As someone who has been to prison on a drug possession charge, I can tell you that the “war on drugs” has nothing to do with drugs. First of all, it is a $50 billion a year industry whose main purpose is to provide lucrative jobs for those who lock people up, and to prevent the people who get locked up (who tend to be poor and people of color) from voting, since they usually vote Democratic.
The war on drugs is the Republican’s answer to the welfare state, only the people on “welfare” in this instance are the prison guards, the DEA agents, the cops, lawyers, prosecutors and judges who make a very good living destroying the people they catch and punish. To someone who has never been to prison it may sound like I am exaggerating when I say that the whole purpose of prison is to destroy a person, but I mean what I say here.
When a person becomes a prisoner he undergoes a legal transformation called “civil death.” All of his rights are stripped away except for a few nominal constitutional rights, such as due process and freedom from cruel and unusual punishment. I refer to these rights as “nominal” because prisoners were stripped of any meaningful access to Federal courts in 1996, and so have no real way to enforce them.
One of the things you are stripped of is your ability to pay your bills. Thus, you can lose your house, your car, your credit, causing your whole financial world to implode because you cannot act on your own be half, or easily transfer power of attorney to someone who can do this for you(assuming you know someone trustworthy). Naturally, being ruined financially plays havoc with your relationships, and seriously diminishes your chances of recovering after the ordeal.
Under a loophole in the 13th Amendment, states can (still) egally enslave prisoners, something which was widely practiced in the Old South up until WWII, and which is starting to come back. Prisoners can be forced to work for as little as 9 cents per hour (a rate that has remained unchanged since 1973).
The only reason people work in prison is to pass the time, but they do as inefficiently as possible, so as to reduce any possible benefit to their oppressors, who are unreasonable and unfair regardless of what kind of job you do. Hence, working in the system for any length of time tends to destroy your work ethic, along with any desire to contribute to society. If you never had a strong work ethic or were never too pro-society to begin with, the constant humiliation and unfair treatment by the guards completely destroys your respect for the law, the cops, and the society they stand for—and doubly so when one is subject the insane punitiveness of prison for a non-violent and victimless crime like drug possession.
Prisons are dangerous, filthy, disgusting, disease-ridden places where 100 men are commonly packed together in a space the size of half a basketball court and forced to share 8 barely-working and never-clean toilets. Respiratory diseases, serious skin infections and diarrhea epidemics are frequent, while the medical care is so dangerously sub-standard that in California it meets the standard of “cruel and unusual” punishment. I was in one 200-man dorm where, in one 6-month period, two men died in the middle of the night due to medical neglect.
The water was so polluted where I was that I broke out in hives over 75% of my body, but the doctors could not prescribe me the bottled water I needed, so I had to pay for it out of my own pocket at 65 cents a bottle, on a wage of 19 cents an hour. If I hadn’t been lucky enough to have family sending me money from the outside, I could have spent the year it took exhausting my appeals in severe pain, and maybe lost my vision.
There is absolutely nothing worthwhile to do in prison, so prisoners spend most of their waking time scheming of ways to smuggle contraband or short-circuit the electrical system in order to get it lit. Not only is there no rehabilitation, but they actively punish you for attempting to rehabilitate yourself. They make access to phones, writing materials or books an unbelievable hassle, and they do it on purpose because they want you to get fed up and demoralized so that you will continue to screw up.
In California 28.6% of the 172,000 people in their system are in for parole violations, most of them for “technical” violations like not showing for an appointment, or having beer cans in one’s trash, or turning in a dirty pee test—things that are not actually even crimes. Parole agents are glorified prison guards who work in the community. And, they can return people to prison for 12 months at a time, just on their say-so. There is no automatic hearing for probable cause, no judge, no jury, and no independent oversight to act as a check against the arbitrary exercise of power by parole officers. As a consequence, the Departments of Corrections can “violate” a parolee at will; sentence them to additional prison time, for vague “offenses” that are not even crimes, without any judicial oversight or review. Hence people commonly serve more time in prison on parole violations than on their original sentences.
In California, roughly 70% of the people released return to custody on just this basis. This is not necessarily because they commit new crimes; it is because the prison guards get more lucrative overtime when the prisons are overcrowded, somebody flips out and they lock the whole place down. So, don’t let the prison guards fool you when they tell you that they “walk the toughest beat in the state.” If a riot kicks off, its generally their own fault, if not deliberate—like putting rival gang members together, or feeding prisoners wet baloney sandwiches for days on end.
Not only does the United States incarcerate more people per capita than any country in the world (roughly 7 times more than Canada and European industrial democracies), it also incarcerates 7 times more Blacks than Whites per capita. In 2005, there were 990 incarcerated White males per 100,000 population, but 6,838 Black males per 100,000 population.
Neither candidate wants to discuss how the drug war (Prohibition) was a failed policy from its inception, or how it does does absolutely nothing help people or deter people from using drugs, because to admit these things would be to admit that the War on Drugs was never about drugs and was always about Jim Crow. Neither side wants to draw attention to the nascent police state which has grown up around the Drug War, or how is combining with the War on Terror and the War on Illegal Immigration to extend the surveillance capabilities and the reach of the state into people’s communities and their private lives. Neither side wants to discuss how this police state apparatus has been diverted from its stated national security purposes and is now engaged in the business of disenfranchising people, and keep communities so distracted and burdened by poverty that no leadership can emerge and organize the community politically.
Blacks and people of color know full well what’s going on, they just don’t want to bring this political grievance up at this particular time. Crime rates are lower now than at any time in the past 35 years, yet people’s fears of crime are at an all time high. According to criminologists, this exaggerated perception of crime stems from being fed a constant diet crime fantasies in the form of TV murder dramas. These portray many times the number of murders than are actually committed. The resulting fear of crime tends to be heavily racially tinged, so that promoting “law and order” becomes a sneaky backdoor code for measures and policies that promise to crack down on Blacks and other people of color. Trying to do this with Obama in the race risks giving the whole “law and order” sham away. And, of course, it would be foolish for Obama to remind white people of their fears by bringing up drugs, crime, incarceration or any of the rest of it.
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