2.9 Incarceration Rates and the War on Drugs
Adam Tyler
From my notes on incarceration rates and the War on Drugs, I've learned that no matter what, the War on Drugs has not made things much better in America. Unsurprisingly, America has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, even surpassing places like Russia and China. America only has 5% of the world's population and the country has more than 25% of incarceration population. A lot of people tend to blame this on the War on Drugs which was put into action by who I think is America's worst president, Richard Nixon. Many people accused Nixon of just making up the war for an excuse to jail hippies and black people, a lot of whom smoked crack cocaine, which increased mass incarceration as seen in the graph below. However, some people actually think the War on Drugs wasn't actually responsible for mass incarceration. There was a more simple reason than that. It was because prisons held several people in for violent offenses, not people like drug offenders. The real problem for mass incarceration was the higher rates of murder in America, but yet the War on Drugs didn't really help the situation. This is actually still a controversial discussion as to whether it was the War on Drugs or the higher count of violent crimes that caused mass incarceration. I myself am deciding what I think what caused mass incarceration, the War on Drugs or violent crime?
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| Mass incarceration increasing |
I could say The War on Drugs certainly put a lot of drug offenders in jail at the time. Unfortunately, people discovered that black males were being imprisoned almost 8 times higher than white males. This lead to a lot of outrage, believing that this war was just a front to be racist once more. Although Nixon claimed that the DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) was heavily aimed at marijuana users, that was said to be more dangerous than heroin, this was a dirty lie and was just an excuse to arrest more hippies. There started to be all sorts of conspiracies that Nixon was just imprisoning non-violent offenders that didn't deserve all the jail time they got. In the 1980s, the Corrections Corporation of America started to imprison humans for profit. This made private prison incarceration rates increase by nearly 20%. Corporations had found huge benefits from private prisons from low-cost labor, so people started to become incarcerated more and more. As prison numbers jumped, black and brown people were in a very disproportionate size with the next being rural white people. John Ehrlichmann, a man at the White House, even said "The Nixon White House had 2 enemies, the antiwar left and black people. By getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities." In 1985, Americans who were against drugs as "the number one problem" was just 2-6%, and then four year later, it became 64%. People wanted mass incarceration to stop since they thought it was racist with all so many black people in prison, and it was tearing peoples' lives apart, so many wanted low level offenders to be set free so the "real bad prisoners" would be the only ones who were in the prison. I was shocked to learn that the War on Drugs could affect people so much.
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| War on Drugs not working so well |
Although I was convinced that the War on Drugs was absolutely responsible for mass incarceration, I started having second thoughts when I found new sources that told me otherwise. Apparently, the War on Drugs isn't actually responsible for mass incarceration, a high rate of violent crimes is. This whole new theory started when Michael Pfaff wrote Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration add How to Achieve Real Reform, which contradicted the popular book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, written by Michelle Alexander. Pfaff explains that the War on Drugs didn't make incarceration any better, but the real problem is violent crime, and stopping the War on Drugs wouldn't make things any better. In reality, only about 16% of state prisoners are drug dealers and 5-6% are non violent or at low-level as shown by the chart below. Also, despite many black people being in prison, most were there for horrendously violent crimes, so putting those people in jail wasn't racism and they definitely weren't there for minor offenses. Pfaff even states that letting people out of prison for drug-related charges won't change anything either and that this just guarantees a higher crime rate since they won't really learn anything from what they've done, especially since drug charges are usually for DEALING DRUGS not just using them. Pfaff says that The New Jim Crowe just absolves criminals of their responsibility for their "poor choices". A good example is one prisoner named Jarvious Cotton killed someone, and even though his ancestors were abused and killed, racism and poverty aren't excuses for his actions and you can't just let him off the hook for it. Pfaff says the real way to stop mass incarceration isn't to let low offenders go, but to assure criminals pay for their choices while also making sure the punishment doesn't cause too much damage, since the punishment also affects the prisoner's family. This whole idea put a serious change of thought into my brain, and I actually started to think the War on Drugs wasn't in fact responsible for mass incarceration.
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| What the prison system could really looks like |
In my final answer, I decided that mass incarceration was more the result of violent crime rather than the War on Drugs. Although I have to agree that Richard Nixon definitely didn't help things with the war and just got more people imprisoned, violent crime just landed a whole lot more people in jail. I think people just thought that the government was being so racist, that they wanted black people out of prison since they "were just low offenders". That isn't true at all and most of them did the awful stuff they were held accountable for. It's not racism, it's just a surprising coincidence, no matter how hard it could be to believe. Also, I definitely agree with Pfaff when he says that letting low-level offenders is a bad idea. How can you assure that criminals are getting punished when they're basically just being given a hall pass? They need to be PUNISHED. However, I'm not entirely sure I agree with Pfaff when he says that the way to achieve real reform is to make sure prisoners suffer the most without their family suffering. Although, the prisoners' families don't need to suffer and they shouldn't, I don't think you need to be so extremely hard on the prisoners, because prison can turn people into monsters. You can start out by being a simple drug user and then turn into a psychopathic murderer when you're let out of prison. What's the real way to stop mass incarceration? I certainly don't know and I'm probably not the one to make the choice, but all I can say is that you need to keep criminals locked up.
In conclusion, mass incarceration is a big problem for America and it's probably one of the hardest problems to solve since it involves nearly everyone related to the offender and it can break the offender if things don't turn out the right way. The mass incarceration discussion still goes on today and I'm not sure if I'm right or wrong but I made my choice, so America can still imprison criminals and not disrupt the system in any way, whether it be drug offenders or violent criminals.
In conclusion, mass incarceration is a big problem for America and it's probably one of the hardest problems to solve since it involves nearly everyone related to the offender and it can break the offender if things don't turn out the right way. The mass incarceration discussion still goes on today and I'm not sure if I'm right or wrong but I made my choice, so America can still imprison criminals and not disrupt the system in any way, whether it be drug offenders or violent criminals.
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