Black Miss America

After getting the public support for his campaign, America saw an unprecedented rise in its incarceration rate, particularly among African Americans. The “ War on Drugs ” has had a disparate impact on the black community even though blacks and whites use drugs at approximately the same levels. This is achieved through a myriad of formal and informal practices. African-Americans are targeted and prosecuted at a much higher rate even though they are not statistically any likelier to abuse or sell drugs than the white population.

The United States features a prison population that is more than quadruple the highest prison population in Western Europe (Pettit, 2004). In the 1980s, U.S. legislation issued a number of new drug laws with stiffer penalties that ranged from drug possession to drug trafficking. Many of those charged with drug crimes saw longer prison sentences and less judicial leniency when facing trial. The War on Drugs has furthered the boom in prison population even though violent crime has continued to decrease steadily. Many urban areas in the U.S. have a majority black population. With crime tendencies high in these areas, drugs are also prevalent. This means that a greater percentage of those in prison are going to be black because law

During the Civil Rights Era, many black power movements strived to prevent the New Jim Crow from happening. The black man was being oppressed during segregation and treated like animals. The white supremacy, only visualize African Americans as slaves, people who should not be a part of the United States. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X drove men and women to fight for his or her rights. However, that was not enough to stop the white supremacy from oppressing African Americans. The Civil Rights movement did put an end to public segregation. It did not put not put an end to the laws being made by the government, which is dominated by the white race. In the book, The New Jim Crow by Michelle Alexander discussed how the Civil Rights and black power movements helped African Americans gain their equal rights, but did not help to gain political power. Mass Incarceration is where the African Americans’ lives end because of the social structure created by the government. Blacks are mostly in the lower class because after the Great Depression, Roosevelt only created laws for whites. This allowed the white community to build and move out the cities into better neighborhoods. Leaving the black community behind. The government placed businesses and built big buildings to keep all the blacks in one place. Base on how the black community was viewed as a race and social status, gives this race a higher chance of being behind bars.

Purpose Statement: to reveal the problem of mass incarceration of poor, black male, and increasingly female, young people in the name of a bogus war on drugs from the 1980 's?90 's.

To understand how our criminal justice system became a system of mass incarceration, it is important to compare the current system to previous systems of racial control in U.S. history. The history of caste systems in America begins with slavery. As a young country looking to prosper by any means, agriculture was that means to the South. Americas

We approximately have 5 percent of the nation’s population, but we have over ¼ of the world’s prisoners. This number is still increasing at an alarming rate. Since the 1980’s the prison population has increased to 2.2 million men and women. In all of the world, we are the leaders in incarceration. Most of the people being arrested and charged are for drug related offenses. This significant increase in prisoners is due to the War on Drugs started by Ronald Regan.

In 1982 the crack epidemic started, which shortly after Ronald Reagan expanded the war on drugs that Nixon started, one of his top aides admitted that the war on drugs was used to “target African Americans and hippies”. The number of incarcerations before the war on drugs was expanded in 1980 was four thousand seven hundred forty-nine for drug related crimes, in 1990 that number increased to twenty-four thousand two hundred ninety-seven, sixty percent of those incarcerations were African Americans (sentencingproject.org). If you were caught with one gram of crack you got the same sentencing as someone found with eighteen grams of cocaine, it was policies like these that targeted lower income black communities because crack was much cheaper than cocaine and was more likely for a white person to have cocaine.

American people identified the War on Drugs was launched to combat the crack crisis. However, Alexander claims that the crack crisis emerged some years after the War on Drugs was launched. She argues that negative racial stereotypes surrounding the crack crisis were widely dispersed on media. Reagan administration intensified a campaign to gain public and legislative support to the drug war in 1985. Suddenly media was saturated with images of black “crack whores” “crack dealers” and “crack babies” (p.5). There was a widespread discourse that crack crisis was a problem of the poor black neighborhoods. Thus, it was created and constantly reinforced the idea that African American people are drug addicts and dangerous. It is not surprising to know white people that is scared of black people. Moreover, in case you argue to someone that is scared of black people that s/he is being racist, they will claim that statistics prove that many African American are in prison due to drug issues.

The “War on Drugs” established that the impact of incarceration would be used as a weapon to combat the illegal drug problem in this country. Unfortunately, this war against drugs has fallen disproportionately on black Americans. “Blacks constitute 62.6% of all drug offenders admitted to state prisons in 1996, whereas whites constituted 36.7%. The drug offender admissions rate for black men ranges from 60 to an astonishing 1,146 per 100,000 black men. In contrast, the white rate begins at 6 and rises no higher than 139 per 100,000 white men. Drug offenses accounted for nearly two out of five of all black admissions to state prisons (Human Rights Watch, 2000).” The disproportionate rates at which black drug offenders are sent to prison originate in racially disproportionate rates of arrest.

In 1994 there was 15,000,000 incarcerations, in 2002 there were 13,500,000, and by 2012 there were only 12,000,000 incarcerations. The notion of a historic boom in incarceration after the 1994 crime bill was passed is completely false. This fact takes away the movies narrative of social injustice and the massive incarceration that is taking over our modern society today. This section of the movie then goes on to claim that black people are targeted for the consumption and dealing of drugs in the 90’s. However, the Bureau of Justice Statistics states that 50% of drug incarcerations were white people and 49% was black and the 1% was other races. If black people were targeted in this time era so heavily, why were there more white people in jail for drugs compared to African-Americans? At this same time SAMHSA did a survey in prison asking inmates whether they are in prison for selling drugs or consumption. 82% of the people were white and 16% was black. The percent of African-American drug users was 13% and the incarceration rate was 13%, at this time 60% of blacks lived in intercity metropolitan areas were the majority of arrests were made. This shows that it isn’t the polices fault for making these arrest, but the people in the intercity who involved themselves in using drugs knowing well that there was a higher chance of being arrested due to higher police force in areas that require it.

She argues that when President Reagan officially announced the War on Drugs, less than 2 percent of the American public viewed drugs as the most important issue of the nation. Crack began to spread within the black community two years after

on Drugs, hidden racism and how it plays out with African Americans. The book details the Struggles of the black population during and after slavery and even before Ronald Reagan wrote into policy “The War on Drugs” which he officially announced October 1982.

In the United States the prison population has increased from 300,000 in 1972 to 2.2 million

The criminal justice system became a kind of invading force, aimed mostly at young black men. There was, of course, the inexplicable sentencing disparity between those caught with powdered cocaine and those caught with crack cocaine. States were emboldened to be equally punitive. In Illinois, for instance, the Legislature passed a law that automatically transferred a juvenile to adult court if caught with drugs within 1,000 feet of a public housing complex — a law clearly directed at African-American teenagers. The war on drugs mangled, if not destroyed, any trust between residents of distressed urban communities and the authorities.

The fight for the abolition of slavery was a big battle but the one for racial segregation was a bitter one. “Race should not be a source of power or advantage or disadvantage for anyone in a free society” (Steele, page509). It is quite difficult to understand that America a nation of freedom, liberty and opportunities could have allowed some people to be oppressed. Even in the court of law the injustice persisted. “Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts” (Letter from a Birmingham Jail).