The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration – A Brief History of Civil …

The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration

No discussion of civil rights for blacks can be complete without addressing the issue of mass incarceration. While this complicated issue has roots as far back as the end of the Civil War, it was exacerbated by the policies put in place by President Reagan and Congress when they declared a war on drugs. Those policies were maintained by Bush and intensified by the crime bill passed in 1994 by President Clinton. It was only in George W. Bush's second term that the sentencing disparity between crack cocaine and powder cocaine was finally addressed by the Supreme Court. Even still, a disparity in sentencing between the two drugs remains, despite the fact that they have been determined to be almost the same substance.

Misguided drug laws and draconian sentencing requirements, especially pertaining to crack cocaine, have produced profoundly unequal outcomes for communities of color. The results have decimated minority families - black men in particular have been victims of these policies. Although rates of drug use and selling are comparable across racial and ethnic lines, blacks and Latinos are far more likely to be criminalized for drug law violations than whites. Although minorities use and sell drugs at a similar rate as whites, the proportion of those incarcerated in state prisons for drug offenses who are black or Latino is 57 percent.

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The War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration - A Brief History of Civil ...