Jesse Keating

Drs. Taylor & Clark

PHL 399A: Prisons and Human Rights

February 26, 2016

War on Drugs and Mass Incarceration

In todays political climate, many politicians and citizens alike are revisiting the

incarceration system. It is without a doubt, that the United States is king when it comes to

locking up its own citizens. According to the ACLUs, Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons

and Incarcerations the United States imprisons more people than any other state on the planet.

The rate at which the US is imprisoning its own citizens has reached percentages over 400, and

continues to climb. (Human Rights Watch 2014) With that in mind, one would question who is

the representative inmate, what is the representative crime, and why has incarceration grown

exponentially since 1979? The answer is in terms of racial and economic discrimination of

people of color, primarily black.With the help of the war on drugs," through the objectification

of people of color and the poor, Americans have given the unseen nod of approval to the

systematic practice of mass incarceration.

The War on Drugs has had a long and destructive evolution throughout American

history. With its inception during the prohibition era of the early 20th century, law makers felt

the necessity to make sentencing more potent, because of the upstart development of the alcohol

marketplace by criminal organizations. Those that were targeted and arrested during this time

period were mostly poor people and the marginalized. This trend of targeting the poor and

marginalized has continued all the way to today. Instead of the production and distribution of

alcohol, poor people and people of color are receiving lengthy sentences for various types of
offenses, especially nonviolent drug offenses. These acts of delinquency are in response to the

economic disadvantages that these communities have been suffering from since reconstruction.

What has happened during this time period is the active practice of objectification. American

society had deemed poor people and the marginalized as the other and has related crime to an

intrinsic trait. (Foucalt 267) Thus, the stereotypes by which these people are characterized by,

ultimately makes them the operative targets in this period of mass incarceration.

In John Tierneys, Time and Punishment: Prison and the Poverty Trap, the article goes

into detail about how Carl Harris, an African American man from DC, came to a life of drug

dealing and his familys experience while he was in prison. What is stunning about this story is

that it highlights how the sentencing for his crime was lengthy, and a representative example of

how mass incarceration disenfranchises marginalized communities. According to an HRW

article, With regard to race . . . for every 100,000 black males in the population, 3,023 are in

prison. (HRW 2014) Along with that, referring back to the Tierney article, in the era of mass

incarceration, one in four African American children has had a parent in prison. These children

are then more prone to carry out the same acts of delinquency like their parents, generationally

impacting the communities. (Foucalt 268) With broken families and lack of economic

opportunities, many families like Harris become an everyday example of how mass

incarceration can disenfranchise a whole group of people.

When looking into the economic discrimination side of mass incarceration, one can see

how lack of financial means can be a reason alone that could lead one behind bars. This is what

experts call debtor prisons, the act of locking up people for not paying fines and court fees they

cannot afford. In the 2015 Buzzfeed article, In Texas Its A Crime to Be Poor journalists

found numerous instances in which citizens of El Paso, Texas have been locked up for not
paying fines and court fees because they cant afford them. According to the article, it is illegal

for judges in the state of Texas to imprison defendants and not hold any poverty hearings. In a

city in which 20% of the population is under the poverty level, it details the lack of economic

opportunities which leave these people vulnerable to imprisonment for accruing multiple fees

over a time period. Many that are imprisoned can lose the little to dismal income they relied on,

It took time and opportunity out of my life . . . Im really, really hoping to God that I can find

something to support me. said Levi Lane, a victim to debtors prisons. (Campbell and Taggart)

The judges that sentence the impoverished see this as a non issue, questioning the nature of the

defendants. Many judges disregard poverty hearings or refuse to offer them to those facing time

for fines because the defendants simply dont ask.)Campbell and Taggart) This relates to how

the poor are seen as those that lack autonomy and objectified as less then others.

In summation, one can see how the historical narrative of the War on Drugs has created

a society in which the marginalized and poor have been objectified and targeted as the enemy in

this war. These two elements of ethnicity and socioeconomic disadvantage, increases the

perception of dangerousness and hence the risk of being subjected to remand custody and a

prison sentence after conviction (Snacken 399) Therefore, these two groups of people have and

will continue to be a part of an overgrowing prisoner population. With all of this in mind, one

can really question what we are doing, and how is it preventing people from producing and

distributing drugs.