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'War on Drugs' has specific targets
Since 2001, the Bush administration has invested just $2.5 billion in crime-fighting initiatives, including Project Safe Neighborhoods and DNA testing. Yet, the federal government spent roughly $45.4 billion on the war on drugs.
[size=1]7-9-'07 | The Daily Texan | by Colin Pace

Last week's column, "System in justice?" focused on the disproportionate numbers of the U.S. prison system - the numbers of U.S. citizens incarcerated compared to other countries, the disproportionate numbers of blacks and Latinos compared to whites and the percentage of inmates held for drug offenses.

But important questions remain. Could it be that the U.S. is simply more effective at catching criminals, partially as a result of the high amount of money we spend on it? Do we have more criminal activity in the U.S. than in other countries? If drug offenses compose 57 percent of our prisoners, is that an indication that there is a problem with our drug laws?

The United States detains a large number of criminals precisely because so much money is spent on law enforcement. Since 2001, the Bush administration has invested just $2.5 billion in critical crime-fighting initiatives, including Project Safe Neighborhoods and DNA testing. Yet, according to the White House's National Drug Control Strategy Report, the federal government spent roughly $45.4 billion on the war on drugs, including the funds needed to control the supply of illegal drugs, to pay government employees involved in waging the war and to satisfy rehabilitation costs. Spending that amount of money might be appropriate if the United States had high crime rates compared to other countries. However, the United States has a lower property crime, burglary and violent crime rate than Canada or Germany. Overall, U.S. crime rates are fairly similar to that of other industrial nations.

Yet, international comparisons can be misleading because of differences in measuring crimes and definitions of crime types. Some use these difficulties to claim that increased spending on the war on drugs is a result of increased crime within the United States. Reagan's policies may have decreased the rate of violent crime, but the war on drugs hasn't decreased drug use. According to the Rand Monograph Report, the use of cocaine increased more than fivefold between 1972 and 1988, and the use of the two most prevalent drugs, methamphetamine and ecstasy, increased in similar ways.

But the problem with the United States' drug policy is that the system is set up to disadvantage the poor and people of color. Policing impoverished areas where small amounts of drugs on the street are likely, racial profiling, large sentencing discrepancies between powder cocaine and crack cocaine (convicts receive the same sentence for five grams of crack as they would for 500 grams of cocaine) and mandatory minimum sentences are reasons why the demographics of the prison systems in the U.S. are so skewed.

The late author Michel Foucault calls this system of surveillance "disciplinary power:" a mechanism that allows institutions to "track" individuals throughout their lives. As Foucault writes, "visibility is a trap." The Massachusetts-based Real Cost of Prisons Project describes this visibility as "policing targets [in] inner cities, where poor people of color do business and socialize out on the street, where whites do the same thing safe behind the doors and fences of suburbia." Targets of policing don't decide crime policies - politicians and high-level administration officials decide how these campaigns focus on specific demographics.

Some of the harshest legislation that enforces discrimination comes from the so-called "liberals," as well as the conservatives, of the 1990s. President Bill Clinton increased sentences for drug offenses, slashed welfare programs for recipients with prior drug convictions such as food stamps and subsidized housing and denied student loans to anyone who was incarcerated. That approach won't help society and the drug addicts and criminals that are battling with addiction and desperate situations - it will only exacerbate their situation.

Clinton was not alone with tough-on-crime policies, but followed in a long line of more conservative politicians. Moderate Republican Gov. Nelson Rockefeller initiated tough sentencing in New York in 1973, Ronald Reagan started the "War on Drugs" in 1981, and California Gov. Pete Wilson initiated the three-strikes law in 1994.

Money spent on catching criminals, law enforcement and prison systems is heavily focused on continuing to bring prisoners into the prison-industrial complex and perpetuating of the myth of high crime rates in the United States. But it is clear that budgets and policies governing prisons, and the law enforcement that fills them, disadvantage those who need help at the outset.

Pace is an anthropology and history junior.

 

Buzzby

This sounds like a "survival of the fittest" situation. If you make it easy for the "predators" to find you, you're much more likely to get "eaten". Why would anyone pursue illegal activities in plain sight? Adapt or perish.

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