wikipedia | The War on Drugs has incarcerated disproportionately high numbers of African-Americans. However, the damage has compounded beyond individuals and their families to affect African-American communities as a whole.
African-American children are over-represented in juvenile hall and family court cases, and as a result, they are removed from their families in droves, and placed in the federal system.[15] This is due to two reasons.
First, the high incarceration rate has not ignored families: mothers
and fathers are incarcerated as well. This leads to a lack of a parental
(mother or father incarcerated) figure to provide a good role model and
stabilize a household. The impacts on their children are severe.
African-American youths are becoming highly involved in gangs in order
to generate income for their families lacking a primary breadwinner;
with the War on Drugs having made the drug trade lucrative, it is a far
more profitable for them to work for a dangerous drug gang than at a
safe entry-level job.[16]
The second-hand consequences of this are African-American youths
dropping out of school, being tried for drug-related crime, and
acquiring AIDS at disparate levels.[16]
Second, the high incarceration rate has led to the juvenile justice
system and family courts to use race as a negative heuristic in trials,
leading to a reinforcing effect: as more African-Americans are
incarcerated, the more the heuristic is enforced in the eyes of the
courts.[15] This contributes to yet higher imprisonment rates among African-American children, and tearing apart already damaged families.
The high imprisonment rate has also led the police to target
African-American communities at disparately high levels of surveillance,
invading privacy rights of individuals without probable cause, and
ultimately breeding a distrust for police among African American
communities.[17]
High numbers of African American arrests and charges of possession show
that although the majority of drug users in the United States are
white, African Americans are the largest group being targeted as the
root of the problem.[17]
A distrust of the police in African American communities seems like a
logical feeling. Harboring these emotions can lead to a lack of will to
contact the police in case of an emergency by members of African
American communities, ultimately leaving many people unprotected.
Disproportionate arrests in African American communities for
drug-related offenses has not only spread fear but also perpetuated a
deep distrust for government and what some call racist drug enforcement
policy.
The War on Drugs also plays a negative role in the lives of women of
color. In 1997, of women in state prisons for drug-related crimes,
forty-four percent were Hispanic, thirty-nine percent were black, and
twenty-three percent were white, quite different from the racial make up
shown in percentages of the United States as a whole.[18]
Statistics in England, Wales, and Canada are similar. Women of color
who are implicated in drug crimes are “generally poor, uneducated, and
unskilled; have impaired mental and physical health; are victims of
physical and sexual abuse and mental cruelty; are single mothers with
children; lack familial support; often have no prior convictions; and
are convicted for a small quantity of drugs”.[18]
Additionally, these women typically have an economic attachment to,
or fear of, male drug traffickers, creating a power paradigm that
sometimes forces their involvement in drug-related crimes.[19]
Though there are programs to help them, women of color are usually
unable to take advantage of social welfare institutions in America due
to regulations. For example, women’s access to methadone, which
suppresses cravings for drugs such as heroin, is restricted by state
clinics that set appointment times for women to receive their treatment.
If they miss their appointment, (which is likely: drug-addicted women
may not have access to transportation and lead chaotic lives), they are
denied medical care critical to their recovery. Additionally, while
women of color are offered jobs as a form of government support, these
jobs often do not have childcare, rendering the job impractical for
mothers, who cannot leave their children at home alone.[19]
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