5.4 The War on Drugs

The War on Drugs

True Stories: Read an excerpt from Michelle Alexander’s New York Times best-selling book, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, as she shares the story of Erma Faye Stewart, a mother of two children, who was caught up in a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas.

Imagine you are Erma Faye Stewart, a thirty-year-old, single African American mother of two who was arrested as part of a drug sweep in Hearne, Texas (Frontline, 2004; Davis, 2007). All but one of the people arrested were African American. You are innocent. After a week in jail, you have no one to care for your two small children and are eager to get home. Your court-appointed attorney urges you to plead guilty to a drug distribution charge, saying the prosecutor has offered probation. You refuse, steadfastly proclaiming your innocence. Finally, after almost a month in jail, you decide to plead guilty so you can return home to your children. Unwilling to risk a trial and years of imprisonment, you are sentenced to 10 years’ probation and ordered to pay $1,000 in fines, as well as court and probation costs. You are also now branded a drug felon. You are no longer eligible for food stamps; you may be discriminated against in employment; you cannot vote for at least 12 years, and you are about to be evicted from public housing. Once homeless, your children will be taken from you and put in foster care.
A judge eventually dismisses all cases against the defendants who did not plead guilty. At trial, the judge finds that the entire sweep was based on the testimony of a single informant who lied to the prosecution. You, however, are still branded a drug felon, homeless, and desperate to regain custody of your children. Now place yourself in the shoes of Clifford Runoalds, another African American victim of the Hearne drug bust (American Civil Liberties Union, 2002). You returned home to Bryan, Texas, to attend the funeral of your 18-month-old daughter. Before the funeral services begin, the police show up and handcuff you. You beg the officers to let you take one last look at your daughter before she is buried. The police refuse. You are told by prosecutors that you are needed to testify against one of the defendants in a recent drug bust. You deny witnessing any drug transaction; you don’t know what they are talking about. Because of your refusal to cooperate, you are indicted on felony charges. After a month of being held in jail, the charges against you are dropped. You are technically free, but as a result of your arrest and period of incarceration, you lose your job, your apartment, your furniture, and your car. Not to mention the chance to say good-bye to your baby girl.
This is the War on Drugs. The brutal stories described above are not isolated incidents, nor are the racial identities of Erma Faye Stewart and Clifford Runoalds random or accidental. In every state across our nation, African Americans—particularly in the poorest neighborhoods—are subjected to tactics and practices that would result in public outrage and scandal if committed in middle-class white neighborhoods. In the drug war, the enemy is racially defined. The law enforcement methods described [earlier] have been employed almost exclusively in poor communities of color, resulting in jaw-dropping numbers of African Americans and Latinos filling our nation’s prisons and jails every year. We are told by drug warriors that the enemy in this war is a thing—drugs—not a group of people, but the facts prove otherwise (Alexander, M., 2010).

With the identification of drug misuse as “Public Enemy No. 1,” President Richard

Nixon launched the War on Drugs. Though the initial policies included significant resource allocation for substance misuse prevention and treatment programs aimed at “prevention of new addicts, and the rehabilitation of those who are addicted” (The American Presidency Project: Special Message to the Congress in 1971), what followed over the next 40 years was an unprecedented wave of punitive drug policies with increasing incarceration of U.S. citizens for drug related crimes. As of 2017, the U.S. was incarcerating its citizens at 5 to 10 times the rate of other industrialized nations (The Sentencing Project, 2019).

Chart – International Rates of Incarceration per 100,000 in 2019

Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986

The above graph shows current incarceration rates across the world per 100,000 people. The U.S. incarceration rate is 639 per 100,000 people followed by El Salvador at 572 per 100,000 people. Incarceration rates in the U.S. were not always this high. Prison and jail populations across the country began to escalate sharply in the 1980s with the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 under President Ronald Reagan. Passing with strong bipartisan support, the Anti-Drug Abuse Act ushered in harsher penalties, mandatory minimum sentencing for some drug crimes (e.g. those involving crack cocaine), and increased enforcement activities, in particular for low-level drug offenses, by raising overall spending thresholds on drug enforcement by $1.7 billion (Pearl, 2018; Teasley, 2001). Along with the mandatory minimum sentences was a 100:1 sentencing disparity for crack versus powder cocaine. Note that crack was used mainly by the Black community and powder cocaine by Whites. Under this provision of the law, possession of 5 grams of crack cocaine received the same sentence as possession of 500 grams of powder cocaine. The impacts of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 were disproportionately levied against low-income, ethnic minority communities nationwide. (Note: In 2010, 24 years after the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, Congress passed the Fair Sentencing Act during the Obama Administration reducing the crack versus powder cocaine sentencing disparity from 100:1 to 18:1.)

Violent Crime Control Act and Law Enforcement Act of 1994

The second piece of major legislation introduced during the War on Drugs was the Violent Crime Control Act and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. The 1994 Crime Bill, as it is better known, was passed during the Clinton Administration. Similar to the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, it received strong bipartisan support. From 1980 to 1992, when urban areas across the nation faced a 27% increase in violent crime rates and overall crime fell just 5% (Block & Twist, 1994), being “tough-on-crime” was viewed by many politicians as an effective strategy to both secure the economic vitality of American cities and protract their own political longevity.

• increased enforcement activities training 100,000 new police officers to patrol American streets as part of an enhanced community policing program that disproportionately centered on marginalized racial-ethnic minority communities;
• large grant mechanisms totaling $9.7 billion to fund new prison construction;
• authorizing the death penalty for 60 new federal offenses;
• making juveniles aged 13 and older eligible to be prosecuted as adults for certain serious violent crimes; and
• expanded mandatory minimum sentencing provisions (“3 Strikes and You Are Out!”) including mandatory life imprisonment without possibility of parole for federal offenders with three or more convictions for serious violent felonies or drug trafficking crimes (U. S. Department of Justice, 1994).

The ramifications of these two major policies enacted during the height of the War on Drugs (Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986; 1994 Crime Bill) has shaped the carceral system and low-income minority communities in the U.S. as we know them today. Largely as a result of these policies, marginalized racial-ethnic minority communities in the U.S. are more fragmented than ever before with a new prison opened every 10 days from 1990 to 2005 (Kirchhoff, 2010) and in 2015 approximate 77% of people serving time in federal prisons and about 57% of people in state prison for drug convictions are Black or Latino (Drug Policy Alliance, 2015). Further, when considering the fraying of the nuclear family, 1 in 9 Black children has an incarcerated parent, compared to 1 in 28 Latino children and 1 in 57 white children; totaling 2.7 million children growing up in U.S. households in which one or two parents are incarcerated, where two-thirds of these parents have been convicted of nonviolent offenses (Western & Pettit, 2010).

Collateral Consequence Laws & the Social Costs of a Felony Drug Conviction

In addition to serving time in prison, individuals in the U.S. convicted of felony drug offenses are subject to collateral consequence laws that limit their participation across multiple sectors of mainstream society.

Collateral consequences are defined as “legal and regulatory restrictions that limit or prohibit people convicted of crimes from accessing employment, business and occupational licensing, housing, voting, education, and other rights, benefits, and opportunities” (National Inventory of Collateral Consequences of Conviction, 2021).

Examples of collateral consequences are listed below:

• stigma of being a drug felon
• ineligibility for government sponsored supplemental nutrition assistance programs (SNAP)
• ineligibility for government sponsored student loan programs
• ineligibility for government sponsored housing assistance programs
  • cannot live with individuals who receive housing assistance from government programs (even if they are family members)
• ineligibility to vote (varies by state)
• potential employers can legally discriminate in hiring processes due to felony conviction