The War on Drugs has given rise to an American police state and led to U.S. being the world’s No. 1 Jailer

Great post from Mark Perry



Two excerpts from the article “The American Police State: A sociologist interrogates the criminal-justice system, and tries to stay out of the spotlight,” about the research of Alice Goffman, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

1. Starting in the mid-1970s, the United States stiffened its laws on drugs and violent crime and ratcheted up the police presence on city streets. The number of people in American jails and prisons has risen fivefold over the past 40 years (see chart above). There are now roughly six million people under criminal-justice supervision. “In modern history,” Goffman writes, “only the forced labor camps of the former U.S.S.R. under Stalin approached these levels of penal confinement.”

2. The crackdown on the drug economy coincided with a welfare overhaul that cut aid to poor families. Those seeking work in the drug trade, says Goffman, were arrested “on a grand scale.” The prison population grew fivefold between the early 1970s and 2000.
More black men are ensnared in the criminal-justice system today than were enslaved before the Civil War. Goffman and others view the situation as a setback to the advances that African-Americans made in the civil-rights movement. One recent book calls mass incarceration “The New Jim Crow.”