Those of us who had institutions as part of our recovery, know that the Division of Correction is a big bussiness. I was doing a Bible study in the Maryland Penitentuary and I did a little poll. First I ask how many were incarcerated on drug related charges. Out of 200 men I believe 3 didn't raise their hands. We can speak about some of the other questions I ask at a later time. Our Institutions are filled with with people who have drug and alcohol problems, but don't think for a minute that they don't want you to "[You'all come back now, hear"] The DOC is one of the larger unions in this wonderful country of ours. Another statistic that is mind bobbling is that we incarcerate more men and women in the USA then any country in the world.
Many prisons accross the the country have dropped every program that would help an inmate once he returns to society. It uised to be you could learn a trade, earn a diploma, even a degree. But this has all been replaced by what I call warehousing, where bodies are crammed into quarters that is in many cases less humane than a pig pen. And as with any institution, you learn what the institution has to offer. So you go to jail as a drug addict and leave knowing how to hot wire vehicles, steal cars, sell drugs on a big time scale and by pass alarm systems are among just a few of the great things The D.O.C. has lined up for those who come to visit. Believe me when I say this. They DO NOT want to have yopu leave the PENN. in a better place than when you went in. They want you to fail, they are banking on you too fail, because if you fail, you help them feed their families. That's a good enough reason for them to keep you down, now isn't it. I had a C.O. telll me that I was going to take the $25.00 they give you when you leave and stick it straight in my arm not 10 minutes after I got out of the Penn.
Funny how 2 years later an inmate had invited me and some people from my church to come visit for spiritual warrior week. As I walked through the door, who was the C.O. ( Correctional Officer) on duty, but the one who said I'd through my Bible in the garbage and go get high not 10 minutes after being released. He was certainly different when he found out I was now a Pastor and was coming back in to minister to people. He pulled me aside and ask if I would pray for his family and his son especially, who was caught up in the game. Of course I did, but don't believe he wouldn't have been happier to see me come back in cuffs instead of a Bible.
"The drug war is a proxy for racism," says Andy Ko, Project Director of ACLU-Washington's Drug Policy Reform Project. "Most modern politicians wouldn't dream of explicitly advocating that society persecute or enslave poor people or members of minority communities. But that is exactly what is happening as a result of the 'get-tough-on-crime' drug war policies of the past few decades."
Ten years ago, perspectives such as these might still have been viewed as exaggerated rhetorical stabs at trying to reverse the trend of skyrocketing U.S. incarceration rates.
But today, civil liberties attorneys like Ko are being joined by what amounts to a nationwide chorus of drug war dissenters.
"It's impossible, in the [sociohistorical] context that we're living in now, to think about civil and human rights without looking at the impact of the War on Drugs," says Sharda Sekaran, Associate Director of Public Policy and Community Outreach for the Drug Policy Alliance in New York. "We now have the vantage point from which to examine the impact of decades of failed drug policies on the nation's most vulnerable communities."
A Growing Movement
The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA), the nation's leading organization promoting alternatives to the War on Drugs, recently held a national conference focusing on the impact of punitive drug policies on communities of color.
"Breaking the Chains: People of Color and the War on Drugs" brought hundreds of religious leaders, civil rights advocates, addiction treatment specialists, musicians and elected officials to downtown Los Angeles last month to discuss what the organization has unabashedly referred to as America's "apartheid-like" criminal justice system.
The conference built on the momentum generated in August 2001, when an ad-hoc group of more than 100 celebrities, politicians, religious leaders and drug policy reform activists (including Danny Glover, New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, NAACP Chair Julian Bond and former U.S. Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders) sent a letter to UN Secretary General Kofi Annan urging recognition of the War on Drugs as a "de facto form of racism." Representatives of the group then took their message to the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, to generate discussion and awareness about the disproportionate arrest and sentencing of low-income minorities on drug-related charges in the U.S.
The time was right for the Los Angeles conference, says DPA's Sekaran, because the inequities are now "glaringly obvious." Citizen-supported initiatives favoring treatment over incarceration in states including New Mexico, Arizona, California and Washington have convinced some politicians that a shift away from incarceration toward the treatment of drug addiction as a public health concern, is no longer a "third rail issue."
But the shift is slow in coming, largely because the national criminal justice trend over the past two decades has overwhelmingly favored long, punitive prison sentences over comprehensive strategies toward addressing drug addiction, alcoholism, poverty and mental illness. Beginning with the Sentencing Reform Act of 1984, the modern era of the War on Drugs was ratcheted up by the Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988, which imposed harsh sentences for the possession of crack cocaine. Parole was essentially abolished for drug offenders in federal prisons and then made difficult (if not impossible) for many state prisoners. In the years to follow, many states followed suit with intensified mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines, and the jingoistic "three-strikes-you're-out" legislation, sealing the fate of hundreds of thousands of men and women behind bars.
The results of this intensification of the drug war have been dramatic and devastating. With two million Americans doing time behind bars, our country now imprisons roughly 500,000 men and women on drug-related charges, at an annual cost of $9.4 billion.
Undeniable Disparities
Of the men and women serving more than one year in state prisons for drug-related offenses in 2001, over three-quarters were people of color. Regardless of the fact that, numerically speaking, five times as many Euro-Americans use drugs in the U.S. as African Americans (for more on this subject, see Tim Wise's article in this issue, "Affirmative Inaction"), a host of practices in law enforcement and the criminal justice system have led to glaring disparities in incarceration rates.
Indeed, racial profiling, buy-and-bust undercover operations, and specially-funded gang task forces have all but guaranteed higher arrest rates within communities of color. These policies and procedures have then, in turn, been exacerbated by overzealous city prosecutors and judges who have little or no wiggle room in meting out mandatory minimum sentences for drug-related offenses.
African Americans are by far the most overrepresented ethnic group in the prison system: At just 12.3 percent of the national population, African Americans made up 58 percent of the state prison population in 2000 doing time for drug-related offenses. Euro-Americans, by comparison, constitute 75 percent of the national population, but make up 23 percent of men and women doing time for drug-related crimes in state prisons. "For young black men born in 1966, they are more likely to have gone to prison than to have graduated from a four-year college," says Professor Bruce Western, a professor of sociology at Princeton University. "Prison is now as common as any other life event."
The government's own Bureau of Justice Statistics reports that fully ten percent of African American men nationwide between the ages of 25-29 were in prison in 2001. And although men still far outnumber women in state and federal prisons (at 93.4 percent versus 6.6 percent), African American women now represent the single fastest growing segment of the prison population.
According to Human Rights Watch's Punishment and Prejudice: "Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs," African Americans in seven states actually account for between 80 and 90 percent of all people sent to prison on drug charges. The extreme end of the racial disparity continuum is represented by states like Illinois, where African American men are sent to prison on drug charges at 57 times the rate of Euro-American men.
The extent to which African Americans are incarcerated has led to a political disenfranchisement unparalleled since the Jim Crow era: Today, almost 1.4 million African American men have been temporarily or permanently stripped of the right to vote because of a felony conviction.
Latinos are similarly over-represented behind bars, particularly in the federal prison system. In 1999, almost half of men and women charged with a federal drug offense were Latino, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Nearly 30 percent were African American, while 25 percent were Euro-American. From 1985 to 1995, the presence of Latinos in prisons in the U.S. grew faster than any other ethnic group by 219 percent.
While the Bureau of Justice Statistics does not track the proportions of Native Americans in prison, the rise in these populations has been documented by correctional departments in such states as New Mexico, Arizona, Oklahoma, South Dakota, Washington and California. Notably, the percentage of Asian-Americans in the federal prison population increased fourfold from 1980 to 1999.
"The 'drug warriors' know perfectly well who they're after: African Americans, Latinos, Asian 'gang members,' and, increasingly, poor European Americans," says Ko.
Ruined Lives
The drug war arrest and sentencing trends in communities of color have not been limited to adults. Youth of color convicted of drug-related offenses are being sent to juvenile detention centers and even to adult prisons in states like New Mexico and Arizona at rates that far surpass those of their Euro-American counterparts.
A report released this past July by Building Blocks for Youth, for instance, revealed that the average incarceration rate for Latino youth is now 13 times the rate of Euro-American youth. Between 1983 and 1991, the percentage of Latino youth in public detention facilities increased by 84 percent, compared with an 8 percent increase for Euro-American youth.
Because most juvenile detention facilities are geared toward the notion of punishment rather than rehabilitation, youth emerge from the system undereducated and emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the pressures and economic demands of life in the free world. In this sense, many youth of color make a quick transition from juvenile detention facilities to adult prisons, where their age, size and inexperience often make them the target of physical and sexual abuse.
Tellingly, two-thirds of state prisoners have less than a high school education and one-third were unemployed at the time of their arrest.
Professor Western, who has studied the impact and cycle of joblessness and incarceration on the lives of African American men, notes that ex-offenders tend to do "poorly on the outside."
Employers, he points out, are very reluctant to hire people with criminal backgrounds. And the ex-offender pool among African American men, adds Western, is "is enormous and will only continue to exacerbate wage inequality."
In 2001, roughly 400,000 men and women, most of who were people of color, were released from prison or jail. And year after year, the same recidivism trends play out. With limited employment and housing resources, roughly two-thirds of people released from incarceration nationwide are rearrested within three years. Most of the arrests take place within the first six months after release.
The reason for high recidivism rates among all former prisoners and particularly drug offenders has everything to do with the host of problems that they face in trying to reintegrate into society. Once released, prisoners are often sicker, angrier, and more alienated from their communities. Outside of 12-step peer groups, drug treatment services and programs are increasingly scarce in most prisons in the U.S. Under the best of circumstances, ex-offenders are often confronted with the reality that their old habits, coping mechanisms and temptations hold an enormous amount of power over their lives, particularly when even the lowest-paying jobs prove difficult to obtain with a prison record.
Ex-felons convicted of drug offenses also promptly lose their eligibility for federal assistance for both higher education and public housing. (To worsen matters, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that even innocent family members of people who used drugs can be evicted from public housing, regardless of whether they had knowledge of such drug use.)
And because of a hastily tacked-on amendment to the 1996 Welfare Reform Act, both food stamps and Temporary Aid to Needy Families (TANF) are now denied to most men and women convicted of drug felonies in the U.S.
"The War on Drugs has really been a war on the poor. Rather than supporting those who are vulnerable, we are punishing them and making it even more difficult for them to participate in a very competitive society," says Dan Merkle, co-chair of the Race and Class Disparity Task Force for the Seattle/King County Bar Association's Drug Policy Project.
Nothing about the nation's drug war strategy, adds Ko, indicates a genuine desire to help people battle serious drug problems, particularly in light of consistent cuts in state and federal funding for drug treatment.
"Treatment, harm reduction, education, and regulation are the answers to self-destructive drug use and the drug market," Ko says emphatically. "But our current drug policy depends on prison, deprivation of voting rights, ineligibility for subsistence level food and housing assistance, and loss of eligibility for educational loans, which only compound the misery that often is at the root of compulsive drug use." Shalom OldSchool777
Hello,
You might know me as OldSchool777. I thought at this time it might be a good time as any to tell you my story. Not my GGWO story. A story that will give you some background on where I have come from. At two weeks of age my biological mother decided that she couldn't take care of me, so I was signed over to Catholic Charities to be adopted out. I was adopted at about 5 mos of age by a policeman and his wife. My adopted mother was a sweetheart, and it is because of her that I am alive today to tell this story. Everything was normal until around the age of 6 or 7. It is when I began first grade. First my dad wanted to have me in Parochial School. After two days of that, I was thrown out for giving the nun a hard time. When my dad came to pick me up from school that day, I knew from then on things were going to be different. As soon as I sat in the car, front seat, my dad took his hand and backhanded me across the mouth. This put my two front teeth through my lip. As the blood ran down my chin, he started to scream obscenities at the top of his lungs right in my face. He told me I was a nothing and was never going to amount to nothing. When I arrived at home he told me to go clean myself up and get ready for dinner. My mother ask what had happened and when I went to explain, he told me I'd better shut up and mind my own business and told my mom the same. At around the age of 8 the beatings began to progress. Now he was using his belt and making me stand at attention while being beat. If I flinched, I would get one more. Sometimes he beat me so many times that he wore himself out. These beatings were not just on my butt, but also my back and my legs. Knocking my teeth through my lip was an everyday thing by now. And the screaming in my face never stopped throughout my life with him. Please don't think bad about my mom. She took my dad to court on more than one occasion, but because of my dad being a big time Lieutenant, the cases were always thrown out before we even got into the courtroom. Around the age of 10 I started to sprout up, but my dad was a short man, 5ft7" and now I was starting to be taller than him. He hated this. He would take me to the police station and the guys would tease him about the milkman being my dad and it would infuriate him. At 10 was when the real beatings started. He would pick me up by my ears and pound my head into the wall until sometimes he would put a hole in the sheetrock. My mother would try to defend me by putting her hands behind my head, and she got her fingers broke on more than one occasion. By this time going from 10-11-12 were like I was living in a horror story. I would watch out the side window for my dad to come home and I could tell by the look on his face as to whether or not I was going to get it. His methods advanced also. By now the belt had broke and so he came up with a little number I like to call the strap. It consisted of a broom handle sawed off about 3/4 long and then he nailed two pieces of leather belt onto the broom, and tore the end to make strips. At this time my dad was Head of the Narcotics Squad in Balt Cnty. Now this is back in the late 60's and the 70's. You were not to popular if your dad was busting everyone's older brother or sister you went to school with. I remember walking down the hall in school and getting sucker punched in the face and then jumped on by 3, 4, sometimes up to 12 guys. This was because my dad was the Narc, so I was considered one too. When I would ride the school bus they put cigarettes out on my head and neck. I eventually couldn't ride the bus, and then I would get home and tell my dad what happened, and he told me I had to learn to be a man. Then I was made to stand at attention and whipped with the strap, and as always, every time I flinched, I got another. I couldn't even take a shower after gym class because I had welt marks, many which drew blood, from the middle of my back all the way down to the back of my knee’s. I was thrown down flights of stairs. Punched in the face , the stomach and wherever else he could get a shot in while I was covering up. Then as a young teen I started to run away from home. I was between the ages of 12 to 15 now. First time I made it to FLA and guess who drove down to pick me up. Well let's just put it like this. I had to get my front tooth removed after the journey. I couldn't win. Go to school, get jumped by a gang, go home and get the strap until I bled. I still have flat spots on the back of my head where he put my head through the wall all the way until I was about 15 or 16. It was a vicious cycle. I couldn't understand this man. he beat me half to death 6 days a week and then took me to church on Sundays. I reported his actions to the parish priest, he said it was just a little discipline. I told the police that would pick me up in various states for running away and they ignored me. Once I made it to Vegas always hitchhiking, and this time he flew me back. I talked to my mom on the phone from the police station in Nevada and she promised she would come get me at the airport. Guess who showed up. I have so many scars on the insides of my lips. Eventually at the age of 17 I was put in a home for kids who are incorrigible and incontrollable by their parents. I started drugs when I was 12 so no one would think I was a narc. I didn't stop until I was 39 yrs old. Spent 5 1/2 yrs of my life behind bars. And now the Lord by His grace has delivered me from all of that. My dad died last year, and my mom lives in Vegas. If you knew me, I mean really knew me, then you would know that sometimes I speak harshly, sometimes I don't quite get out the things I want to say the way I want to say them. That is why sometimes I quote different authors because I used to have a speech impediment, I guess from being so nervous all the time. I hope this will give you some insight into me. I am a Big Teddy Bear, and if your my friend, I will go into the darkest alley in the worst neighborhood, if I think I can help you or yours in any way. That's All OldSchool777. This is such a nice place to chill and it's good to be back.
To wrap this up, from years of physical abuse and mental, I needed an escape and drugs were the perfect fit. Do any of us feel the same? Does one type of abuse lead to the other?
OldSchool777
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