Why aren'I was trying to get at initially. The idea I am presenting is that minorities are not genetically predisposed to criminality. They are not just hard luck cases. What they are is under attack by a society which has supreme contempt for them. In essence the only stupid criminal is one who does not realize his true enemy. we touching race here? It's a very large factor. In my opinion we shouldn't simplify it down with judgmental language of stupid v.s. smart criminals. While yes, at base here, the big picture issue is drug prohibition in general, and yes if you go around leaving your meth pipe in your car's cupholder and running stop signs with a broken tail light, you are an idiot— but— I'm going to leave that aside and point out that certain groups of people are ultimately bigger victims of drug laws due to their race and class. The reason America's rampant drug criminalization is referred to as the new jim crow is because of how it's essentially geared to put people of color in jail for drug offenses. You could be slyly toking a one hitter, you could even be smoking a regular old cigarette but if you're black or brown, you have a much higher chance of being given a second look and if you are indeed doing something out of line, you will face worse consequences for it. A man driving down the street with weed hidden in his car is much likelier to be stopped and searched if he isn't white and he is also much likelier to be incarcerated more intensely than someone who is white.
I have a friend, who is white/upper middle class, who was allowed to snort cocaine and have another glass of wine
while in police custody before they took him to a
hospital for being intoxicated. They were laughing it up together even though someone called the cops on him while he was in a hotel room for drunkenly threatening someone's life. While we can argue back and forth as to whether or not his class and race had anything to do with the ease of his encounter with the police, let us first speak of statistics:
Some statistics (sources at bottom):
According to these statistics more whites use illicit drugs than blacks yet blacks suffer the consequences most. Are you going to tell us that it's because blacks are "stupid criminals" and that whites are "smart criminals?"
Once you're given a criminal record, your rights and opportunities suffer massive reductions which manifest themselves as debt, difficulty acquiring a job, lost time due to jailing and going to court, etc. These factors increase the poverty and profiling that initially leads people of color and those of the poverty stricken class into a repeating cycle. These people with criminal records, a.k.a., people of color according to many many statistics, are kept in poverty, separate from those who are not stuck in these cycles… segregated, separate and not equal— just like when we had the actual Jim Crow laws in the 19th century.
Let us
also take into account records of alleged CIA supported drug trafficking that put crack and heroin on the street in the 80's, which coincidentally is when the number of incarcerated people in this country began to quadruple. If you read books about the history of the rise and fall of the black panthers for example, it is riddled with FBI agents attempting to corrupt the group by getting their members to engage in drug dealing and trafficking amongst many other things such as becoming informants.
These are things you don't think about when you have it easy because of your appearance. I'm not trying to pick on anyone for being white and privileged, but I'm challenging those of you who are, to think deeper about how big of a factor one's class and race are within the criminal justice system.
Sources:
naacp[dot]org/pages/criminal-justice-fact-sheet
wikipedia[dot]org/wiki/CIA_involvement_in_Contra_cocaine_trafficking
http://rt[dot]com/usa/usa-cia-drugs-poor-americas/
Excuse the strange formatting of the sources, the website would not let me hyperlink them, I think because I am a new member.
