I need help with this discussion post. Thank you.
I think the most interesting reading this week was the article Dufton wrote about the war on drugs. People were made to believe that the war on drugs was solely a war on drugs, and nothing more than that. However, if one were to look closely at what was actually happening it could be seen that the war was on much more than drugs, and there was an actual race war happening at the same time. African American’s were incarcerated at a much higher rate than all other races, and their sentences were much harsher than all other races. A similar thing was mentioned in a lecture a few weeks ago about how someone who was arrested for cocaine, a predominantly white drug, could receive the same sentence for having 100 times the amount of the drug crack cocaine, which was a predominantly African American drug. The article states that at one time one third of all young African American men were bound by the penal system by some way whether it be incarceration, parole, or probation. Even as recent as 2010, African American’s were four times as likely to be arrested for marijuana than whites, and in some counties it was as high as thirty percent. Inequalities and discrimination have always played a role in American history, and there seems to be no end in sight for the continuation of it.
