Prison Industrial Complex For Beginners by James Braxton Peterson

Author:James Braxton Peterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For Beginners LLC

With so much public and political support for the War on Drugs, finding the financial resources to fund the campaign was generally not an issue. In the 1980s and 1990s, however, a new financial incentive emerged that enhanced the aggressiveness of law enforcement departments in the conduct of the War on Drugs. Asset forfeiture laws—under which the property, money, or other material possessions of suspected drug criminals were forfeited to particular law-enforcement units engaged in an arrest if the goods or property had been acquired with illegal drug money—fundamentally altered the potential for judicial objectivity in prosecuting the drug wars. As James Kilgore wrote in Understanding Mass Incarceration (2015),

[t]hroughout the country, police have seized real estate, personal property, and cash totaling fifteen billion, which they have legally pocketed to upgrade their operations and equipment.40

The potential for corruption in a system with notable biases is readily apparent in this kind of policy, but corruption is not even the most critical concern when considering how asset forfeiture feeds the War on Drugs and, in turn, the Prison Industrial Complex. If local and/or federal drug enforcement units are allowed to keep the “proceeds” from drug raids (if only for the department's benefit, rather than just an individual's benefit), does the policy offer any incentive that increases the likelihood of the war ever ending?

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