Posted on 09/28/2015 5:55:41 AM PDT by reaganaut1
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Today’s disastrously punitive criminal justice system is actually rooted in the postwar social and economic demise of urban black communities. It is, in part, the unintended consequence of African-Americans’ own hard-fought battle against the crime and violence inside their own communities. To ignore that history is to disregard the agency of black people and minimize their grievances, and to risk making the same mistake again.
The draconian Rockefeller drug laws, for example, the model for much of our current drug policies, were promoted and supported by an African-American leadership trying to save black lives. During the 1960s, concentrated poverty began to foster a host of social problems like drug addiction and crime that degraded the social and civic health of black neighborhoods. After the Harlem riots of 1964 (which erupted following the shooting of a 15-year-old black male by a white cop), polls showed that many African-Americans in New York City still considered crime a top problem facing blacks in the city, while few worried about civil rights and police brutality.
By the late ’60s, drug users were mugging residents and burglarizing homes, stores and churches. Loitering alcoholics, addicts and out-of-work young black males frightened the elderly and scared children. Not surprisingly, working-class and middle-class African-Americans organized and fought back. In 1968, Roy Wilkins, the leader of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, said, “It is too early to raise a victory cry, but a reaction is setting in that could make the demand for order far louder than the emotional call to race — right or wrong.”
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
“...polls showed that many African-Americans in New York City still considered crime a top problem facing blacks in the city, while few worried about civil rights and police brutality.”
Welllllll, that’s great and all, but you can’t get rich off that, said, Barack Obama, Jeremiah Wright, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, Al Sharpton, and Jesse Jackson.
Maybe poverty doesn’t cause drug addiction and crime, maybe drug addiction and crime cause poverty?
Democrats cause poverty.
True.
No, the real roots of the drug laws go back to the 1920s and propaganda movies meant to titillate rather than inform. Influenced by the ‘decadence’ of jazz and black/hispanic use of marijuana, the national nannies accomplished through criminalization what had previously required a constitutional amendment. Nixon merely globalized the new nanny’s reaction to the Beat culture of the 1950s.
Or maybe it's a vicious circle, with each problem worsening the other.
If you have a $200 a day habit you’re not poor. You’re just not spending your money wisely.
Indeed. There is another thread about a police department that had mercy on and helped a young mother who was busted for shoplifting diapers. Not long afterwards, she was arrested on drug charges.
If an addict stealing $200 a day got clean but kept stealing, I wouldn't consider the problem solved.
No. Just from a purely financial viewpoint.
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