Since the war on drugs began in 1970, the inmate population in the United States has increased over 700%, prompting multiple Eighth Amendment violations. The Eighth Amendment of the United States Constitution prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Once a person is found guilty of a crime and convicted, they are devalued and stripped of some civic duties such as voting. Today, prisons closely resemble labor camps and slavery because prisoners are forced to engage in manual labor for no compensation. The term “war on drugs”, coined by President Nixon, was meant to prohibit illegal drug trade and stop the sale and use of illegal drugs. Today, prison growth is fueled by greedy private business owners who expand the economy to house urban minorities. Prisons act as an economic stimulus for cities in financial distress. The privatization of prisons has laid the foundation for corruption within the government. Prisoner exchange programs can cause inmate transfers hundreds and thousands of miles away from their family. This removes the prisoner from their support system, forcing them to depend on themselves to solve problems and deal with their emotions.
These roadblocks to rehabilitation create longer prison sentences and more repeat offenders. Therefore, the system’s focus becomes punishment and degradation of inmates instead of rehabilitation and reform. Additionally, the prison industrial complex thrives on systemic racism. Prisoners are required in order for a private prison to be profitable, the prisons’ budgets are never 100% guaranteed or set in stone. To solve this problem, corporations collaborate with local justice systems to extend sentences to longer lengths or charge with higher-level crimes for longer sentences. These extended sentences put low-level drug dealers behind bars for longer amounts of time then was equivalent to the crime during the war on drugs. Although the prison industrial complex was created to keep drugs out of America, it instead brought systemic racism into America through the school to prison pipeline and skewed rates of minority incarceration.
As the war on drugs was declared public enemy number one by the Nixon administration, the government aimed to reduce illegal drug trade in the United States. To the government, this drug epidemic represented an insurrection in the youth who wanted to escape reality and political turmoil. To combat these issues, the Nixon administration passed laws to stop the circulation of drugs. These laws targeted blacks in the South and Mexican immigrants in the Midwest. The laws and policies only got worse after the Nixon administration. President Reagan took office after Nixon and increased efforts to end the war on drugs. The number of people who were convicted for nonviolent offenses and placed behind bars skyrocketed. The media portrayed Black and Hispanic minorities as animals unfit to live in society.
In 1994, President Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act. This was the largest crime bill in the United States: 356 pages providing new guidelines for 100,000 police officers and 9.7 billion dollars for prisons. This bill also eliminated the opportunity for inmates to receive higher education and criminalized low-level drug dealers, labeling them as violent. The bill also allocated unnecessary resources into the prison system as there were not enough inmates to need 10 billion dollars to make the prison system function. The documentary, 13th, about the prison system in the United States, reveals the nation’s history of racial inequality. Director Ava Duvernay declared, “That omnibus crime bill was responsible for a massive expansion of the prison system.”(Duvernay). In 1994 when Bill Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, he truly believed that he was helping “clean up” society’s crime problem.
However, the expansion of the prison system negatively influenced minority families from impoverished communities. This crime bill added to systemic racism in the prison systems. As quoted by Bryan Stevenson, a social justice activist, “We had a prison population of 300,000 in 1972. Today, we have a prison population of 2.3 million. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world and the majority of those people are black and Hispanic.” (Stevenson, 13th). Things that would not have previously been crimes in the past are now being treated as heavy offenses. People who commit petty crimes are being detained in hopes that they will change their ways. These people are consistently from oppressed racial minorities. The war on drugs became the war on low-level black and Hispanic drug dealers. They were punished as harshly as drug lords. The war on drugs began an epidemic of mass incarceration of people of color that continues systemic racism.
As a result of the staggering rise in mass incarceration, people of color were hit the hardest. Minorities were disproportionately detained. In the era of high incarceration rates, prison admission and return have become commonplace in minority neighborhoods characterized by high levels of crime, poverty, family instability, poor health, and residential segregation. Racial disparities in incarceration have tended to differentiate chances for success and civic participation of blacks, in particular, from those of most other Americans. At a National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) meeting in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, former President Obama stated that “The United States is home to 5 percent of the world’s population, but 25 percent of the world’s prisoners…The United State has a higher prison population than the top 35 European countries combined” (Obama). This is due in part to the lack of police presence in African-American communities.
People were left to do what they wanted in their neighborhoods as long as their actions did not negatively affect white people. Not only were black people being misrepresented in the prison population, but they were also not receiving the same investment in school systems as their white counterparts. Politicians of this time represented these political and economic viewpoints. Former President Nixon’s advisor, John Ehrlichman said: “…by getting the public to associate the hippies with the marijuana and blacks with heroin, and the criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities…” (Heitzeg). There were many bills and small laws put in place to punish black people that committed petty times. Systemic racism is present in America’s prison systems due to increased incarceration of people of color.
Disciplinary actions taken by schools are meant to keep students on safe, but instead, they push them out of the educational environment and into the juvenile and criminal justice systems. The school to prison pipeline has always disproportionately targeted minors and young adults from disadvantaged backgrounds because of racial bias in increasingly harsh school and municipal policies. Disciplinary policies such as zero tolerance, out of school suspensions, expulsion, and referrals to law enforcement have alleviated distractions in the classroom, but have pushed more students closer to entering the juvenile justice system. Zero tolerance policies were created to keep weapons and drugs out of school buildings, but have since been used for teachers to take out their frustrations on students who have minor incidents such as talking back or uniform violations.
After the Columbine school shooting, schools started to hire security guards and implemented the use of metal detector screenings for students. Although these measures are meant to protect children, they can make students feel like criminals already entering prison. Schools are creating more prison-like environments and this movement has created some unintended consequences such as racial bias. Minority children are often targeted by zero-tolerance policies and they develop a fear of going to school. Paul Campos, a law professor at the University of Colorado has said, “Many black children, for example, attend schools that once again are as segregated as they were in the 1960s, and they are far more likely to become trapped in a prison-industrial complex…” (Campos).
Prisons rely on the downfall of society’s youth. Some people even argue that it is the fault of people of color. The New York Times published an article about how white privilege is alive and well and the article stated: “Conservatives… tend to blame either social welfare programs for sapping initiative and keeping black people poor, or black people themselves for being less intelligent than whites.” (Campos). It is unfair to blame African-Americans for being less intelligent than whites, there are deeper issues at hand. The lack of funding for inner-city communities and their education systems create achievement and opportunities gaps between white and minority children. The school to prison pipeline directly influences children of color and continues the cycle of overrepresentation of minorities in prisons.
When children grow up in systems that rely on prison-like discipline strategies, they are more likely to continue in the footsteps of their older siblings and parents. Since people of color make up the majority of prison populations, many families of color are separated. Over the years, multiple family members end up in the prison system. This creates a cycle of incarceration within families. According to John Tierney, “Prison…has become a routine event for poor African-American men and their families, creating an enduring disadvantage at the very bottom of American society” (Tierney 2). This cycle of incarceration of black families started with the war on drugs and harsh compensation for low-level drug deals. It is a huge problem when one in three African-American boys face a lifetime risk of going to jail.
These children don’t have access to programs or afterschool activities that will keep them out of prison. Also, these children don’t have the proper support system as they have parents who may have not made the proper life choice. These children are exposed to the prison system early and they don’t know any way to thrive in society without doing something illegal. It is not fair to blame the children when the system is functioning off the assumption that they will fail in life. In the New York Times article, Prison and the Poverty Trap, the article states, “Among African-Americans who have grown up during the era of mass incarceration, one in four has had a parent locked up at some point during childhood,” (Tierney 2). When children are exposed or come in contact with someone in the prison system, they may start to doubt their purpose.
Because Black children are constantly discriminated against, they lack the skills to cope with stereotypes and stigmas placed on them. Black children who have a parent locked up constantly follow the footsteps of their parent because they feel that the only options apparent to a black child are a long life getting by on minimum wage or a shorter life on street corners that only promise prison or death. Because there are a lot of impoverished children with a parent in jail, these kids are more likely to follow in the footsteps of that parent rather than breaking the cycle of incarceration placed on that family.
Despite the fact that the war on drugs was made to keep harmful substances out of America, it rather brought fundamental prejudice into America and misrepresented the rates of minority imprisonment. Over the past 40 years, the prison population has increased drastically with the majority of these people being minorities. This expansion of the prison population has targeted low-level drug dealers and youth in underprivileged communities. Overall, America’s prison growth exposes systemic racism put in place by the government. The government must create policies and laws that focus on rehabilitation and reform instead of abuse and neglect.
