U.S. drug law a fabricated excuse for mass incarceration
(11/29/17 5:00am)
Even as America continues to lose competence on the world stage, one pillar of our society stands uncontested: the skyrocketing number of prisoners. In the U.S., the home of the free, we have the highest incarceration rate in the world — triple the prison population of Russia. These numbers have been on the rise since Nixon’s 1971 declaration of the “War on Drugs.” While America’s crime rate remained stable between 1972 and 2012, our prison population grew from 300,000 to 2 million. This man-made crisis was crafted to treat a nonexistent problem, using the scapegoat of petty drug crimes to disproportionately arrest minorities in order to make a quick buck and create a class of contemporary untouchables we call “criminals.”