My project will examine how the United States’ social and legal system has treated and found ways to maintain control over African Americans throughout history. I am particularly showing the link between racism and mass incarceration. This project will begin in the 1930s and end in the early 200s. Society, as well as our judicial system, has created several ways to control minority groups, specifically, African Americans. The judicial system does this through longer prison sentences, and racial profiling, just to name a few, and society does this by idly sitting by and watching it all happen. I will show that it is essentially impossible to talk about how mass incarceration came about without looking at and understanding history.
The Civil Rights Movement began in 1960 and although it created a large rise of activism and broke down legal barriers deterring African Americans from many of their rights, crime rates began to increase (Graff, 2015). In 1970, mass incarceration hit its peak and crime began to stand in for race. In October 1982, President Nixon and his team declared the war on drugs and vowed to deliver heavy sentences to individuals who associated themselves with drugs. On the surface level, Nixon made it seem that he had pure intentions of health as a top priority when in reality the war on drugs was a war on communities of color, specifically African Americans (Rosino, Hughey, 2018). Following Nixon, President Reagan’s administration was a crucial period in prison expansion. After taking office in 1980, there were only half a million people in American prisons (Kilgore, 2015), and after leaving office in 1988, the prison population had doubled.
The Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 was yet another legal way to express dominance over African Americans and other minorities. During President Reagan’s final year in office, the house voted on the Anti-Drug Abuse Act. This act imposed longer sentences for drugs and added mandatory minimum sentences for possession of cocaine. The issue with the Anti-Drug Abuse Act was that crack cocaine was most readily available to poor minority groups than powder cocaine, which was mainly used and sold by whites. Individuals who were caught with five grams of crack cocaine received the same sentence as those who were caught with five hundred grams of powder cocaine (Graff, 2015). This alone led to a major explosion of mass incarceration as minority groups were unable to afford or even locate powder cocaine under the “tough on crime” agenda.
Although Reagan kicked off the prison boom, Senator Bill Clinton increased this boom with his 1994 Crime Bill. This bill issued over $9.7 billion to prison construction across the country as well as expanded the federal death penalty to cover over more than sixty offenses. Due to these, the nation’s prison population increased again, by more than half a million. In addition to this, during the Clinton years, President Clinton enforced more aggressive policing. The results of the war on drugs were enormous. From the years of 1980 to 2005, arrests relating to drugs tripled, which of course led to tremendous increases in the prison population. By 2000, approximately 500,000 people were incarcerated for drug-related offenses compared to the 41,000 in 1980 (Kilgore, 2015). In an interview with NPR, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness explains how the War on Drugs was completely planned by the Republican Party to ease concerns of white Americans because they were threatened by the level of progress that was made from the Civil Rights Movement. In her interview, she explained how the federal government not only supported the war on drugs but also incentivized the increase in arrests which in turn caused a massive explosion in prison populations (Alexander, 2012).
This project aims to delve deeply into the history of crime and unjust punishment surrounding African Americans. Images of individuals, as well as newspaper clippings in this project, will show the direct linkage of racism to mass incarceration.