Hi Leslie!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your memo. I feel that you did a nice job of laying out the issue and the harms. It wasn’t just about the fact that incarceration rates were biased towards black people but the harms that drug laws have on society as a whole and that you touched on the history behind it. I think it would be interesting if you mentioned the war on drugs and its link to the voting rights act of 65′. Maybe you could also touch on how drugs get into black neighborhoods to begin with . Maybe there could be a policy change in that . I also loved that you touched on how not much money is actually put into rehabilitation (which i thought was the goal of prison ).
HI Lesile,
Drugs have troubled nations for ages. Throughout the years, each society has had different perspectives toward drugs and their usage. Drug addicts in the United States are mostly viewed as criminals who should be locked away from main society. Is this a way of helping them or the opposite? To my understanding if you want to help someone you try to understand the core problem. If authorities wanted to eliminate the problems related to drugs they would have acted differently and not placed people who use drugs behind bars – furthering their addictive tendencies because prisons are infested with cartels and gangs that bring the drugs into the prisons, oftentimes with the help of guards that get cuts from the profit. Imprisonment is not a solution. Your memorandum perfectly sums up the actual causes that the war on drugs was conducted for – racial discrimination and placing more people of color behind bars. This was mostly targeted towards African American women and men in minority communities. All laws that were imposed targeted mainly these communities. Nixon’s war on drugs was not helpful at all. It might visually cut down the drug trade or usage; however, it didn’t help those who truly needed resources to free themselves from their addictions at all. People have been incarcerated for small crimes, such as marijuana usage. Nixon categorized marijuana as a Schedule One drug, which is the most restrictive category of drugs. Let’s also not forget the Rockefeller Law that gave penalty of at least 15 years and maximum of 25 years for drug trade or usage. I took a course on Drugs and Society where we would study the actual harms of drugs and its media representations. Most of the times the drugs that send people behind the bars are the less harmful ones. There is a very interesting book written by Michelle Alexander and it is called “The New Jim Crow”. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this subject, as it examines the outcomes that incarcerations cause to not just imprison people but also their families. According to the author, the war on drugs is a new way of segregating people and I agree with this reasoning.
It’s so important to understand the ineffectiveness of the so-called “war on drugs” especially as it relates to the disproportionate negative effect that it’s had on black communities and your data/statistics illustrate this point very well.
Hi Leslie!
I thoroughly enjoyed reading your memo. I feel that you did a nice job of laying out the issue and the harms. It wasn’t just about the fact that incarceration rates were biased towards black people but the harms that drug laws have on society as a whole and that you touched on the history behind it. I think it would be interesting if you mentioned the war on drugs and its link to the voting rights act of 65′. Maybe you could also touch on how drugs get into black neighborhoods to begin with . Maybe there could be a policy change in that . I also loved that you touched on how not much money is actually put into rehabilitation (which i thought was the goal of prison ).
HI Lesile,
Drugs have troubled nations for ages. Throughout the years, each society has had different perspectives toward drugs and their usage. Drug addicts in the United States are mostly viewed as criminals who should be locked away from main society. Is this a way of helping them or the opposite? To my understanding if you want to help someone you try to understand the core problem. If authorities wanted to eliminate the problems related to drugs they would have acted differently and not placed people who use drugs behind bars – furthering their addictive tendencies because prisons are infested with cartels and gangs that bring the drugs into the prisons, oftentimes with the help of guards that get cuts from the profit. Imprisonment is not a solution. Your memorandum perfectly sums up the actual causes that the war on drugs was conducted for – racial discrimination and placing more people of color behind bars. This was mostly targeted towards African American women and men in minority communities. All laws that were imposed targeted mainly these communities. Nixon’s war on drugs was not helpful at all. It might visually cut down the drug trade or usage; however, it didn’t help those who truly needed resources to free themselves from their addictions at all. People have been incarcerated for small crimes, such as marijuana usage. Nixon categorized marijuana as a Schedule One drug, which is the most restrictive category of drugs. Let’s also not forget the Rockefeller Law that gave penalty of at least 15 years and maximum of 25 years for drug trade or usage. I took a course on Drugs and Society where we would study the actual harms of drugs and its media representations. Most of the times the drugs that send people behind the bars are the less harmful ones. There is a very interesting book written by Michelle Alexander and it is called “The New Jim Crow”. I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in this subject, as it examines the outcomes that incarcerations cause to not just imprison people but also their families. According to the author, the war on drugs is a new way of segregating people and I agree with this reasoning.
It’s so important to understand the ineffectiveness of the so-called “war on drugs” especially as it relates to the disproportionate negative effect that it’s had on black communities and your data/statistics illustrate this point very well.