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This mindmap relates to Section B, Question 3: Insecurity, Risk and Surveillance- 'War on Drugs'
The focus of the question will be to explore whether the ‘war on drugs’ has lead to racial discrimination in sentencing and punishment. The resulting sense of insecurity has led us to embrace habits and policies that would have seemed unthinkably repressive thirty years ago. Concerns about economic insecurity and personal safety. In this culture, the State controlled criminal justice system has come to be regarded as limited in its capacity to control crime and delivering security.
The aim is to explore:
While the Act reduced the crack/cocaine sentencing quantity disparity to 18:1, thousands continue to languish in prison serving sentences applied under the old laws because the act has not been applied retroactively.
Introduced mandatory minimum sentences to keep drug offenders in prison for longer periods of time:
In 1986, released drug offenders had spent an average of 22 months in federal prison. By 2004, federal drug offenders were expected to serve almost three times that length: 62 months in prison (Mauer, 2009).
Due to their existing over-representation of Afro-Americans and the poor in the criminal legal systems. As a result:
Since its official beginning in 1982, the number of Americans incarcerated for drug offenses has skyrocketed from 41,000 in 1980 to nearly a half-million in 2007 (Mauer, 2009).
According to the Sentencing Project (2013),, 1 in 3 black men can expect to go to prison in their lifetime.
1 in every 15 African American men and 1 in every 36 Hispanic men are incarcerated in comparison to 1 in every 106 white men.
Number of drug-related arrests and convictions has grown exponentially- Although minorities only make up 30% of the United States’ population, they account for 60% of those imprisoned.
In 'The Drugtakers' (Young, 1973) Young suggests:
“law is made for the powerful to be applied against the powerless—it is scarcely surprising that the rich do not figure prominently in the crime statistics” (Young, 1973: 45)
In his article, 'It’s the Poor What Gets the Blame’ (Young, 1973) stated, ‘‘by amplifying,’’ or drawing broader attention to deviant behaviours, groups with power re-affirm accepted moral boundaries" (Young, 1977:12).
Reiman and Leighton (2017) challenge us to step through the ‘looking glass’:
“entertain the idea that the goal of our criminal justice system is not to eliminate crime or to achieve justice but to project to the American public a credible image of the threat of crime as a threat from the poor” (2017:1).
Although the drug war has certainly sought to eradicate controlled substances and destroy the networks established for their distribution, this is only part of the story:
Efforts to control drugs are also a way for dominant groups to express racial power.
UK
Such an anti-drug rhetoric was mirrored in the UK under Thatcher’s government.
Adopted an equally high profile campaign, based around the slogan `Heroin Screws You Up’. This portrayed young heroin addicts as unkempt social outcasts who threatened the cohesion of local communities and placed lives at risk.
Some have rightly observed that the war on drugs could more accurately be described as a war on drug users (Ashton, 1992).
With the appointment of a Drugs Tsar (the UK anti-drugs co-ordinator) and vast resources, the government is rallied the nation to wage war on illicit drugs.
USA
In October of 1982, President Ronald Reagan declared war on drugs- a 'planned, concerted campaign' against all drugs-'hard, soft or otherwise’.
The initiative included a set of drug policies that were intended to discourage the production, distribution, and consumption of psychoactive drugs that the participating governments and the UN have made illegal.
Yet, the policies were viewed as controversial and some suggest has instead, led to a 'War on race'.
Describing his campaign in military terms- he vowed, "We're going to win the war on drugs". As a result:
The number of federal drug task forces increased
Anti-drug spending increased
These very processes create wider social harms than the offence for which they are punished:
ostracisation
loss of family
loss of home
loss of job
A process Christie (1986) describes as ‘pain delivery:
Punishing
Disposing
Broadcasting
Classifying
Defining
Characterised by an unacknowledged but open war between young males, mainly from poor, minority racial and deprived backgrounds (Box, 1983; Christie, 1993; Reiman, 1998) in the war against crime.
‘Crime’ gives legitimacy to the expansion of crime control.
The state – via the criminal justice system – appropriates the conflict and imposes punishment, of which the prison sentence is the ultimate option and symbol (Blad et al., 1987).
