The Tough On Crime Legacy
Nearly 50 years later, the rate of drug use and overdose has barely budged. Meanwhile, massive swathes of the nation are controlled by drug traffickers, millions have been forced to give up their freedom, and countless innocents have lost their lives. Faced with this harsh reality, America must ask itself if being “tough on crime” is worth it.
As a result of the War on Drugs, nearly two and a half million Americans, or more than one in every hundred adults, are currently imprisoned. And this mass incarceration leaves Americans with serious psychological damage.
Urbana High School junior Faith Smith, whose cousin is currently incarcerated, says, “Having a close family member incarcerated really takes a toll on my mental health … you’re not able to speak to them … when you go for visitations, it’s like you’re in jail too, like you’ve done something wrong.”
Children with family members, especially parents, in prison, are significantly more likely to be incarcerated themselves as adults. According to the Pew Research Center, more than 1 in 14 American children will have an incarcerated parent at some point in their lives.
Incarcerated people experience the cruelty of the American justice system as well, often even more strongly than their family members.
Smith goes on: “The problem with the justice system is that there is an attempt to wash convicts off the face of the Earth, like nobody wants to talk about the effects on both sides of the prison walls. [My brother] was a convicted felon for a nonviolent crime and was attempting to turn his life around and was unable to due to the charges.”
America’s recidivism rate, or the percentage of convicts who will later be re-convicted, is nearly 70 percent.
This heavy price, while damaging to all Americans, falls heavily on the backs of minorities and the poor. The United States Bureau of Justice reports that fully 30% of African-American males ages 20-29 are either on probation or imprisoned, in contrast to only 4% of whites of the same gender and age. And this heavily racialized justice is no accident.
John Ehrlichman, a former Nixon adviser, said in 1994,
“You want to know what this was really all about? The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
The War on Drugs has gone on for close to fifty years. Numerous attempts on prison reform have failed, and the White House talks earlier this year that initially appeared promising have produced little legislative action. In light of this consistent failure to reform, the legacy of the War on Drugs, and all the violence that comes with it, will most likely continue to haunt America for generations to come.
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