Race, ethnicity, and drug war

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 * Share links: race or racism. See: Drug war causes high U.S. incarceration rate. And: Influential black cannabis users. And: Wars, drug wars, and brutality on demand.

The U.S. Drug War. Republicans lead. See: New Republican governor removes voting rights of all felons for their entire lives. A RepubliKKKan dream.

Mass incarceration due to the drug war began in the 1980's due to Republican-led hysteria about marijuana, followed up by whipping up fear of black men and crack cocaine. See: The American Drug Panic of the 1980s. Chapter 12 of Moral Panics: The Social Construction of Deviance. See: Drug War, mandatory minimum sentencing, handguns.




 * Number incarcerated in the USA peaked in 2008.
 * The Drug War, Mass Incarceration and Race. June 12, 2015. Drug Policy Alliance.
 * Race and Prison | Drug War Facts: "Human Rights Watch’s analysis of prison admission data for 2003 revealed that relative to population,  blacks are 10.1 times more likely than whites to be sent to prison for drug offenses ."
 * Chart below from: The meteoric, costly and unprecedented rise of incarceration in America. By Emily Badger, April 30, 2014. The Washington Post.

Past month illicit drug use by race or ethnicity
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Chart below. Past month illicit drug use. Age 12 or older, by race or ethnicity 2002-2010. Results from the 2010 National Survey on Drug Use and Health: Summary of National Findings. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration. Center for Behavioral Health Statistics and Quality.

Over 100 years of drug war
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See: Cost of U.S. drug war.


 * Four of the Major Fear Campaigns That Helped Create America's Insane War on Drugs. By Phillip Smith / AlterNet. February 9, 2015. History of racist U.S. drug war since the 19th century.
 * Canada: Emily Murphy: A pioneer in the war on pot. By Mark Bourrie. Sept. 30, 2012. National Post. "Emily Murphy ... made Canada the first Western country to launch a war on pot. She convinced the government to ban cannabis by writing a book that, if it came on the market today, would certainly fall under the hate crimes provision of the Criminal Code."


 * The Drug War, Mass Incarceration and Race. See PDF. June 12, 2015. Drug Policy Alliance. See chart from the article:

Republican wars on brown people
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The "War on Drugs". Why is everything a "war" or a "crusade" to Republicans? The war on drugs is a war on people.

Black Lives Matter
Return to top. All We Want Is Justice: Fighting for Eric Garner. By Erica Garner and Reggie Harris. Dec. 3, 2015. Huffington Post. NYPD cop who killed Eric (I can't breathe) Garner with a banned chokehold is still on the payroll.
 * Trump said it was OK to "rough up" black protesters, and sent a racist tweet . And you wonder why the Republican-led drug war is so racist.
 * The Man Beaten And Choked At A Donald Trump Rally Tells His Story.
 * 'Muslim-Free' Gun Store Now Selling George Zimmerman's Confederate Flag Paintings. 18 Aug 2015. You can't make this stuff up. And:.
 * There's blatant inequality at nearly every phase of the criminal justice system (charts and article). By Andrew Kahn and Chris Kirk, Slate. 9 Aug 2015. Business Insider.
 * Racism and Mass Incarceration in the US Heartland: Historical Roots of the New Jim Crow. 27 November 2015. By James Kilgore. Truthout.
 * Alicia Keys released a beautiful video to get 1 million signatures for prison reform. By Erica Williams Simon. 25 Nov. 2015. Upworthy.

Bill Maher on the Drug War
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Bill Maher: "We had slavery, and then we had the Jim Crow laws, and I think the successor to those two ways of putting down the black man in America is the war on drugs." From Real Time with Bill Maher – Episode 260, September 21, 2012.

Bill Maher: May 2, 2010 video and article: "I would never say and I have never said, because it's not true that Republicans, all Republicans are racists. That would be silly and wrong. But nowadays, if you are racist, you're probably a Republican. And that is quite different." More info

Bill Maher: October 8, 2011 video and article. "Overtly racist bullshit thinly painted over. Honestly, could anyone have written a better metaphor for the modern Republican party?" More info.

Cory Booker & Quentin Tarantino on Drug War
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Incarceration rates by race, age, and ethnicity
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2009 numbers in first 2 charts below. See for more info.

    

Incarceration rates in the USA peaked in 2008.

2008 chart below is from page 8 of the PDF for a September 2010 report by The Pew Charitable Trusts: [http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/0001/01/01/collateral-costs Collateral Costs. Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility]. Numbers are for 2008.

Chart below has numbers for 2010, and is from:
 * Chart of the Week: The black-white gap in incarceration rates. By George Gao, July 18, 2014, Pew Research Center. And: Charting the shocking rise of racial disparity in our criminal justice system. By Christopher Ingraham, July 15, 2014, The Washington Post. And: The Prison Boom and the Lack of Black Progress after Smith and Welch. By Derek Neal and Armin Rick, July 2014, National Bureau of Economic Research.

''' "On any given day in 2010, almost one in ten black men ages 20-39 were institutionalized". '''. "Institutionalized" means incarcerated for the most part nowadays : "Few persons under age 50 are in nursing homes, and the populations housed in mental hospitals have declined greatly over the past three decades." . See: US timeline of imprisonment and mental hospital rates. ''' "By 2010, nearly a third of black, male high school dropouts aged 25-29 were imprisoned or otherwise institutionalized." '''.

More 2010 numbers in chart below. It is adapted fron this article: Chart: Black America's incarceration rate is almost 37 times as high as Canada's. By Dylan Matthews on October 16, 2014. Vox Xpress.

The 2010 rates in the above chart are per 100,000 of all ages. Except for black American men which is per 100,000 adults in 2010. More variations of the chart, and more sourcing info:
 * Correctional Populations in the United States, 2010. NCJ 236319. Published December 15, 2011. By Lauren E. Glaze. U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics. See appendix table 3 of the PDF.
 * Inner-City Violence in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Oct. 30, 2014. The Atlantic.
 * Incarceration is not an equal opportunity punishment. August 28, 2012. by Peter Wagner. Prison Policy Initiative.

Chart below is US timeline of adult male incarceration rates by race and ethnicity. From this article: Our penal system - Why Nations Fail. By Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson.



News
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 * Sex, drugs, and racist policing in Rutland, Vt. By Farah Stockman. 26 Aug 2015. Boston Globe.
 * Cops "Smelled Weed", and Raped Woman Publicly in Gas Station Lot . 6 Aug 2015.
 * ‘I can’t breathe! I’m choking on my blood': Disturbing video of Black soldier dying in Texas jail. 20 May 2015 article. While serving "A two-day sentence for driving while intoxicated".
 * After Rising Dramatically, Marijuana Arrests Are Falling In New York City And Across The Country. 20 Nov 2014. Forbes. From the article: "Low-level marijuana possession arrests by the New York Police Department (NYPD) skyrocketed from about 3,000 in 1994, when [Republican] Rudolph Giuliani took office as mayor, to more than 51,000 six years later. The crackdown continued during Michael Bloomberg’s administration, when the NYPD arrested an average of nearly 39,000 pot smokers each year, compared to 24,487 under Giuliani, 982 under David Dinkins, and 2,259 under Ed Koch". The Million Marijuana March started because of Giuliani. See: 1998 Million Marijuana March.
 *  Death of Eric Garner. "I can't breathe". Black man choked to death on July 17, 2014 for selling "loosies" (single cigarettes) from packs without tax stamps. As of December 28, 2014, at least 50 demonstrations had been held nationwide specifically for Garner.
 * 2014 New York City: Democrat Mayor de Blasio seeks mail-in payment for pot fines. He stopped Giuliani and Bloomberg's policy of arresting tens of thousands of brown people yearly for cannabis possession. . See Saturday Night Live video.
 * Black smoke shop owner’s surveillance cameras catch undercover informant planting crack at the behest of cops.
 * The black/white marijuana arrest gap, in nine charts. By Dylan Matthews. 4 June 2013. Washington Post.
 * The War on Marijuana in Black and White. 3 June 2013. American Civil Liberties Union.
 * Fabrice Olivet talks to TalkingDrugs about race and drugs in France. By Rupert George, 22 Mar 2013.
 * Former surgeon general Joycelyn Elders calls for marijuana legalization. By the CNN Wire Staff. 18 Oct 2010.

The new Jim Crow
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 * The New Jim Crow: How the War on Drugs Gave Birth to a Permanent American Undercaste. NORML Blog. By: Russ Belville, NORML Outreach Coordinator. See Wikipedia: Jim Crow.


 * Michelle Alexander's book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness.



Map of U.S. incarceration rates by state
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Adult rates of incarceration on December 31, 2013.




 * Above map. Adult incarceration rates by state. State prisons and local jails. Rate per 100,000 adults. Does not include numbers for federal prisons. Click to enlarge. Note the higher incarceration rates in the South. See List of U.S. states by incarceration rate. See also: Commons: File:US Adult Incarceration Rate by State.svg for sources, and detailed state-by-state data table. The federal rates and counts are listed there too, and can be added to the state rates and counts.

Louisiana has the highest incarceration rate in the above map. It is the highest rate in the world.


 * Louisiana's Republican Governor Bobby Jindal Denies Clemency to Non-Violent Pot Offenders. By Mike Adams, June 22, 2015. "Without a doubt, Louisiana is a veritable concentration camp for marijuana offenders, currently housing more prisoners for petty pot-related crimes than any other state in the nation—with some of these people forced to spend as much as 20 years in prison due to the state’s three-strike rule." See also:
 * Petition · Grant Clemency to Bernard Noble, 13 years for 2 joints · Change.org. Louisiana's Republican governor needs to be voted out of office for denying this man's clemency. "Due to two, decades-old prior drug convictions, he was charged under the state’s habitual offender law and faced a mandatory sentence of thirteen and one-third years. ... A father of seven children and he works hard to support them. His youngest child suffers from autism, and another of his young children suffers from rheumatoid arthritis for which there is no cure. To support them he started two businesses, a janitorial service and a restaurant."

How Billy Holiday was hunted down
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William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger
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 * Worth Repeating: Marijuana Prohibition and Sexual Politics. March 30, 2012. By Ron Marczyk, R.N.. Toke of the Town. From the article:

"The early black jazz musicians of the 1920s and 1930s blended their love of marijuana with sexuality. This music broke through the color barrier, and was enjoyed by both white and black audiences. Marijuana was the driving force for jazz, and it was the fear of the mixing of these races that drove the white elite. ... And who was the 1937 black star who was the model for stealing white women by using the reefer music that Hearst and Anslinger feared? Cab Calloway -- that funny, funny Reefer Man! ... The large number of songs glorifying marijuana use in the decade leading up to cannabis prohibition shows what a large part marijuana played in black culture and music. ... Hearst's hatred of Mexicans and his hyping of the 'Mexican threat' to America likely was rooted in the 800,000 acres of timberland that had been confiscated from him by Pancho Villa during the Mexican Revolution. The Hearst papers carried paid-for columns by both Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini, rationalizing his relationship with the two men as one of 'helping to fight Communism.' However, during a continental tour Hearst actually attended the Nuremberg rally of 1934. He later completed a newsreel deal with Hitler during the trip!"

NAACP billboard and ACLU lawsuit.
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 * Blacks in Government Say War on Drugs Is Racist. Article on Black Entertainment Television (BET) site. September 2, 2011. By Naeesa Aziz. "Another Black organization has added its voice to the growing number of groups and individuals who are publicly calling for the end of America’s war on drugs. ... In July [2011], the NAACP made a similar move and passed its own resolution calling for the end of the drug war and asking government to shift the focus to substance abuse treatment and education. The call for the end of drug criminalization and drug law reform has also been echoed by other organizations such as the National Black Police Association and the National Black Caucus of State Legislators, and is gaining momentum."
 * GOP War On Voting Is Most Determined Disenfranchisement Effort Since Jim Crow. By Ian Millhiser. July 7, 2011. ThinkProgress.
 * Inactive U.S. Marshal speaks about war on drugs. April 9, 2008. Collegiate Times. In the article Matthew Fogg, a black member of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition (LEAP), and former Chief Deputy US Federal Marshal, is quoted: "Drug prohibition helps the US maintain a racial apartheid prison industrial complex."

Astronomical U.S. incarceration increase
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Incarceration nation
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Number incarcerated in the USA peaked in 2008.

Minorities under control of US corrections
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The number of people incarcerated in the USA peaked in 2008. The number of people in the correctional system as a whole (jail, prison, probation, parole) peaked in 2007.

Charts below are adapted from Race and Prison. DrugWarFacts.org

Table below is from here:
 * Correctional Populations in the United States, 2013 (NCJ 248479). Published December 2014 by U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS). By Lauren E. Glaze and Danielle Kaeble, BJS statisticians. See appendix table 5 on page 13 in the PDF, for "Estimated number of persons supervised by adult correctional systems, by correctional status, 2000–2013."





Children with incarcerated parents
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"One in 9 African American children (11.4 percent), 1 in 28 Hispanic children (3.5 percent) and 1 in 57 white children (1.8 percent) have an incarcerated parent."
 * Collateral Costs. Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility. Sept. 28, 2010. The Pew Charitable Trusts. From page 4 of PDF:

Above chart is from page 19 of the PDF for a September 2010 report by The Pew Charitable Trusts: [http://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/reports/0001/01/01/collateral-costs Collateral Costs. Incarceration's Effect on Economic Mobility].

Charts below are from page 8 of the same PDF. The numbers are for 2008.





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