- General Notes
- Over 500,000 are incarcerated in the United States for nonviolent drug offenses
- Black Americans are disproportionately represented at any stage in the drug war
- 2.7 million children in America have had a parent behind bars
- These children are far more likely to be incarcerated during their lifetime than children who have not had a parent in jail
- Reagan
- “Public enemy no. 1 is drug abuse”
- Nixon
- Is credited with starting the drug war as well as coining the phrase “War on Drugs”
- Under Nixon, ⅔ of the budget for the drug was devoted to treatment rather than law enforcement
- David Simon
- What drugs haven’t destroyed, the war against them has
- The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world
- War on drugs – draconian and doesn’t work
- The war on drugs has cost over $1 trillion since 1971
- Illegal drug use has remained unchanged
- Propaganda about what a drug user or seller is
- “Became almost a wartime cartoon of the enemy”
- The drug war started as a war on narcotics
- Modern drug enforcement can be traced back to the early 1950s
- Early narcotics enforcement targeted black Americans, “even though the addict population was always distinctly biracial”
- Prof. William Julius Wilson (Harvard)
- David Kennedy (John Jay)
- Police tend to profile geographically and patrol certain areas
- Charles Bowden
- Very few people know about the war on drugs going on in America
- The United States has the biggest drug industry in the world
- Dr. Gabor Maté (Addiction Expert)
- We try to deal with the addiction like a legal problem when in reality it is a health problem
- People use drugs to soothe the pain, so the real question is not “why the drugs” but instead “why the pain”
- Michelle Alexander
- There are more African-Americans under correctional control today than were enslaved in 1850
- Prof. Charles J. Ogletree (Harvard)
- There is a whole generation of kids who assume that they are destined to be in the criminal justice system
Citation
The House I Live In, BBC, 5 Oct. 2012, tubitv.com/movies/372320/the_house_i_live_in.
