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"What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has."
War on Drugs: the New Jim Crow
Well that mass incarceration is a myth.
I don't know where these people claim that folks aren't getting locked up,
I guess in their world, because they don't know anybody who is.
Basically the war on drugs is becoming the new Jim Crow in the United States.
We now have more than two million people in prison,
more than five million people under criminal justice supervision
on any given day in our country.
And about a quarter of them are there for non-violent drug offenses.
And the overwhelming majority of them are people of color.
In 2006 there were 7,211,400 persons in the U.S. corrections system. 2.2 million were behind bars.
In 2006 53% of inmates in federal prisons and 19.6% in state prisons were drug offenders.
We asked participants of the Beyond 2008 NGO meeting to comment.
Some said mass incarceration of drug users is a myth...
Well that mass incarceration is a myth, to a large degree.
I also have a law practice and I do criminal defense work.
One of the things that the people who want to legalize drugs say is that
people who use small amounts of marijuana are going to prison.
That's absolutely untrue.
I've represented thousands of people,
I've never known anybody to go to prison for a small amount of marijuana.
People that are going to prison for drugs are drug traffickers.
The average amount of marijuana that somebody gets put in prison for
in the United States, in federal prison, is 115 pounds.
Now certainly that's not personal use.
That's somebody that's trafficking in drugs.
Personal users who have small amounts of drugs,
are not going to prison, that’s just absolutely untrue.
Well, others came to a very different conslusion . . .
The claim has certainly been made by some,
particularly those who are in the federal government,
the office of national drug control policy and so forth,
who make the claim that there's no major problem
with incarceration rates of drug users in the United States,
that its only major, large scale traffickers that are incarcerated.
Just a simple look at the numbers shows that
there's absolutely no way that that can be true.
In the United States today
we have over 500 thousand people incarcerated on drug offenses.
There's simply no way that there are 500 thousand large scale traffickers
in the United States.
We're a big country. We're not that big.
There have been so many reports,
most recently two excellent reports
by Human Rights Watch and the Sentencing Project
that very carefully document the dramatic increase
in incarceration for drug offenses in the United States.
We now have more than 2 million people in prison,
more than 5 million people under criminal justice supervision
on any given day in our country.
And about a quarter of them are there for non-violent drug offenses.
And the overwhelming majority of them are people of color.
So I don't know where these people claim that folks aren't getting locked up.
I guess in their world, because they don't know anybody who is
it must not be happening.
But I know a lot of people who do,
and a lot of the folks I work with do too.
The example of crack *** sentencing disparity.
In the U.S. we have what we call a hundred to one sentencing disparity
between powder *** and crack ***.
Where it takes 500 grams of powder ***
to automatically trigger a 10 year mandatory minimum sentence.
Yet it only takes 5 grams of crack ***, possession of 5 grams,
to trigger that same 10 year mandatory minimum sentence.
And most states have adopted that same law
that the federal government first enacted in 1986, I believe it was.
That has led to widespread, massive incarceration
of crack *** users, not dealers, because someone possessing 5 grams of crack,
they're not a dealer.
In fiscal year 2005 61.5% of all federal crack *** defendants were low-level offenders such as mules or street dealers.
Only 8.4% were high-level dealers.
If anything, maybe they're selling very small amounts to support their habit,
but they're certainly not drug dealers in the classic sense of the word.
The vast majority of them are absolutely drug users,
and that's become a very large percentage of our prison population.
How does the War on Drugs affect the lives of communities of color?
Basically the war on drugs is becoming the new Jim Crow in the United States.
Right now, as I mentioned, we have about 500 thousand people incarcerated on drug offenses.
Of those, about 70% are African American.
If you include Latinos,
you are looking at over 90% of people convicted of drug offense,
or people incarcerated on drug offenses,
in the United States, are people of color.
A lot of what people decry
as the absence of men in the community
is a direct result of the over incarceration policies driven by the war on drugs.
The inability of um...the high unemployment rate,
is also directly related to that,
because once people have a drug conviction it’s hard for them to get a job.
The inability of men to provide adequate support
for their children is also directly related to that.
The breakup of families,
a lot of people refer to as the sort of pathologies of poor communities
is in a lot of ways linked to the war on drugs
and the way that it’s been conducted and enforced in communities of color.
Transcribed by Anna Fischer Subtitled by Hunter Holliman