understand the substance of those criticisms. Asking me to defend stuff I did not write about in the original piece, however, distracts from the content of my article, which I believe is sound.
“Seriously? You see yourself living in a wold where you and whoever would follow me around to police my herb gathering activities? Really?”
I think you misread my statement. I do not believe society should operate in a fashion in which anyone can do whatever they please, regardless of its impact on the collective good. If your “herb gathering activities” have a detrimental impact on the community as a whole, in my opinion your right to do so is superseded by the community’s needs. All but the most extreme on the libertarian end of the spectrum understand the sanctity of engaging in any activity because it suits you personally is not an absolute right, whatever reasoning for same one claims.
“But when it comes to my life and my culture, when I am doing something that has no connection to you or anyone else?”
The idea that we can do things in the world that are strictly for ourselves and have no impact on anyone is a myth. Such a myth is capitalist in character, as it leans on the idea of radical individualism and agency as a primary value.
The practice of culture, if it’s an actual practice of culture, is a collective act, historically and practically.
In my opinion, if your activities have a detrimental impact on the community, your individual desires are not more important than the collective need. But that is just my opinion. Fortunately, you live in a society where many people share your view.
Thanks for the links on private prisons. I have worked in prison abolition movements in the past and believe it’s well documented how these corporations seek to provide private industry solutions to what have been public sector roles (as a function of seeking profit). Immigrant detention centers are one model for this. However, these issues are not what I asked about.
I am looking forward to learning more about private-prison industry is lobbying on behalf of drug prohibition, specifically — not three strikes or nonviolent sentencing, etc. Both of those categories, certainly, are far wider than drugs. Again, I am guessing you are correct, but would like to learn more.
Much appreciated. And hey, if you’ve got enough time to pull all this research, you ought to consider being a regular site contributor. We can always use the help! :-)
From Families Against Mandatory Minimums
Stephanie Nodd
Stephanie Nodd
Sentence: 30 years
Offense: Conspiracy and possession with intent to distribute cocaine base; aiding and abetting
Priors: Stephanie was convicted of receiving stolen property and theft of property for shoplifting clothing from a department store at age 16.
Year sentenced: 1990
Age at sentencing: 23
Projected release date: Nov. 11, 2016
Stephanie grew up in Mobile, Alabama. She became pregnant in ninth grade and dropped out of school to care for her child. Stephanie was barely 20 years old in 1988 when she met John, a handsome drug dealer with lots of money. John had moved to Mobile to sell crack with another established dealer. He met Stephanie, showered her with compliments, and promised to reward her generously for helping him set up in the area. Stephanie introduced John to people and local drug spots, sold crack to customers on the street and later delivered cocaine and picked up money for him. In return, John gave her cash; money which Stephanie, a single mother, needed to provide for her three young children. A little over a month after meeting John, Stephanie was arrested and held accountable for over 6.5 kilos of crack cocaine that was estimated to have been sold in the Mobile area from July 1987 to August 1988.
Stephanie was charged as a manager in the drug conspiracy and sentenced to 30 years in federal prison. Although Stephanie had no adult criminal record, she received a longer sentence than almost all of her codefendants, including John.
Two decades later, Stephanie is still incarcerated. While in prison, she has earned her GED and taken college courses, obtained her forklift license, culinary certification, graduated from computer programming and completed many other programs. In August 2006, Stephanie’s mother, the primary caretaker for her children, passed away. Stephanie was granted a five day unescorted furlough to attend the funeral. Elizabeth, Stephanie’s teenage daughter, was able to spend a few precious days with her mother who she has never seen outside of prison walls. Stephanie writes, “I cried myself asleep on the plane [coming back to prison] because I had to leave the people I love so dearly. I know I made some bad choices in my life and I take full responsibility for the wrong that I have done.” Unless the law changes, Stephanie’s foolish decision to sell drugs in her youth will ensure that she spend three decades behind bars, isolated from her family.
Not that you care about this but Corrections Corporation of America actually wrote the AZ 1070 law. Their lobbyists love the idea of getting paid to house all the deportees until they are deported.
Not to mention the fact that no corporate prison is a union shop.
If I wasn’t already positive that private prison profiteers are evil, I assure you you convinced me of that!
“The idea that we can do things in the world that are strictly for ourselves and have no impact on anyone is a myth. Such a myth is capitalist in character, as it leans on the idea of radical individualism and agency as a primary value.”
I agree with this statement when it comes to issues of pollution, capitalism, guns, etc and I am no libertarian by any stretch and hate those jerks. Do you understand native Tribal sovereignty and the fact that First nations people were being arrested for practicing our traditional ceremonies until 1970′s and that many if not the large majority of First nations people consider this continent to be under illegal occupation? From your pictures I would guess you are First nations yourself. How I define my society does not include this vast brainwashed Christian Jihad. Sorry that is just my perspective. They have no authority over me. That is not a capitalisit perspective it is an anti-occupationist perspective.
http://thephoenix.com/Boston/News/73092-Freedom-watch-Jailhouse-bloc/?page=1#TOPCONTENT
Please see this extensive 5 page article from the Boston Phoenix on CCA lobbyists and other lobbying for stiffer sentences.
Page One. I will not post the rest if you are interested follow the link.
With aromatic puffs of change, Bay State stoners rejoiced on Election Day. But even the haziest of revelers may have missed the full significance of Question 2, a statewide ballot initiative to decriminalize marijuana possession in small amounts. Not only will this bring more humane and responsible marijuana laws, it will also suppress — however slightly — an insidious, contemporary offshoot of what President Dwight Eisenhower famously referred to as the “military-industrial complex”: the idea that if private industry and government joined in promoting ever-increasing defense spending, war as well as national bankruptcy were more likely.
Almost a half-century later, that mindset has extended to both the local and federal law-and-order sectors, which have argued for, and experienced, virtually unabated growth. Today, law-enforcement groups regularly lobby against criminal-punishment reforms, and for the creation of new criminal statutes and overly harsh prison sentences. While these efforts are cloaked as calls for public safety, they are essentially creating more business for themselves.
The problem has become so widespread that some private correctional corporations — companies that subcontract services, and even privately owned jails and prisons, to all levels of government — have even lobbied the government to enact and maintain ever broader criminal laws and higher sentences. Those private prisons are now rolling in the profit, and taking on more prisoners every day as federal and state prisons run out of room to house their inmates.
But these lobbyists’ success — and that of various law-enforcement groups — has given rise to a veritable “prison-industrial complex” that not only uses fear to suppress these groups’ true intentions — it leaves taxpayers footing the bill.
Bleak house of detention
It was with these self-aggrandizing interests in mind that the Massachusetts Districts Attorneys’ Association (MDAA) and other tough-on-crime groups fiercelyopposedthe marijuana-decriminalization referendum.
After all, if the penalties for minor marijuana possession were to remain on the statute books, more police, prosecutors, prison guards, and parole officers — and their lucrative overtime — would also be retained.
To their dismay, however, Question 2 passed by an overwhelming 65 to 35 percent voter margin, and will be implemented 30 days after election results are certified. As a result, many law-enforcement officials may soon be without an important source of job security and additional revenue — namely, the $30 million a year (as one study by a Harvard economics professor estimated) spent enforcing the soon-to-be-history current marijuana-possession laws.
Never mind that the forthcoming statutory reform is, from even a moderate law-and-order perspective, relatively benign. According to Question 2, anyone caught with less than one ounce will forfeit the substance and pay a $100 fine, while minors will additionally have to complete a drug-awareness program (including group sessions and community service). Current penalties for growing and trafficking in marijuana, as well as the prohibition against driving while high, will remain exactly as they are.
These facts were conveniently left out of the MDAA’s efforts to “inform” voters.The group could not legally make direct contributions to ballot campaigns — publicly funded groups are unable to do so, thanks to a 1978 Supreme Judicial Court decision — yet in opposing Question 2, it still managed to fuel a whisper campaign and add misleading info to its Web site (hosted, by the way, on the state’s “.gov” domain).
And yes Obama pulled a bunch of troops out of Iraq but guess what we increased? Private Sevurity and Private Prisons are getting contracts in Iraq. The privatization of every sector of American government including our military and yes prisons. It will be hard to get these snakes back in the basket.
From the above posted Boston Phoenix article
“The country’s largest private prison provider, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), spent more than $2.7 million from 2006 through September 2008 on lobbying for stricter laws. Last year alone, the company, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, generated $133 million in net income”
All Right I will shut up now. Sorry
What an absolutely awesome debate/discussion, gentlemen! I took so much away from this most enlightening back & forth & LOVE the CIVILITY displayed by 2 awesome thinkers/debators who I assume would be sort of on the edges of society in everyday life, not saying you’re anarchists, but definitely outside the authoritarian mode a bit, aren’t ya?! Can you imagine a society filled with wonderful awesome free thinkers like yourselves & just the majority of people on this site?…what a wonderful place we could have!
I agree with the need to question drug legalisation. After all, is that not what pharamaceutical companies always did, sell drugs? They even sell opiates, to hospitals! I recently (6 months ago) began a new marital relationship with a man who literally grew up on the streets in Kings Cross, Australia’s most notorious red light district, which is a place possibly almost as bad as much of the streets of America’s big cities. He is some good number of days into the 1001 required (ala Arabian Nights story given me for the purpose), of withdrawal for him to feel enabled to live clean, after receiving an exorcism from a traditional medicine man, and then using one last time to be sure of himself; that he will not be using an opiate again. I am myself quite naive to the inner worlds of illicit drug sellers and buyers, but quite a lot of the discourse in this article is relevant in my mind, for whatever my opinion is worth as a white person who has not been dependent on such substances, but is married to a black man whom has suffered serious dependency from pre-adolescence, to opiates, and also used speed regularly at times, etc. We have been watching a lot of American films recently, about the real life stories of those few narcotics traffickers who had to give their evidence in open, and my husband had no need to mention that the cocaine suppliers in Australia, on the whole find our market too small to worry about; but in respect of how we relate to the police here, about the use of home grown weed, we seem to have made ourselves very relevant, sort of by accident of having wanted to access local crops rather than having to tolerate use of plants that were sprayed with eviler substances than our health wants to endure. Many Australians, white and black, hope for full legalization of marijhuana one day, and in the Australian Capital Territory, and in South Australia, it is already decriminalized, so the police can only charge trafficking with an offense, but give an on the spot fine for possession. The worst of the story is, that in those two places, police have also (unofficially of course) promoted use of heroin, so as to attempt to prove that cannabis lead to harder drugs. Another consideration is that the illicit trade of opiates is today heavily dependent in Australia, on prescription supply of morphine, which many users prefer using because there is less risk involved when the amount and quality are regulated by government producers. In particular however, it it is the black users of opiates whom find themselves preferring morphine produced from our home grown poppy crops, mainly because the supply avoids so many exchanges in which police needed to be bought off, and therefore, exchanges in which blacker folk are made more at risk by the racism of the state. To move the discourse into a higher debate, I want to assert that it is relevant to include opiates in the discourse, for a few obvious reasons, and one less obvious reason. Obviously, opiates are already a legal but controlled substance. Also opioid drugs, (like methadone etc) are often also prescribed to folk with emotional dependence on opiates, but when the opioids were often more addictive, and their only advantage was being free, and legal. But most relevant yet most obscured by the users of opiates, was the fact that the way to live through withdrawal, (ie reduce the pain enough), is to behave in a manner opposite to what feels most natural, and in particular, to behave in a manner opposite to how the cultures which sustain a black consciousness, engage us in self belief. Enough police use the shit such that they know this, and have extensively projected upon every black user of opiates, that their black skin makes it impossible to give up their use of. We can prove that the police have been terribly wrong, but the question is, who do we need to prove that to, and do the “good guys” already know how bad police were, or not? Asking ourselves about the relevance and usefulness of campaigning for the legalization of many normally illicit or controlled substances is a most worthy academic pass time. I believe that the issue touches on a much larger issue about the relevance of legislative democracy. We ought not let legislators define reality.
After further thought I want to add a bit more information here. Opioids are often available by prescription especially in cases where longer term opiate users have developed epilepsy as a result of drug use; and morphine is often available by prescription for anybody whom has had a serious accident damaging to their bones and tendons, which is something that becomes more likely to happen after longer term opiate use, (opiates negatively effect co-ordination and speech in longer term users, such that they come across as though lacking basic intelligence, but are often very bright, but have simply been disenfranchised by poverty, from accessing any way to withdraw without losing everything of their life’s work, including memory for the first three years after withdrawing); and so it is the case that medical professionals (many of whom have experience dealing with opiate dependent patients whose dependencies were not a result of illicit use) often show a good deal of compassion for heroin users, and seek to enable them in whatever ways they can find legal. This is an essential aspect to the whole question, since the nature of opiate withdrawal, means that users are more likely to feel able to withdraw when given permission to use, than when use is considered to be wrong. I think my vote would go to who can enable legalization and decriminalization, but also some level of real regulation of supply, which would not be dependent upon organised crime, and could be sustained within minimal regulatory control of police. When the use of drugs is a lesser crime than the other crimes caused by drugs being illegal, and the police force harboured racist conduct from its officers, then legalization can become favourable to black folk, but surely it is not a white drug sellers perogative to say so.
another factor worth considering, is that legalization will make drug use more visible in some cases, and less visible in others
when will it need to be more visible, and when less visible?
At times drug users violate their own cultural beliefs, and the cultural beliefs of their neighbours, by hopping between two different cultural bias; so when that was happening, exposing their problem, encourages everybody to hold them accountable into both cultures, as is necessary. At times, what drug users need most, is acculturation into a mode of belief that enables them to witness how different cultures have the same meanings; but that kind of learning is very expensive for a community to provide. Expensive, but essentially the hidden component of drug legalization!!!
“Drug laws MAY be draconian, but to use examples of abuse is rather easy. ” What a load of crap. I work w/ prisoners where I receive letters from them asking for help. Too many people are behind bars not for committing violent crimes but for non-violent crimes and drug use is one of them. Drug addiction should not be a crime but treated as a health problem, but if our society is not going to provide treatment for health issues then we will use jails and prisons to deal w/ non-violent, self abuse and this is just STUPID.
Black people make up 12.4 percent of the US population yet they are 39.4 percent of the US prison population and are 41 percent of those inmates on death row. Black children are 9 times more likely to have an incarcerated parent in prison! The fact that the people busted w/ crack cocaine verses cocaine powder get more time is clearly racist! More than 14 percent of the unemployed Americans are black men. So, if people are kept from getting a job that can support their lives or families then crime becomes the only avenue for feeding mouths and sheltering bodies. Selling or using drugs is a symptom not the disease! Poverty is the disease that drives most people to use or sell drugs.
I think this analysis is very weak and wrong-headed. The first role incarceration plays is SOCIAL CONTROL to keep people pacified. Secondly, it is a money making venture. You only have to look at the private prison companies that are traded on the stock market (like CCA) and then there is cheap prison labor that compares to or in some states like Georgia, BEAT the cost of Chinese labor of 12 cents an hour!
Pitiful reasons not to decriminalize drugs!
Hi Mindy,
While you point out the argument I make is weak, I appreciate you taking the time to address it.
As I wrote, I take no issue with the various statistics one can present about Black criminalization in the United States and elsewhere. Where I differ is in not believing that criminalization of Black people will end with drug legalization. The United States was founded on a basis of colonialisn, white supremacy and capital. Legalizing drugs may certainly change the nature of how laws are enforced, but the country’s long embrace of racial disparities will remain until it’s addressed frankly and openly. I can’t fall for the legalization movement’s arguments on these issues; such a movement won’t talk about white supremacy and power, and such are necessary conversations.
I’ve heard theories of incarceration as pacification tool. Don’t find them to be particularly compelling, nor do most people. Thanks again.
@Zari –
who do you think are bringing in the hard-core drugs like heroin and cocaine? the rich capitalists ALREADY bring in illegal drugs…CIA..remember the Iran/Contra Affair?? CIA was flying in cocaine to flood South Central LA in the mid 80′s. Look up “Operation Greenback” it was a drug money laundering operation that George HW Bush stopped when he was president to make sure drugs were not stopped from coming into the USA.
Regardless of whether or not drugs are legalized is not a problem for rich white people to keep from profiting from. They NEVER do time for their use or sales of drugs. That is reserved for poor and non-whites in particular.
@ernesto –
Hi Ernesto. I think you pointed out something worth thinking about again…”Legalizing drugs may certainly change the nature of how laws are enforced”
Law enforcement is a total separate issue from the issue of drug legalization. I know from listening to people like Mumia Abu Jamal that the court system is set up to prosecute and not to provide justice to the people. I heard him once say that the way the courts operate w/ regard to the poor or those who are targets for incarceration is that not only do you have the state prosecution against the defendant but you can easily have the judge against the defendant and WORSE…your court appointed council can be against you…how many times do defendants get their council come to them and offer them a plea deal (to avoid a trial procedure)and they end up doing time for a crime they never executed?
I have a letter right here to share w/ you from a man in a NC prison dated 2/2/11 here is his sad story (and he is in need of help)
“I lost to a jury trial on a drug charge. From the beginning, the case was weak. But a month before the trial the DA noticed that the drugs were lost. They didn’t have them. I went to trial for possessing something they couldn’t even produce. I was convicted and sentenced to a harsher sentence because they enhanced my crime to habitual felon. Do you know of anyone or any org. that can help me?”
Great…a guy goes to prison because the courts were and are corrupt…having one less ridiculous reason to incarcerate a human being sounds good to me.