Civil movement; rhetoric into increasing crime; criminalizing the black; drug issue is treated as a crime instead of a health issue

Coin the term

War on drugs

Reagan turn the literal term into reality => mass incarceration; takes the problem of economic inequality, hyper-segregation in American cities and the problem of drug abuse and criminalize all of that in the form of drug

Generation of education

Crack cocaine is cheaper therefore more prevalent in coloured community. By putting harsher sentencing on crack cocaine, black are persecuted harsher.

Increasing spending on law enforcement (policing, jails); more funding militarization of police department

Media outlet portrays the black as super predators, and it is effective. Generation of black grows up in this rhetoric. Black parents support policies that discriminate their own children

War on drug is essentially war on coloured community

It is a political strategy

Play on law and order, and fear of crimes

Southern strategy

Educate a public for years, decades to believe that black is dangerous, and black also believes that.

Won election around the fear on the black

Deliberately depicting the black as criminals

Primitive American fear; a staple of white imagination

“Being tough on crime” political environment forces democrat to take the same stances and take a more centrist stance

Considerations over Circumstances around a case are overlooked; prosecutors> judges

Black panthers

Black leaders were came after “stripe out a whole generation with leadership”. Black is vulnerable and unable to protect themselves

Fred Hampton

Companies that make money off mass incarceration => incentives to lobby policies to put money in prisons.

Inmates become cheap labour and work for big corporations

Too poor to get out; can’t pay the bail

Most people chose not to go to trails. Pleading guilty to crimes they didn’t commit just because the thought of going to jail for what the mandatory minimums are is so excruciating

If you exercise that right to a trial, and you are convicted, we will punish you more.

Punished him for having the audacity to not take a plea deal and to want to take it to trial

Take that plea and commit to something you didn’t do?

Once in jail, lose the right to vote

Historically, when one looks at efforts to create reforms, they inevitably lead to more repression.

Throughout American history, African American has repeatedly bee controlled through systems of racial and social control that appear to die but then are reborn that tailored to the needs and constraints of the time

Mass criminalization and incarceration

To ignore that racial heritage, to ignore that historical context means that you can’t have an informed debate about the current state of blacks and police relationships today cause this didn’t just appear out of nothing. This is the product of a centuries-long historical process