However, the socially constructed image clearly shifts in the mid-eighties. In his history of dug policy, Baum notes that, by the end of 1985, media no longer show the cocaine user as white, rich, attractive and tragic. Now the user is black or Hispanic, and menacing as well.
When crack use did become more of a problem in the inner cities than suburbia, it came in tandem with the results of Reaganomics, the outsourcing of factory jobs, as well as white and black middle class flight from the cities. The only growth market in the inner city community was drug sales, and if one lived, one could make a comfortable living in the dismal1980s economy.
Without any critical thought, government acknowledgment of guilt, or media analysis regarding how the crack trade came about, the crack “epidemic” served the twin theories of flawed character and racial inferiority that white middle class communities find so comforting in dismissing urban poverty as just desserts for their own bad acts. As quiet as it is kept, while the distribution of crack and other forms of cocaine is conducted in the inner cities, use is still more far-reaching than many like to believe.
The War on Drugs and Racialized Incarceration
The war on drugs intensified in response to media portrayals of frightening black gang members and irresponsible welfare mothers smoking crack while pregnant. These were the public faces of the crack cocaine epidemic, and in response to the fear and disgust generated, the sentencing guidelines became stricter for the crack form of cocaine while sentencing for powdered cocaine remained at pre-crack levels. Budget allocations for the war on drugs were 50% more for incarceration and punishment than for treatment or prevention, and the war on the growth industry of the 1980s inner cities became a very profitable growth industry in itself.
Michelle Alexander explained the racial motivation of the Reagan Revolution regarding the administrations’ focus in the “War on Drugs:”
President Ronald Reagan officially declared the current drug war in 1982, when drug crime was declining, not rising. From the outset, the war had little to do with drug crime and nearly everything to do with racial politics. The drug war was part of a grand and highly successful Republican Party strategy of using racially coded political appeals on issues of crime and welfare to attract poor and working class white voters who were resentful of, and threatened by, desegregation, busing, and affirmative action.
Alexander went on to assess how successful in re-segregating and disenfranchising the black population these policies were.
• More black people are in prison or parole today than were slaves in 1850.
• “Felon disenfranchisement laws” effectively and legally evade the Fifteenth Amendment.
• Coupled with the label of “felons for life,” these laws also permit discrimination in housing, employment, education, and deny participation in the political and justice systems that decide the fates of those so branded, and the fate of their children.
• Because of the enormously high rate of imprisonment of black fathers, and increasingly of mothers, a black child today is less likely to live with both parents than they would have during slavery.
Tony Whitehead wrote about the “incarceration epidemic” in Marion Barry, the Incarceration Epidemic, and the Prison-to-Community Cultural Continuum in Washington, DC, and noted that at 6% of the US population, black males make up 70% of the population in prison or on parole, and that this has occurred even as crime rates have “steadily declined since the late 1990s.” Whitehead also noted that while consequences for individuals are well documented, less has been written about the consequences to the communities they are taken from and recycled back into, their families, or particularly their children.
The Smallest Victims
Andrea Victoria Martinez argued that the federal sentencing guidelines adopted in 1984 anticipated the removal of much bigger fish in the drug trade than the application of those guidelines have achieved. Martinez went on to note that the “true victims” of the “War on Drugs” have been the very people the government ostensibly went to war to protect, and that to avoid compounding those errors, there must be a policy shift away from crime and punishment towards treatment and prevention.
Instead of “kingpins,” the largest demographic imprisoned by the federal government have been “street-level dealers and couriers,” or the “single impoverished mothers in relationships or working for the targeted kingpins that are filling the prisons for drug offenses. It is the children of these all too often imprisoned mothers that eventually enter the criminal system themselves” The smallest victims of the federal governments systemic failure to apply the drug laws without prejudice are abandoned to a punishing and impersonal child welfare system that too often separates siblings at a time when they just experienced severance from their parents. The trauma caused by the upheavals and dislocations in these children’s lives are causative of their future contact with the penal system.
Because the “Adoption and Safe Families Act of 1977” mandated the states to “initiate the termination of parental rights proceedings” in the cases of children in placement for 15 of 22 months, mandatory drug sentencing guidelines too often serve to permanently rip children from their families. As a result of the racialized nature of the targeted arrests and sentencing in poor communities, loving and perfectly stable family members can be disqualified from keeping a child within the family by offering their home as refuge. This disqualification can be based on any minor criminal offense, “such as resisting arrest, or drug related offenses as much as five to ten years old.”
While the motivation of erring on the side of caution can be appreciated, the best interests of the children are not served by separating them from their family, and too often an allowed consideration becomes a mandatory requirement to prevent the reunification of family ties. This has grave consequences for children ripped from their parents, from their siblings, and finally from any sense of family or community care. What must these children think of a society that treats them so carelessly? How should they feel about such a society?
Bradley Schiller, in The Economics of Poverty and Discrimination noted that there is less resentment in a society that believes the system is fair, but when society perceives that winners win by creating losers and preventing mobility and participation in the political process through predatory practices in a rigged system, the clash between economic classes becomes much more relevant. The ‘War on Drugs” and the problems caused by the racialized application of the laws created just such a rigged system. The biggest “kingpins” responsible for flooding America’s streets with cocaine worked in or closely with our own federal government. While investigated and found guilty, not one was ever convicted. That is a stunning miscarriage of justice in itself, but when we consider who has born the ultimate burdens of the results of that crime, and the casual malice of the “War on Drugs,” it becomes a national disgrace.
