“Drugs, Race, and Prisons” Oct. 5, 2019 Dr. Roger Ray, pastor
John Ehrlichman as quoted in Harper’s, April 2016 “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
Of the western democracies with whom we would like to associate ourselves, England, France, Canada, Sweden, Finland, we have between 5 and 12 times as many people in prison per capita. At 2 million people, our inmate population is virtually a nation within a nation.
I find it amazing that he was willing to admit it in an interview, but I am not the least bit shocked by that facts revealed by Nixon administration advisor, John Ehrlichman, in a 2016 interview, that the Nixon administration increased the criminal sentences for marijuana and heroin, not because they really wanted to fight a drug war but because marijuana was a drug common among young Vietnam War protestors and heroin was associated with the black community that was finally finding a voice and political clout in the Civil Rights movement.
You cannot even imagine Richard Nixon being concerned about drug abuse, but, as Ehrlichman said, he considered blacks and war protestors as his domestic enemies, and he would do anything to destroy them.
Increasing punishment for drug possession and distribution allowed them to break up meetings, jail leaders, and generally harass and threaten Nixon’s perceived enemies. Ehrlichman concludes the interview saying, “Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”
This is not Stalin’s Russia, this is not Mao’s China, this is our America…sweet land of liberty, the home of the free and the brave, the greatest Democracy since ancient Greece. I hope that you know that I take no pleasure in either revealing or rehearsing these facts. Here is the naked, unavoidable, and painful truth: the government of the United States, in successive administrations, has lied to the population to gain their acquiescence to policies that result in the oppression and imprisoning of minorities and dissidents. They do this in many ways but one of the most insidious and dishonest is the use of drug charges.
Now, let’s be very honest about this. Heroin is a scourge. It is a highly addictive yet relatively cheap and available drug that is killing tens of thousands of people. If making it illegal and criminally charging those who manufacture, distribute, and use it would wipe it off the face of the earth, I would feel differently. But what we know for a fact is that 50 years of a war on drugs has failed entirely and our policies have ruined the lives of millions, cost us billions in tax dollars, and has, almost single handedly, broken up minority families and kept the sons and daughters of 19thcentury slaves locked in chaos and poverty.
The so called “War on Drugs” has utterly failed. Almost every western democracy has realized that addiction is not a crime, it is medical problem. It does not call for incarceration, it calls for treatment. Why does the United States persist in doing what we have clearly seen for 50 years is a disastrous failure?
If you have not spent time around a county jail, that last point might easily pass you by but let me drill down on this for just a moment:
And those fees pay for law enforcement salaries, construction, utilities, food, clothing, supplies, and transportation. If this obscenity doesn’t make you mad as hell then you might have a cold hard place where your heart was supposed to be but if you need a little more of a nudge in that direction, let me tell you something else about this situation:
The “why” of America’s mass incarceration is almost entirely a “follow the money” explanation. Explaining how we do it has a lot to do with power.
If we ask ourselves, “Who should be in prison and how long should they be there?” I guarantee you that your answers would be much more compassionate than the reality we see in our very broken judicial system.
One in five inmates are locked up for drug charges. Two-thirds of our 2 million nation of inmates are locked up for non-violent crimes.
I have sat in courtrooms with parents of young men being sentenced for crimes such as possession of child pornography…. Not for rape, not for child abduction, not for producing or selling or even buying child porn, but for being a stupidly curious young man and looking at it on line, and they will be sentenced to ten or fifteen years in a federal prison. Child pornography is illegal in most countries but in most of Europe, the maximum sentence is five years. In the United States, we have grown our prison population, largely, by adding years and years onto the sentences of those convicted of a crime.
This goes to the character of America. Do we put people in prison in order to reform them? To change their criminal ways and help them to become better people or do we imprison them for some kind of social revenge? Do we want a pound of flesh from the inmate or do we want to protect society from criminals while helping the criminal to be reformed?
By treating prisoners as being subhuman, literally exposing them to overcrowding and degradation that would not be allowed at an animal shelter for stray dogs and cats, we keep our prisons full by teaching inmates to be criminals so that they re-offend and return to prison life.
I must thank you for being patient with me today as I have flipped through charts and statistics about the injustice of our justice system, but I cannot leave this topic without saying something about race.
It is never entirely accurate to globalize from any one case but the contrast between the white actress, Felicity Huffman, and the black homeless mother, Tanya McDowell is irresistible. Huffman bribed and SAT test administrator $15,000 to cheat on her daughter’s test to get her into a better school. She was found guilty and was sentenced to 2 weeks in a comfy jail. Tanya McDowell used her father’s address to register her six-year-old son in a better school than he would have gone to from the homeless shelter and she was sentenced to 5 years in prison. Now, don’t get me wrong: Felicity Huffman paid a $15,000 bribe but when she was sentenced to two weeks in jail, she also had to pay a $30,000 fine. Honestly, that seems about right to me. We have too many people in jail for way too long and I think that given the public humiliation, criminal record, spending a few days in jail and taking a financial hit is punishment enough.
It is Tanya McDowell’s case that reeks of racism. If they found her kid didn’t deserve to be registered in the school where his grandfather lived, then, I suppose you could move him to another school. But in what universe is it a crime for a poor mother to try to get her kid into a better school? A five-year sentence for this? Am I the only one here who thinks that she should be applauded for taking action to get her kid into a better school? The problem here is that Felicity Huffman had too much money and way too much sense of white privilege and Tanya McDowell was poor, desperate, and doing what she could. Call me a rebel, but justice here does not include any criminal charge for Tanya, and far from jail time, I think Felicity Huffman should have paid her $30,000 fine to Tanya McDowell so that woman could rent an apartment in a good school system. That’s just my opinion . . . it just so happens that I am right.
The ACLU reports that, on average, a black person’s prison sentence is 20% longer than a white person’s who committed the same crime.
But as bad as that is, the larger fact that is more difficult to quantify is that Latino, Native American, and black people are more likely to be apprehended, convicted, and incarcerated than are white people. One famous example is the way in which Billie Holiday and Judy Garland were treated when they were both addicted to heroin.
Judy Garland’s doctor told her to take longer vacations and spend more time with family and friends, which, ironically, is the best way to treat addiction. Billie Holiday was put in jail and handcuffed to a bed, and that is where she died.
Look, James Taylor was a heroin addict… do you think of him as a criminal? Sweet Baby James? Is it a weak-minded person who sang “I’ve Seen Fire and I’ve Seen Rain?” If James Taylor were black, he would probably be dead now and that is the issue about race and drugs in America.
Let me sum up by saying that we need to stop thinking of addiction as a crime and start treating it like the medical problem that it is. And I think that we need to put protections in place to make sure that justice is blind to race and to class. And furthermore, I think that we need to turn the tables and put the justice system on trial. Justices, prosecutors, and politicians have transferred billions of dollars and grabbed corporate and political power by abusing minorities, the poor, and the vulnerable. We need to shorten prison sentences and use prisons to reform rather than to get revenge. We need to release most of our prisoners by using prisons only for people who represent a real threat to society.
People who smoke pot or register their kid in a better school district are not a threat to you or your rights.
My modest suggestion is that we put rapists in prison rather than on the bench.
