The war on drugs has been a perennial problem in the United States and the world at large over the past years and stretching further to the beginning of the advent of civilization. There have been several spins and turns on the issues surrounding the effects the drugs cause to the users and the economy of the country in a much more detailed perspective (Alexander, P54). There have been differences in opinions and ideologies of the successive administration and political leadership of the United States regarding how to curb this menace. To successfully win the war on drugs, there has to be a well coordinated and structured mechanism of attack on the producers, distributors, and users of the drugs and also understand the factors that make the drug usage and business to thrive from various perspective
...s for instance from a political ,social and economic point of view.
To start with the author of the book the book ‘the new Jim Crow, Michelle Alexander is a legal practitioner and a civil rights activist. The fight alongside the war on drugs over the last 40years has been characterized by various happenings most of which are politically motivated and enforced by the regime that is in power at that time. Mass incarceration is a phenomenon that is related to the fight against drugs though its intention is seen to be promoting an agenda of ill will. It is where the administration in control uses an immense classification of the social and racial control of the people. The administration locks away people based on their social and racial system of those it perceives to be players in the drug usage
and distribution channel. This is however very discriminatory as only a particular race of the population is targeted when they are even innocent most of the time. The most targeted group is the African –American persons, and this is a violation their human and civil rights.
The mass incarceration of the people of a particular who were involved in the use of the drugs and were perennial lawbreakers had some political undertones in it that were propagated by each regime that was in power. This lead to a sharp increase in the prison population and the war on drugs motivated this. Consequently, America went ahead to record one of the highest incarceration rates in the world; this, however, helped to reduce to the levels of crime in the country .This was, however, a recipe for disaster as there was a storm gathering from the prisons due to the very high number of inmates. It is important to note that this was during the era of President Richard Nixon.
Due to mounting political pressures and shifting of political alliances and allegiance coupled with the agitation of civil rights movements the issue of the high number of inmates became a hot contentious political issue (Alexander, P71). The happenings of the above events coincided with the economic fall in communities of the inner-city and the communities of color.
This lead to many people rendered jobless within a short period, and this affected the people of the African American race most particularly men. Factories shut down due to the economic turmoil in America and multinational shifted their operations to other countries hence the loss of jobs. Globalization and deindustrialization resulted into the
state of despair in inner city societies in America. Therefore, this state of affairs leads to the augment of crime levels which had already been contained as a result of the mass incarceration.
The political administration appeared to be winning the fight against the civil rights groups to review their stand on the issue of mass incarceration, but this did not happen. The administration tightened the bolt on the incarceration policy due to the rising crime rates, and it is at this point that the war on drugs was declared a national disaster.
The plain reality about the crime rates is that the crime rates do not depict the abrupt and striking mass incarceration of the African Americans during over the past thirty years (Foner, P64).The crime rates have been irregular over the last few decades, and they are at present at an all time low, but imprisonment rates have regularly been on the rise
Drug-related crimes single-handedly contribute about two-thirds of the rise in the national inmate numbers and more than half the rise in the state prison population. The war against drugs has been vicious that is full with SWAT teams armed with grenade launchers, tanks, and bazookas and clears off complete neighborhoods. This brutality is experienced so much in the African American neighborhoods, but the people who live in the white community neighborhoods have little or no clue to such brutality and destruction caused by the war on drugs. The war on drugs has been brought forth in underprivileged communities of color yet though studies continually illustrate that people of all colors make use of and sell the prohibited drugs at almost the similar amounts.
Some studies show that the white youth is considerably more prevalent to indulge in the unlawful drug activities as compared to the black youth. Any idea that drug consumption among the African Americans is more hazardous is a fabrication of the collected data over the past few years. For instance, the white youth has almost thrice the cases of drug-connected visits to emergency health facilities as compared to the African American youth. President Ronald Reagan formally acknowledged the fight on drugs which is presently ongoing in 1982 when the drug-related crime was reducing and not increasing as we are meant to believe (Foner, P77). From the onset, the fight against drugs has little to do with drug related crime and so much to do with racial and ethnic politics. The fight against drug use is a component of a bigger and efficiently successful scheme of the Republican Party technique of adopting racially inclined appeals on the concerns of crime and wellbeing to woo the less privileged and working class white voters who are aggrieved and afraid of integration, affirmative action, and busing. In simple terms, the whole problem is the blacks and not so much the fight against drugs. Present data illustrates that development in the African American communities is a fairy tale in many perspectives.
In conclusion, when we retract the curtain and see through the eyes of a colorblind society, we see the formation of communities without affirmative action. We view a recognizable economic, social and political structure, and this is the structure of a racial class. To sum up the previous regimes that came up had to review some policies that were aimed
at fighting crime and the war on drugs, for instance, the mass incarceration policy. This is because the prison populations were swelling by the day and had reached catastrophic levels and this was like a ticking time bomb. Depriving a person some of his or her basic rights that are protected under the bills of rights as a result of a criminal record also became a contentious issue of debate and was reviewed by the successive for the better of the citizens. There was also a shift from the prosecuting petty drugs crimes as the kingpins were now under the focus of law enforcement agencies.
