Chained to the System by Arthur H. Garrison

Author:Arthur H. Garrison [Arthur H. Garrison]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cognella Press
Published: 2020-01-30T00:00:00+00:00

The belief by many within the black community that the government allowed heroin and later crack cocaine to settle in black communities to give the government the justification to unleash law enforcement and the criminal justice system with the goal to incarcerate blacks disproportionately is a deep-seated belief, and it colors how blacks view crime control model advocates. Putting Ehrlichman's statement in historical context with peonage, criminal surety, convict leasing, and the CIA Inspector General concluding in its 1998 report that the CIA turned a blind eye to cocaine drug running conducted by the Contras, the belief is not unreasonable. As Baum correctly concluded, “Nixon's invention of the war on drugs as a political tool was cynical, but every president since—Democrat and Republican alike—has found it equally useful for one reason or another.”

But regardless of its origin, crack was a plague in the black community, and my point is not that crack was not a problem that needed attention, but the only attention it got was cops, courts, and corrections. Only the hammer of government and the unleased warrior cop philosophy was applied to the problem. Politically, that could be done, because crack was viewed as a black drug and a black crime. The fact that whites used crack by the late 1980s and 1990s equally to blacks was of no consequence in the politics of crime control. News stories of crack babies35 born addicted to crack and mothers abandoning them en masse for the need to get their next crack high were a nightly event. The entertainment industry in movies and rap music that romanticized the use of crack in the 1990s just made the problem all the worse with rap artists and movies glorifying those who sold crack as being authentically black.

Between 1991 and 1995 under the George H.W. Bush and Clinton Administration blacks accounted 51 percent of the total U.S. prison population. In 1995, America broke the one million mark of people incarcerated in federal and state prisons. The 1990s was the high-water mark in the get tough on crime rhetoric and policies of the second punitive era. No politician could get elected if they were perceived as soft on crime. Justice Department grants required state criminal justice policies and programs to be focused on reducing serious violent crime. During this period, catchphrases like “super predators” and “adult time for adult crime” supported policies for treating juveniles as adults for certain types of crimes and the general political attack on the operating principle of juvenile court (rehabilitation). This period also saw the overall nationwide abandonment of parole through “truth-in-sentencing” statutes that required offenders to serve most if not all of their imposed sentence. These types of statutes supported the impact of both mandatory and minimum sentences for certain crimes, all of which removed judicial discretion in setting prison terms and fostered overcrowding.

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