Security Privatization by Oldrich Bures & Helena Carrapico

Author:Oldrich Bures & Helena Carrapico
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

7.5 This Story Is Not New: The Role of Markets and Private Interests in the War on Drugs

It is imperative to consider, due to the existing parallels, the effects the War on Drugs had on those it targeted, which were disproportionately Black and Brown men. Due to its interest in further expanding its profits, the prison industrial complex played a key role in the proliferation of tougher sentencing laws and increasing incarceration rates (Fulcher 2012). Private prisons were key to growing mass incarceration in the U.S., which makes it difficult to distinguish public and private actors in the War on Drugs, as privatization processes allowed private prisons to obtain government contracts and interact with public agencies on a very large scale (Price 2006). A similar pattern has been observed regarding the securitization of immigration; private contractors (a lot of them the same actors as in the War on Drugs) proliferated through the political economy of security and immigration, with more and more private enterprises involved, shaping, and profiting from technology, transportation, and detainment practices that are now becoming standard practices in the securitization of immigration. In this section, we summarize the economic, political, and social impact of prison privatization and mass incarceration on racial and ethnic minorities.

According to Price and Morris, “the past four decades have witnessed a worldwide movement toward the privatization of goods and services traditionally, provided, produced, and delivered by government” (2012, p. 1). The contemporary roots of private prisons can be traced back to the “tough on crime” movement, which served as the impetus for the incarceration boom, in the late 1960s, early 1970s. The late 1970s and early 1980s were characterised by the War on Drugs campaign with the Rockefeller Drug Laws being the most infamous of all the policy changes related to drug policy. Hattery and Smith (2014) explain that other key changes to drug laws, such as mandatory minimums (Meierhoefer 1992), longer sentences for crack cocaine possession (King and Mauer 2006), felony drug offenses (King and Mauer 2006), and three-strikes laws (Haney and Zimbardo 1998) all contributed to the U.S. incarcerating more than 2.3 million citizens, approximately 1.3 million in state and federal prisons and another million in local jails, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Concomitant with the increasing incarceration rate, “practically overnight the budgets of federal law enforcement agencies soared. Between 1980 and 1984, FBI antidrug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million. Department of Defense antidrug allocations increased from $33 million in 1981 to $1042 million in 1991. During that same period, DEA antidrug spending grew from $86 million to $1026 million, and FBI antidrug allocations grew from $38 to 181 million” (Alexander 2010, p. 49). Ironically, during the same period, public agencies in the preventative and rehabilitative areas of government that focused on drug treatment, prevention and education had their operational budgets severely slashed. For instance, the National Institute of Drug Abuse’s budget was cut from $274 million to $57 million from 1981 to 1984 (Alexander 2010), and antidrug funds awarded to the Department of Education were cut from $14 million to $3 million.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.