03/14

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14
Mar 14

Baffled

The thought that kept circulating uncomfortably through my head while I was reading chapters 2 and 3 of The New Jim Crow was, “Crap, someone actually thinks this is a good way to run a country.” There are lots of people, both elected and not (e.g. corporate heads), who hold and have held (over decades and centuries) considerable social power who apparently believe/believed that racialized social control is a workable and desirable plan. What’s terrifying is that those people have collected the political, social, economic, and military capital to make their vision a reality. After reading this section of the book, I still do not understand (and honestly don’t particularly care to understand) why exactly people like Nixon believed in the War on Drugs and how they obtained the power to implement it. I’m talking about psycho-social processes here–people do things for reasons, so what were their reasons? The trouble is, I suspect those reasons are not possible to understand if you don’t agree with them.

Related reading on the NYPD for anyone who’s interested (I’m sure many of you have already seen this): http://www.alternet.org/civil-liberties/9-frightening-things-about-americas-biggest-police-force

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13
Mar 14

The New Jim Crow, Ch. 2-3

Last year, a friend of a friend was pulled over by the police for a minor traffic violation.  They wrote her a ticket and, despite lack of evidence, requested to search her car.  She complied, and after literally tearing apart the interior of her car, the officers found a small amount of marijuana and a pipe; this lead to a mandatory court appearance and, thankfully, no jail time.  This young woman, intimidated by police officers, consented to a vehicle search because she did not know she had the right to refuse.  I feel as though I would have done the same thing in her situation out of anxiety and a fear of what could happen if I said no.

I simply do not understand why the federal government continues to offer incentives to local government to increase drug crime arrests.  Why would a politician wanting to appear “tough on crime” choose drug crime over every other possibility?  I would much rather politicians be tough on violent crimes like murder, rape and domestic violence than petty drug crime.  It is also completely ridiculous that 80% of drug arrests are of users, not dealers.  I can only hope that someday the government will adapt the Harm Reduction Coalition’s stance that ensuring drug users are using safely is more important than incarcerating them with little means to effectively curb addiction.  Ideally, our government would go Portugal’s route and legalize all drugs; I highly doubt it would cause worse circumstances than the War on Drugs already has.

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13
Mar 14

For Profit Incarceration Is Not Cool Incarceration

It blows my mind how profitable incarcerating people has become in the second half of the 20th century. Local law enforcement agencies in the United States are under a system in which there is financial incentive to round up large amounts of people and incarcerate them for gain. The Edward Byrne Memorial state and local law enforcement assistance program fun law enforcement agencies that follow the drug war agenda and forfeiture laws let law enforcement literally take money out of people’s pockets.

There is also the blatant racism in some of these laws that I actually can’t believe something hasn’t been done about them yet. There is a massive difference in the amount of consent and pretext searches that are done on white people and people of color. People of color are being searched at much higher rates. In a state in which officers can search just about anyone they want, is it really all that strange to see their racial biases exposed through their work?

There’s also the controversy with crack cocaine holders who are predominantly black getting longer sentences  than powder cocaine users who are predominantly white. At all levels of the law, minorities of low socioeconomic status have the short end of the stick. Many even have no choice but to plead guilty because it’s the most socioeconomically feasible thing to do even if they are innocent.

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