The drug war has been a centerpiece of America domestic and foreign policy for over two decades, and it should not be viewed as one directed against a specific inanimate object. In a better sense, it should be understood just as a case of what war is and what it has always been to attain political objectives. Over the last years, race has played a crucial role in identifying the communities that are targets of the drug war and consequently exposing their institutions and cultural practice to police control and military style attack. This paper seeks to analyze Kenneth Nunn’s arguments on race and crime targeted on black communities.
The majority of the white Americans view the African Americans as the source of vice and crime. According to Nunn, Reagan’s anti-drug rhetoric war was perfectly designed to tap into cultural attitud
...es about the blacks and their link to drug use and crime. To Nunn, millions of blacks have been imprisoned, and many have been treated unfairly by the criminal justice system. At the same time, the rights of legitimate suspects and other black citizens have been violated, and millions of people have a low quality of life. The war on drugs has been against street dealers who come from communities populated by blacks. By symbiotic relationship, Nunn means that those involved in drug use are likely to be involved in crime. According to Nunn, there has been mass incarceration and disproportionate arrests among the blacks, sentencing disparities, over policing of the black communities and the use of military-style tactics.
According to Nunn, a large number of black communities are incarcerated at a percentage that exceeds legitimate law
enforcement interest and as such the black community is negatively impacted. To Nunn, the black community comprises 12% of the U.S. population and are 46% of those incarcerated in federal and state prisons. The high inequality comes in when a comparison is made between the rate of incarceration and the proportion of the blacks that are incarcerated. At the end of 1999, more than half of blacks were held in state and federal prisons. In 2000, the rate of incarceration for whites was 449 per 100,000 and that of black males 3457 per 100,000.
According to Tonry, racial disparity in the criminal justice system is as a result of calculated effort to increase the percentage of blacks in prison. Those responsible for planning drug war knew it as unnecessary, and the selected policies would not work. According to Tonry, drug war planners knew that the policies they proposed to implement adversely affect the blacks. The move was unnecessary since drug use was declining and in the case of a drug war, the policies could not work. The drug war motivated arrests, convictions, and prosecutions of the blacks.
