Drug Wars VIII

Sometimes writing these essays are a chore and seem demanding, then there are other times when they seem to write themselves, this is one of the latter. I have written extensively about America’s war on drugs and all the ills and problems that it has caused. First of all let me state that I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do not believe that racism is involved in every aspect of life in America, at least it hasn’t been in my life. However, there are times when it plays a major role in how we interact with one another. The war on drugs and the death penalty are probably two of the most egregious ways in which racism does play a role in America. The recent results of a couple of studies highlight the disparity in our criminal justice system that can not be explained by any other means.

More than two decades after President Ronald Reagan escalated the war on drugs, arrests for drug sales or, more often, drug possession are still rising. And despite public debate and limited efforts to reduce them, large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates.

Two new reports, issued Monday by the Sentencing Project in Washington and by Human Rights Watch in New York, both say the racial disparities reflect, in large part, an overwhelming focus of law enforcement on drug use in low-income urban areas, with arrests and incarceration the main weapon.[1]

Ok, here is the short course of racism in America. Drug addiction has no respect of person, it affects blacks and whites in similar numbers. It is not a black issue or a white issue. The difference is in how it is prosecuted in both communities. The drug war has always been depicted by the politicians and the media as a black inner-city issue, as if there were no drug problems in white suburbia. So if we are using drugs at roughly the same numbers then how can one explain that more than 50% of all persons sent to prison for drug crimes are black? These are not traffickers and distributors, these are mostly possession cases.

Here is how you devastate a community and destroy its future. You begin by arresting its young men for minor drug offenses in a depressed economy. Once arrested you prosecute them for felony convictions. Once they have been convicted or have pled guilty then you have sentenced that young person to a life of hopelessness. That young person has forfeited all rights to achieve any semblance of legitimate success. Once they have received a felony conviction they are no longer eligible for education grants, most government programs that target the poor, or be able to participate in the most basic form of citizenship by voting. One simple arrest by outside observation has actually removed this young person from competing in our society in any meaningful way in the future.

Two-thirds of those arrested for drug violations in 2006 were white and 33 percent were black, although blacks made up 12.8 percent of the population, F.B.I. data show. National data are not collected on ethnicity, and arrests of Hispanics may be in either category.

“The race question is so entangled in the way the drug war was conceived,” said Jamie Fellner, a senior counsel at Human Rights Watch and the author of its report.

“If the drug issue is still seen as primarily a problem of the black inner city, then we’ll continue to see this enormously disparate impact,” Ms. Fellner said.

Her report cites federal data from 2003, the most recent available on this aspect, indicating that blacks constituted 53.5 percent of all who entered prison for a drug conviction.[2]

By prosecuting the drug war in the way we are doing it, we are providing cover for racism to continue. We are spending 70% of our resources targeting inner-city and rural white neighborhoods as if these are the people importing the drugs from the foreign capitals and making the billions in profits. The people we are targeting for the most part are such major players in the drug trade most can’t even afford attorneys at trial. So where are all these drug profits going? I can tell you they are not being spent in my neighborhood, the occasional new pair of Jordan sneakers or chrome rims can hardly be presented as some large criminal enterprise.

Are drugs devastating our inner-city neighborhoods? Of course they are, but the solution is not to destroy the village to save it. Many in the black community are tired of the drug trade with its inherent crime and violence, but the way it is being combated today only creates more strife. We must develop alternatives to incarceration and the ruining of lives. The drug war has decimated the black community and has created an atmosphere of fear and distrust of those who are paid to protect us. All of us make mistakes especially during our youth, we mustn’t compound those mistakes by ruining their lives with felony convictions. While whites are offered diversionary programs to avoid felony records blacks are continually being placed in the system. We want crime reduced, but not at the expense of our future.

Where does it all begin and how does the ball get rolling. I read a story recently on the numbers of street stops being made by the NY city police and the numbers are staggering. There are similar numbers for traffic stops in communities across America. If we continue to target only one community then naturally the crime statistics are going to be skewed towards that group. The war on drugs has allowed this country to choose what group to prosecute and what communities to devastate under the cover of law and order. No one can argue the legality of what is being done, but what about the morality of it?

Street stops have gradually increased, to 508,540 in 2006 from 97,296 in 2002, according to departmental statistics. Because more than half of those stopped were black, the increases led some police critics to suggest that minorities were being unfairly singled out, though the police reject such claims.

“The numbers are troubling both because of the number of people stopped and because blacks continue to be, overwhelmingly, the ones who are stopped,” Mr. Dunn said. “Someone outside the Police Department, like the mayor’s office, the City Council or the Justice Department has now got to step in and demand a public accounting of the department’s stop-and-frisk practices.”[3]

The issue isn’t that blacks are committing more crimes despite the constant images being displayed on the nightly local news. The issue is that blacks are more likely to be stopped and searched than whites. If the police were to use the same tactics in the suburbs as they use in the inner-city I guarantee you the number of whites arrested would increase. And if they were sentenced in the same manner as blacks there would be a national outcry. Imagine if 50% of young white males were given a felony conviction in their early teens and were rendered useless from that point on. The war on drugs has allowed those with racist attitudes to institute those beliefs under the cover of legitimate crime fighting.

[1] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/06disparities.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=drug+reports&st=nyt&oref=slogin
[2] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/us/06disparities.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=drug+reports&st=nyt&oref=slogin
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/06/nyregion/06frisk.html?scp=1&sq=police+stops&st=nyt

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War On Drugs VII

The thing that makes the war on drugs so insidious to me as a black man is not the fact that it has increased the number black felons or that it has turned our neighborhoods into war zones. No to me the one factor that has caused the most damage to us as a people is how it has removed us from the process of democracy. I think that this was its original intent and it has not failed to deliver. The United States is the only democracy in the world that does not allow its citizens the right to vote after they have served their sentences. In America, it is once a criminal always a criminal. To understand the racist nature of these laws all one has to do is to examine their historic beginnings.

Felon disenfranchisement was sometimes used as a tool by the states to disenfranchise blacks. Some Southern states passed laws disenfranchising those convicted of what were considered to be "black" crimes, while those convicted of "white" crimes did not lose their right to vote. For example, South Carolina disenfranchised criminals convicted of "thievery, adultery, arson, wife beating, housebreaking, and attempted rape," but not those convicted of murder or fighting. Mississippi modified its broad, earlier law--which disenfranchised convicts of "any crime"--to specifically target "black" crimes.[1]

The laws allowing for the disenfranchisement of criminals can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and first appeared in America as early as the 1600’s. So for anyone looking to disenfranchise a group of citizens the groundwork was already laid. If felons forfeited their constitutional rights all one would have to do is to construct and create laws to make more felons and then through a bias application of the laws exclude the majority population while ensnaring the targeted group. This of course is a broad statement and on its own proves nothing. In order to verify its validity there would have to be a statistical anomaly between the number of people in the criminal justice system from the targeted group and the percentage of that group in the national populace that cannot be explained by happenchance. Is there such an anomaly?

Although the incidence of crimes committed by blacks has not increased, the number of black prisoners has tripled since 1980. Approximately 13% of black males have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions, or around 1.4 million persons (Sentencing Project, 2000). The primary theoretical tool used to explain LFD legislation is the racial threat thesis (Behrens et al., 2003). The idea is that the presence of a high proportion of African Americans creates a threat that can be temporarily reduced by sentencing a large number of blacks to prison...Yet we will demonstrate that through policies that have been explicitly and are now "implicitly racial, state institutions organize and enforce the racial politics of everyday life" (Omi and Winant, 1986: 77).[2]

I would say a tripling of black inmates is such an anomaly. Are we to believe that the increased number of black inmates is due to better police tactics or that more blacks are committing more crimes? No, there has been a concerted effort to marginalize black men and exclude them from the democratic process. In a democracy people must have free access to its instruments to affect effective change in their lives and in the lives of their children. The black man has never been given full access to those instruments. The results of that denial of access can be seen in the deterioration of the black community. If you can’t vote, you have no voice in the direction of your community or its resources. If you can’t vote you can’t elect people who are accountable to your interests. You in effect become invisible. And that is what we have in America millions of invisible black men, who are only seen when their faces are flashed on the television screens on the nightly news. They are never heard from, they have no voices.

I believe that the rise in hip-hop and “gangsta-rap” is a direct consequence of that loss of voice. If your voice is not heard through traditional methods, if your concerns are ignored then you are left with few choices. We have millions of young black men who have never voted and never will vote, ever. They have no concept of the democratic process because it does not apply to them. They have seen no improvements through traditional methods. The violence of the past to acquire the right to vote has no influence on them, they could care less. They don’t care because for many it is a “right” they will never get to exercise.

The following is a representation of Florida, multiply these numbers across the country and you begin to see the pattern.

Recent interest in LFD laws springs in great part from the experience in Florida (Johnson v. Bush). Florida's disenfranchisement law kept in excess of 600,000 citizens with felony convictions from voting in 2000 (Rapoport, 2003), of whom one-third were black (Wagner, 2001). Thus, Uggen and Manza (2002) argue that the outcome of the 2000 presidential election, as well as of several other presidential elections and U.S. Senate elections, would have had different outcomes if disenfranchised ex-felons would have had the vote. Florida's part in the 2000 presidential election has become infamous since the Supreme Court proclaimed George W. Bush as president. Before the election, state officials waged a $4.3 million campaign to purge Florida's felons from the voter rolls (Palm Beach Post, 2001).[3]

You may have noticed that I have not used the “C” word or mentioned Republicans, because it isn’t just them. Unfortunately, there are some Democrats who allow these injustices to take place. It not only helps the Republicans to disenfranchise so many blacks, it also helps some white Democrats as well. If you live in a city with a substantial black population and you are a white politician it would be in your interest to suppress the black vote regardless of your Party affiliation. Remember, all politics are local and in local elections it isn’t always good to have a large bloc of voting blacks, especially if they are independently minded. We all know that these laws are disenfranchising millions of black voters, so why have they not been repealed? This is the question that the Dems have to answer as well as the Republicans.

[1] http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5199005/Felon-disenfranchisement-law-history-policy.html
[2] http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5923399/Lifetime-felony-disenfranchisement-in-Florida.html
[3] http://goliath.ecnext.com/coms2/gi_0199-5923399/Lifetime-felony-disenfranchisement-in-Florida.html

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Taxation Without Representation

For many ex-felons completing their sentencing and/or parole or probation still does not allow them the opportunity to rejoin their fellow citizens in the voting booth. In what many consider the last vestiges of Jim Crow, there are still some states that do not allow these people to vote. It is an effort to continue to disenfranchise the rights of some Americans to vote.

These men and women have served the terms of their sentences and completed the requirements of release, yet they are still denied the right to vote. How can this be? The proponents of these laws base them on the 14^th Amendment to the Constitution.

“The legal authority of a state to revoke an inmate's voting rights is based upon the Fourteenth Amendment. While this amendment stipulates that, "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States", it allows for the denying of the voting rights of individuals guilty of "participation in rebellion, or other crime". Under current law, the federal government may not infringe upon a state's authority to grant or rescind voting rights to prison inmates and former felons.”[1]

So, it is up to the states to determine what voting rights a citizen may get to exercise. Having the states determine the voting rights of our citizens is a dubious proposition at best. If we had left it up to the states to repel the various voting laws on the books to disenfranchise the poor and minorities of this country they would still not be voting in some states. There are those who would use these questionable laws to suppress the votes of those they deem unworthy and to maintain the status quo.

It seems clear to me that the goal of the “founding fathers” was to prevent those that had participated in the armed overthrow of the government from voting, not the guy or gal who may have been convicted or plead guilty to a simple drug possession charge. These people are not a direct threat to this government any more than the guy who shoplifts. Because of how our courts have systematically been bias against minorities, in that minorities are more likely to have their charges upgraded to a felony, it would be logical to assume that these laws would affect minorities more negatively than others.

“The San Jose Mercury News conducted a massive study of 700,000 California legal cases over a 10-year period. The paper reported in December 1991 that a third of the white adults who were arrested, but had no prior record, were able to get felony charges against them reduced. Only a quarter of the African-Americans and Latinos with no priors were as successful in plea bargaining.”[2]

With evidence suggesting that race is indeed a factor in whether felony charges are pursued or not, it would also seem logical to conclude that preventing ex-felons from voting could be used by some states or legislatures to suppress the votes of minorities. Voting has not always been a right for minorities in this country and it took the shedding of blood to acquire it. And I say, it would be a travesty to the memory of those who laid down their lives for this right to have it eliminated through some back door loophole. Because of these laws, 13% of African-American males are being disenfranchised; to continue this is unconscionable. Despite what the Supreme Court said in Bush v. Gore: "The individual citizen has no federal constitutional right to vote for electors for the President of the United States." The truth of the matter is that voting defines democracy and citizenship. This was one of the main linchpins for the American Revolution; taxation without representation. To now over 200 years later to justify this treatment because someone has broken the law is according to the founders of this land; tyranny.

If we are not going to allow them to vote, then it only stands to reason that they should not be taxed without a voice. Many in the Congress are afraid to touch this issue because of the far right attacks of “soft on crime”, but this is not a criminal issue. This is a fairness issue; it is a moral issue. Do we believe in rehabilitation and paying ones debt to society or not. Do we believe in inclusion of those who have made mistakes and second chances? You should not lose your citizenship for making a mistake, if that were the case would any of us be allowed to vote?

It is time for us to make voting a constitutional right for all of our citizens. Many people already believe that it is. Let’s not allow politics and rhetoric to take the voice of our people, any of them and silence it. At the current rate of incarceration figures continue to rise, many in the minority community will be marginalized and remember, “No justice, no peace.” Our democracy is too valuable and has come too far to let the racist attitudes of the past once again derail the rights of those who are different. Let he who is without sin, cast the first stone…

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[1] http://www.speakout.com/activism/issue_briefs/1289b-1.html

[2] http://www.crf-usa.org/brown50th/color_of_justice.htm

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