Over the course of the last forty years, the United States has been battling the ‘War on Drugs. ” A phrase coined by President Richard Nixon in 1971 to launch his campaign to protect America and its citizens from the harm that is associated with the use of drugs. This brought about new legislation in the form of mandatory minimum sentencing, which resulted in causing mass incarceration throughout this county. These selectively enforced policies that mainly target minorities “have transformed the war on drugs into a war on minorities and immigrants, leading to a staggering number of imprisoned minorities” (Sirin).
The issue of mass incarceration in the United States stems from a greater social issue that has been going on in this country since its inception, racial control. To further examine these two social issues I will use two different academic disciplines: history and political science. The film “The House I Live In” gives a historical perspective of drugs in the United States and how anti-drug laws have always been associated with race. In the 1800’s certain kinds of drugs that are considered criminal today – heroin and cocaine – were commonly used by middle-aged successful whites.
The first anti-drug law was introduced on the west coast as a city ordinance in San Francisco. Opium (heroin) smoking became a criminal offense. However, it wasn’t opium that was the concern, but rather the people smoking it (Sarin). Chinese immigrants that were working hard on the transcontinental railroad introduced the habit of smoking opium to the citizens, and they eventually became part of the American success story. White workers began to fear that the Chinese were taking jobs away from them and were fraternizing with white women in opium dens.
Politicians got together to figure out a plan to put a stop to this. They knew it wasn’t possible to throw someone in jail just for being Chinese, but a known behavior associated with the Chinese, like smoking opium, could be made into a criminal act exercised to punish these Chinese immigrants. Next, we see at the turn of the century, cocaine, which was associated with blacks, also became criminal when it was suspected that black workers were taking jobs away from white workers.
Then, during the 1930’s, the Depression Era, Mexicans were working hard and working for much less, which, once again, threatened to take jobs away from white workers. Hemp, a legitimate crop from colonial times forward was used industrially as a commercial product, but became a smoked drug in the form of marijuana, which was stigmatized to Mexicans. A. Leon Higginbotham, a jurist and legal scholar, argued that “American law once overtly embraced a ‘precept of inferiority’ with regard to blacks, a precept that we suggest continues to exert discernible effects even into the present day” (Bobo and Thompson p. 48).
Blacks once again became the target in this modern era as they were hired to work in factories and there was an influx of blacks in urban areas within the inner city. Better job opportunities were scarce outside these urban areas and unemployment began to rise, which introduced prohibited jobs within the community. As a result of this unemployment issue within these black urban communities crack cocaine was born. This new form of cocaine helped implement new federal legislation in 1986 with mandatory minimum sentencing laws.
Although middle-aged, successful whites were also using all these drugs, it was targeted by law enforcement as criminal for minorities and immigrants by way of maintaining racial control. Juanita Diaz-Cotto, author of the article titled “Latina Imprisonment and the War on Drugs,” found that many studies reveal that “when racial and ethnic factors are taken into account, Latinos and African Americans are more likely to be arrested and incarcerated for drug offenses even when whites are just as likely (Pettiway 1987) or more likely (Isikoff 1991; Meddis 1989) to use the same drugs” (Bosworth and Flavin, p. 86).
So, we can see that over the course of United States history drug laws targeted any immigrant group seen as a threat to the established economic order. From a political science perspective, the War on Drugs and mandatory minimum sentencing laws implemented by the government asserted “direct and overt racial discrimination by police, the courts, or other law enforcement agencies… [using] practices and polices that that are seen as unfair by design in the eyes of most black Americans.
These practices have resulted not only in the vastly disproportionate incarceration of African Americans, but also now threaten all-important legitimacy and claim to fairness that should be a hallmark of legal institutions in a democratic society” (Bobo and Thompson. p. 449). Authors Henry Ruth and Kevin Reitz of The Challenge of Crime (2003) point out the trends over the last 120 years in regards to the number of inmates in the prison system. Based on their research between the years 1880 to 1980 the nation added a total of about 285,000 inmates to the prison systems (Bobo and Thompson, p. 49). When the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was put into effect Congress enacted different mandatory minimum sentencing terms for specific drugs. For example, the mandatory minimum sentence for 5 grams of crack cocaine carried a five-year minimum sentence compared to 500 grams of powder cocaine both for a first time offender. Both the same drug the only differences being its preparation, use and cost. With twenty years of these new mandatory minimum sentencing laws the nation added 1. million inmates into the prison system (Bobo and Thompson, p. 449).
The War on Drugs implemented in 1981 under the Nixon Administration has single handedly been the “main cause of the current prison population explosion” (Bosworth and Flavin, p. 135). We see over the course of America’s history that in the event there is economic hardship that directly affects white workers in some fashion the government has interjected to covertly establish racial control, and “amid the prevalence of the criminal minority/immigrant’ stereotype, right-wing ideologues have also been increasingly associating immigrants and minorities with criminal activity as a means to push a hard line policy agenda” (Sarin). After the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 was passed, within the first five years the population of African Americans in state prisons grew from 7 percent to 25 percent, with more dramatic increases at the federal level (Tonry & Hatlestad, 1997; Provine, 2007)” (Sarin).
Although the War on Drugs has become an ineffective war that targets minority populations in the name of law enforcement, several progressive steps have been taken to address the racial disparities and injustices associated with mandatory minimum sentencing laws, such as the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010 under the Obama Administration, which reduced the ratio of powder cocaine from 100:1 to 18:1 (Sarin), but this act is not retroactive and doesn’t affect crack cocaine offenses.
Much more remains to be done to not only redeem the past but prevent further injustices that will inevitably cause a greater expansion to our already mass incarceration issue.. Taking into account the element of othering which may be common to both caste-based and mental health-based exclusion, there is a higher probability that the mentally ill as a group are seen as the ‘other’, particularly in some disorders. In general, the mentally ill can be identified as such more easily than members of certain castes or disadvantaged groups in everyday interactions.
This aspect makes them the former group more vulnerable to discrimination and exclusion than the latter groups. Hierarchical or vertical elements are usually not in the picture when it comes to the exclusion of the mentally ill. These features are important in the case of caste-based exclusion, in the Indian context. Areas of convergence between caste-based and mental health-based exclusion are poverty, disadvantage and deprivation. Mental illhealth or psychological distress could be an antecedent or a consequence of poverty and disadvantage or deprivation.