In order to understand how environmental injustice relates to the prison system, it is important to reach the root: why and how mass incarceration started. Without mass incarceration, Black and POC who are the most affected by environmental injustices would not be disproportionately incarcerated. If mass incarceration did not exist, prison conditions would not be as horrible as they are today, and inequalities would not be as stark.
Below, I will provide a brief timeline explaining how and why mass incarceration was created. I used chapter one from the book The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander to acquire most of the information below. If you are interested in watching an analysis of this book, please watch the video below.
Also, before you jump in, please watch this video by Jay-Z who narrates how the racist criminal justice system and the war on drugs impacted the Black community to the extent that they continue to feel those effects to this very day.
1950s-1960s- "Law and Order"
Mass incarceration can be linked back to the late 1950s when Southern governors, law enforcement officials, and segregationists introduced the "law and order" rhetoric to suppress the Civil Rights Movement. For over a decade, officials ignited racist sentiments, criminalized the movement for not following the law, and argued that Martin Luther King Jr.'s civil disobedience was the leading cause of crime (1). Civil rights activists, on the other hand, argued that the protests were a result of widespread police brutality and harassment (1). The riots after MLK's assassination in 1968 further intensified racist sentiments toward Black people, as government officials used those riots to argue that civil rights for Black people increased crimes. By then, 81 percent of people responding to a Gallup Poll blamed Black people and Communists for breaking down law and order (1).
1970s- The Beginning of the War on Drugs
Richard Nixon embraced the "law and order" rhetoric from the 50's during his presidency. In fact, seventeen of his speeches were entirely about law and order and he released a television ad in which he encouraged voters to reject the "lawlessness" from civil rights activists and to instead embrace "order" in the U.S (1). With that, Nixon gained support from low-income white communities, without explicitly addressing race although everyone knew he referred to the Black community when he talked about the "lawlessness" in riots. Nixon's subliminal racism is exemplified in the quote below:
He [President Nixon] emphasized that you have to face the fact that the whole problem is really the Blacks. The key is to devise a system that recognizes this while not appearing to.-H.R. Haldeman (1).
Most importantly, in 1971 Nixon declared a "war on drugs," arguing that illegal drugs were the country's number one enemy. In doing that, Nixon increased the presence and size of federal drug control agencies and enacted mandatory sentencing and no-knock warrants for drug offenses (1). For someone who called drugs the number one enemy, Nixon did not address the root of the issue: why were people using drugs in the first place? However, the truth always comes out, as John Ehrlichman, former Assistant to the President for Domestic Affairs under Nixon, later exposed the real intention of the war on drugs:
The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. 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." -John Ehrlichman (2).
1980s- War on Drugs Expansion + Crack Cocaine
Ronald Reagan recognized the power in igniting racism without explicitly talking about race. So, he drew his approval from those who resented/feared Black people and expected him to keep them in order. Reagan used racist terms like "welfare queen" as codes for Black mothers, followed by his promise to be tougher on crimes in order to gain support from the poor and working-class whites (1).
In October 1982 Reagan officially announced an expansion of Nixon's war on drugs. When he announced this, less than 2 percent of the population in the US considered drugs to be the most important issue (1). While funding for agencies responsible for drug treatment, prevention, and education decreased from $274 million to $57 million, the FBI anti-drug funding increased from $8 million to $95 million between 1980-1984 (1). The number of incarcerated people, most of which were Black or POC, for nonviolent drug offenses increased from 50,000 in 1980 to approximately 400,000 by 1987 (2).
Reagan declared this drug coincidentally around the same time when the industrial employment of Black men decreased to 28 percent. During this time, Black communities experienced an increase in poverty as more industries moved overseas and/or required a higher education (1). As a result, poverty increased incentives to sell drugs, specifically crack cocaine, as families struggled to find sources of income (1).
Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 & 1988
With the sales of crack cocaine skyrocketing and getting worldwide media attention, Reagan enacted the Anti-Drug Abuse Act in 1986. This act increased severe punishment for the distribution of crack, associated with Black people, than powder cocaine, associated with whites (1). As if that was not enough, the act became tougher in 1988 after some adjustments. The revised act allowed public housing authorities to evict any tenant associated with drug activities and expanded the use of the death penalty for serious drug-related offenses. Also, people could be locked up for at least 5 years for simply carrying cocaine, even if they were not selling it (1).
1990s-Tough on Crime Era
During his presidency, George H.W. Bush unsurprisingly continued to appeal to racist ideologies and embraced being tough on crime as well. In 1989, Bush labeled drugs as the "most pressing problem facing the nation" (1). Then, by 1991, one-fourth of young Black men were incarcerated (1).
After Bush, Bill Clinton falsely based his presidential campaign on treatment yet imposed even stricter crime bills when he became president. Clinton implemented the "three strikes and you’re out” law, a $30 billion crime bill that created more federal capital crimes, allocated over $16 billion for the expansion of state and local police forces, and implemented life-sentences for three-time offenders (1). Clinton also ended traditional welfare when he signed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and replaced it with Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF), which introduced a five-year lifetime limit on welfare assistance. TANF criminalized poverty by banning anyone from receiving welfare if they had previous drug-related offenses. Clinton also made it easier for federally-assisted public housing projects to deny housing to applicants with a criminal history (1).
The Clinton Administration’s ‘tough on crime’ policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history. - Justice Policy Institute (1).
Conclusion
Mass incarceration is not natural in any form and did not result from an increase in crime rates but rather from racist intentions that led to "tough on crime" policies that specifically targeted Black and communities of color. Mass incarceration disproportionately affects Black people because its inherent goal is to oppress and silence them in order to perpetuate white supremacy. President after president after the 1950s promoted a racialized political agenda that implicitly criminalized Black people by explicitly attacking crime. This racialized agenda normalized the act of criminalizing, brutalizing, and dehumanizing Black people in the name of safety and liberty for everyone else.
To this day, we continue to see the effects of the war on drugs as more people are currently incarcerated for drug offenses than for violent offenses, as the graph below illustrates.
1.Alexander, M. (2010). The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.
2. A Brief History of the Drug War. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.drugpolicy.org/issues/brief-history-drug-war
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