jihadaze

Do you have any solutions or reactions to how devastating the War on Drugs has been to African-American communities, being that blacks make up just 14% of all drug users but half of those in prison for drug offenses, and considering that in the first decade of the War a cycle of absence began in black families as the rate of single black women tripled as so many black men were locked up, and that the economic situation of black folks began to decline in 1973 which is exactly when the War kicked into full gear?

The average black family now only has eight-cents of wealth for every buck owned by a white family, a gap that began to grow right as the War on Drugs started up:

The precise era that saw a drug-law fueled explosion in our prison population, the early 1970s, are the exact same years that the economic situation of blacks began to starkly worsen and that the gap between rich and poor is wrenched wide open. Beginning in those years and continuing into today, “the economic status of black compared to that of whites has, on average, stagnated or deteriorated."

Up until 1973, the precise year the Rockefeller Drug Laws were passed, the difference between black and white median income had been closing. But then that year it changed course, and in “an ominous bellwether… the gap between black and white incomes started to grow wider again, in both absolute and relative terms.” Direct empirical research into incarceration’s economic effects weren’t done until recently, when a Pew Charitable Trusts research paper showed that prior to imprisonment two-thirds of male inmates were employed and half were their family’s primary source of income. Additionally, upon release an ex-con’s annual earnings were reduced by 40%

And does it trouble you that the Department of Justice doesn't count mixed race half-black half-white prisoners in their drug-related racial prison statistics? All the War on Drugs has done is create more crime, and made hard drugs cheaper, more potent, and more prevalent.