The Failed War on Drugs Has Spawned the New Jim Crow

There has been a resounding call to begin to rethink what has been labeled "The War on Drugs". Notables like former President Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter have also criticized its effectiveness. The pro-reform Drug Policy Alliance estimates that when you combine state and local spending on everything from drug-related arrests to prison, the total cost adds up to at least $51 billion per year. For over four decades, our government has spent $1 trillion of our tax dollars on the drug war, which in many cases, we are losing. The cost of this war has claimed collateral damage that has been qualitative and quantitative in terms of the destruction on families of color as well as poor white communities. The direct monetary cost to the taxpayers of the war on drugs includes spending on police, court cost and corrections to arrest prosecute and detain. In the United States, if Marianna were taxed at rates comparable to those on alcohol and tobacco, they would yield $46.7 billion in tax revenue. A Cato study says legalizing drugs would save the U.S. about $41 billion a year in enforcing the drug laws. In New York, over the last 15 years, a single arrest for low-level misdemeanor marijuana possession, including all police and court expenses, has cost the taxpayer from $1,000 to $2,000 or more, conservatively estimated. This covers all police time including overtime pay for arresting officers and supervisors, all prearraignment jail costs in addition to all court and prosecutor expenses. In 2010, New York City spent $75 million arresting people for possessing small amounts of marijuana and made nearly 1,000 arrests a week. The 50,383 people arrested for marijuana in 2010 were all fingerprinted, photographed, and most spent 24 hours or more in jail. In all cases, marijuana possession was the highest charge or the only charge. In eleven years, the NYPD made a total of 439,056 possession only arrests. Multiplied by two and a half hours of police time per arrest that

equals 1,097,640 hours or approximately one million hours of police officer time to make 440,000 marijuana possession arrests. That is the equivalent of having 31 police officers working eight hours a day, 365 days a year, for 11 years, making only marijuana possession arrests. The War on Drugs has spawned a plethora of 'get tough on crime' legislation such as 'three strikes and you're out', habitual offender provisions and Drug Court. The end effect of these sentencing policies has increased the proportion of convicted drug dealers sentenced to prison but has had a minimal effect on the cause; the influx of drugs in our communities and drug abuse. There is a wide spread, unfounded misconception that African Americans violate drug laws at a greater rate, and that this justifies the great disparities in rates of arrest and incarceration. Most drug arrests are made for the crime of possession. Possession is a crime that every drug user must commit and, in the United States, most drug users are white. The U.S. Public Health Service Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration reported in 1992 that 76% of drug users in the United States were white, 14% were African American, and 8% were Hispanic. Cocaine users were estimated to be 66% white, 17.6% Black, and 15.9% Hispanic. The New York Times reported a Duke University study that shows that, "African Americans are actually less likely to use drugs and less likely to develop substance use or disorders yet African-Americans are 10.1 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison for drug offenses." African Americans are the largest group being targeted as the root of the problem. As a consequence, a disproportionate number of African American drug dealers may be arrested, leading to racial disparities in drug prosecutions and sentencing. In many cases concentrations of investigations and arrests in African American communities exceeds that in white communities, with the statistics shown earlier, there is no reason to believe that African Americans offend at a greater rate than whites, then such practices amount to what is called unjustified over- policing. These crime fighting paradigms defies actual logic to think that there is more purchases in a city like Mt. Vernon, New York that over 50% of the population rents, close to 25 % live on some type of assistance and a median income is less than 50 thousand dollars compared to neighboring Scarsdale that has a median income of 250 thousand dollars. This kind of over-policing is what occurs when police conduct "Stop n Frisk" in Black neighborhoods like Mt.

Vernon, Yonkers, Peekskill and detain African American motorists for 'driving while Black. When was the last time you have heard that these police tactics were used in Scarsdale, Bedford or Briarcliff Manor? The overwhelming evidence would show that the prime suspect for these drug offenses would be white. Many times wealthy white individuals but many law enforcement resources are focused in neighborhoods that are minority and relatively economically deprived. In her book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander takes on the issue of race and the War on Drugs. The point of her book is that there is a new Jim Crow system that traps many African-Americans in a permanent underclass. That system is driven by the War on Drugs which causes many young people to be stigmatized by felony records for a victimless crime that keep them from employment, education and housing. "The arguments and rationalizations that have been trotted out in support of racial exclusion and discrimination in its various forms have changed and evolved, but the outcome has remained largely the same. ... Rather than rely on race, we use our criminal justice system to label people of color 'criminals' and then engage in all of the practices we supposedly left behind. Today it is perfectly legal to discriminate against criminals in nearly all the ways that it was once legal to discriminate against African Americans." Politicians have not used any talking points to address a failed crime fighting policies that has literally attacked a lower economic class of people while ignoring all indicators that the prime suspects have always been the upper class, rich and white. These failed policies have caused an immeasurable loss in workforce productivity, strain on legal/law enforcement resources and wasting billions of tax dollars under a false cover of fighting crime Damon K. Jones New York Representative Blacks In Law Enforcement of America