Tag: War on Drugs

War

Every war when it comes, or before it comes, is represented not as a war but as an act of self-defense against a homicidal maniac. -George Orwell

It’s represented as a threat to national security, a war on terrorism or a war on drugs.

Since the war on drugs started in the Nixon era, what have we accomplished?

  1. Mass Incarceration (We have more people in prisons than any other country, 25% of the world’s prisoners.);
  2. An  opioid crisis that’s killing our children;
  3. A police state.

Why? Prisons are not only profitable they are warehouses for cheap labor.

What has the war on terror accomplished?

  1. A dramatic increase in domestic terrorism, almost a weekly occurrence (no one knows as this information is not readily available);
  2. A refugee crisis in the Middle East;
  3. Global discrimination/violence against Muslims.

Both wars are still being fought.   Now the Trump regime plans to double down on the same failed strategies.  Why?  America is the number one arms supplier to the world.

There are other reasons for Americas’ wars.  Divide and conquer to support white supremacy by disrupting non-white communities and their culture. Why?  I believe you know why.

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The War on Blacks!

Was the War on Drugs Successful?

The War on Drugs was a successful war, but not on drugs. What the War on Drugs was successful at was imprisoning young black youths, removing them from schools and making schoolwork more challenging and frustrating for children who were already stigmatized.

Imprisoning children destroys families, by trapping them in a vicious cycle of poverty where they lose the constitutional right to vote, lose the ability to get an education (since they are denied access to federal financial aide for college), plus a history of imprisonment makes most decent paying jobs inaccessible to them. What a way to begin a life!

This has created a cycle of ex-convict and delinquent youths robbed of their “manhood” while imprisoned, trapping them in a world of violence, environmental toxins and isolation that inevitably leads to more violence, premature death, imprisonment, drugs and unfulfilled dreams.

Society does not recognize its role in this targeting of communities of color. Every time a black youth ventures outside his invisible fence of concentrated poverty, and gets harassed or murdered, it has a profound and pervasive impact. Perhaps this is why such news is not covered; only black-on-black crime is covered.

Until a few years ago, I had no idea of the magnitude of structural racism destroying families in communities of color. Blacks are 14-15% of the US population yet about a 1/3 of the prison population. This is not because Blacks are more violent, but rather because of racial profiling that targets them, especially while they drive or when in school.

Seen from the eyes of Black youths, the world is not a hospitable place. Black youths are viewed suspiciously and deemed criminals by society. Black youths and communities are aware of these beliefs.

Imagine Black youths out to have “fun”, yet can’t, because White adults stare, show fear at their presence, stare past them, clutch their handbags, follow them into a store and even arrest or murder them while buying perfectly legal items at a retail outlet.

How would you feel if your children shared such experiences?

Black youths cannot go to a convenience store without being accosted, followed or watched by store staff. Perhaps some of this suspicion is justified, but most is not.

Solution:

As adults show Black youths the same respect you show other youths: start with a genuine smile and be prepared to be amazed at the results.

Many children from communities of color lack exposure, making communication difficult. Definitions and non-verbal cues have different meanings for them.

Was the War on Drugs Successful?

The War on Drugs legalized racial profiling in the minds of law enforcement officers and the justice departments. A brief review of articles noted in the US Citizens database gleaned many established and new observations. Granted, these observations are anecdotal; therefore these are areas for further investigation. Racial profiling targets Black persons, especially the youths. Racial profiling equals police harassment, with attendant police brutality and violence.

The magnitude of the devastation caused by the War on Drugs on communities of color added exponentially to the psychological trauma of slavery, chronic discrimination and an inferiority complex.

Many communities of color live in a state of dysthymia (chronic low-grade depression) with many folks feeling helpless and hopeless about the future. Many search for meaning through religion, others through gangs, and still others through living in isolation. Remember at least one in three families have a loved one in prison. That is disruptive and defeating.

The War on Drugs has resulted in mandatory sentencing of poor drug offenders. For example, possession of five grams of crack – a cheaper form of cocaine – carries a five-year sentence, while cocaine carries a five-year sentence if the equivalent of 5,000 grams is in a person’s possession. Similarly, stiff sentences apply to marijuana, which is now legal in a few states and has medicinal uses. Where did this all begin you might ask?

The War on Drugs started in the Richard Nixon era. The privatization of prisons took off with the Justice Department collaborating with private prisons after Bill Clinton reduced the budget for law enforcement and the Justice Department.

Since then, explosive growth in prison populations suggests that private prisons have successfully rounded up the criminals from the War of Drugs. However, that was not the case, as it was just a smokescreen of stereotypes. Closer inspection of data refutes that claim by the demonstration of disparities in the justice system and law enforcement.

Private prisons and the Justice Department have a lucrative partnership (paid for by taxpayers) that arrest targeted individuals despite known innocence. These innocent victims, usually challenged in self-defense, are subjected to repeated adult bullying by police officers, correctional officers, judges and prosecutors. They become the main pool or source of income for private prisons and judges.

One wonders if police officers and correctional officers are selected for their brutality and, perhaps, their affiliation with ‘White Supremacy’.

New York City charges about $168,000 per year for each prisoner. This sum does not include benefits and other essentials. New York City does well, considering the accommodations at Rikers. States get more taxpayer dollars to warehouse prisoners than they receive to help poor families. $168,000 a year! Let that sink in while absorbing the landscape of American police state.

Could the above serve as an incentive or driver behind the rise in incarceration rates and prison populations? The United States is 5% of the world’s population, yet it has 25% of the world’s prison population (that is 2.2 million prisoners).

If prisons are packed with low offenders, how is crime controlled?

“Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful.” – Friedrich Nietzsche

My thoughts: Police officers take the easy way out to increase their statistics and make themselves look like crime fighters. However, police officers surreptitiously frame innocent victims while leaving gang members undisturbed to wreak fear and oppression in communities of color. #BlackonBlack Crimes

Police Officers choose victims rather than finding criminals.

Associate Editor’s comments: I share the same thoughts on the war on drugs as it too has ruined many families and communities that are White, Black and Hispanic. This especially true in the poor sections of cities and communities where all those races are targeted.

As a side note, the irony in all of this is that the Government created this mess early on in the Iran-Contra Affair, when the government willingly flooded Black neighborhoods with cocaine in order to fund Nicagua’s Manuel Noriega, which in turn spiked drug related arrests even more.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Contra_affair

Please share your thoughts… I am interested as I continue to do research.

The Success of The War On Drugs on Education

The Success of The War On Drugs  on Education

Part 2 of Prison Reform Benefits Education Reform

 

Was the war on drugs successful? At one time, many believed that blacks were criminals, and I started to fear my own people. The power of the media in creating illusions should never be dismissed.

The war on drugs (WOD) neither reduced drug overdoses nor drug ingestion. WOD harmed innocent children and their families by depriving children of education and placing them in toxic environments (prisons) where they were physically abused and sexually molested (by the United States government).

Over sustained periods, violent environments lacking support produce toxic stress. Toxic stress is a well-established risk factor for both physical and mental illnesses; stress is a major factor underlying the pathology of chronic medical conditions.

Toxic stress compounds pre-existing risk factors in children, as much as four to six times over children with similar risk factors who are exposed to stress, but have supportive adult networks and are not exposed to prison.

Table 1 List of High Risk Behaviors

Risky behaviors include and are not limited to:

1.  Increased risk of drug and alcohol abuse;

2.  Increased risk of suicide;

3.  Increased risk of violence;

4.  Increased risk of sexual infections, pregnancy and molestation;

5.  Increased risk of homelessness;

6.  Increased risk of poverty;

7.  Increased risk of Mental Illness; and

8.  Increased risk of re-incarceration.

Again, I repeat: public schools are the main pipelines to prisons. School-to-prison pipelines are massive problems in communities of color. Zero tolerance, racial profiling, and school-to-prison policies relegate school discipline to prisons. Children who act out are considered difficult to teach, consuming scarce and valued time. What else can overworked teachers and educators working in understaffed schools do with children considered as “trouble-makers?”

Public schools and private prisons expose inner-city children with risk factors to distasteful mixtures of human depravity, bondage, and isolation, as well as unnecessary cruelty, violence, torture, sexual molestation, humiliation, physical abuse, and death. In the United States of America, children with behavioral issues are treated in prisons regardless of their age, diagnosis of mental illness, and lack of appropriate comprehensive evaluation. How effective has that been?

A study of 35,000 former Chicago public school students (4), completed by Anna Aizer of Brown University and Joseph Doyle Jr. of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, showed:

Unsurprisingly, going to jail as a kid has “strong negative effects” on a child’s chance to get an education. Youth that went to prison were 39 percentage points less likely to finish high school than other kids who were from the same neighborhood. Even young offenders who weren’t imprisoned were better off; they were thirteen percent more likely to finish high school than their incarcerated peers.

 

More surprisingly, given that prison is supposed to deter crime, going to jail also made kids more likely to offend again. Young offenders who were incarcerated were a staggering 67 percent more likely to be in jail (again) by the age of 25 than similar young offenders who didn’t go to prison. Moreover, a similar pattern held true for serious crimes. Aizer and Doyle found that incarcerated youths were more likely to commit “homicide, violent crime, property crime and drug crimes” than those that didn’t serve time.

These findings are particularly troubling given that kids are often sent to the criminal justice system for relatively minor offenses.

The prefrontal cortex of a child does not fully develop until around 25-30 years old. Incarcerating children for mistakes – such as drug possession or bullying – teaches the wrong lessons, stunts personal growth, and exponentially increases baseline risk factors for children. Prisons create more risk factors and ensure children fail by limiting their paths to one of darkness, without opportunities for light, often ever again.

Children cannot communicate their feelings as well as adults, so they do what children do best: act out.

Public schools, soon to be charter schools, are similar to private prisons, cataloguing children by name, rank, and future potential inmate ID. Public school pipelines to prison are well-funded, lucrative, and powerful alliances that exploit children, families, and communities by turning the lights off on brighter futures while damning innocent children to lives of deep psychological pain.

Are teachers and educators listening to their customers? What are children telling teachers and educators? Few teachers take time to listen or inquire, and we have few indicators to measure student satisfaction with education.

Are teachers better educators with children in prisons instead of classrooms? How can teachers and educators create positive school climates?

How much does the average inner city class size shrink due to imprisonment of students by the end of the year? What is the impact of these policies on other students?

A system of care approach that applies Big Data is a scalable and fully customizable model for making education relevant and appropriate, leading to healthy, productive children.

Our culturally diverse country makes one-sized education to fit all communities unpalatable and irrelevant for many cultures. A system of care approach empowers communities to set priorities around needs of children and their families while employing resources within the community.

A system of care approach is one of many collaborative approaches to education and metrics that empower communities through community participation and engagement.

Armed with Big Data, education and law enforcement will be more responsive to communities, which will be more informed… I hope.

 ***

References

  1.  What Is IDEA?

http://www.ncld.org/disability-advocacy/learn-ld-laws/idea/what-is-idea

  1.  What is a System of Care?

http://www.thefamilygateway.net/supports-services/system-of-care/what-is-a-system-of-care/

  1.  United States Citizens Justice Database 

https://failuretolisten.com/2014/07/01/united-states-affluenza-and-genocide-online-database/

  1.  STUDY: Throwing Kids In Jail Makes Crime Worse, Ruins Lives

http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/06/17/2166481/study-throwing-kids-in-jail-makes-crime-worse-ruins-lives

  1. Prison Reform Benefits Education Reform  Part 1

 https://failuretolisten.com/2014/07/18/prison-reform-benefits-education-reform/

Prison Reform Benefits Education Reform

Travion-Blount

The above images are victims of organized partnerships  involving law enforcement, the justice system (judges) and private prisons

Prison Reform Benefits Education Reform | Part 1

 

Was the War on Drugs Successful?

The War on Drugs was a successful war, but not on drugs. The War on Drugs was successful at imprisoning young black youths, removing them from schools and making schoolwork more challenging and frustrating for children who were already stigmatized.

Furthermore, imprisoning children destroys families by trapping them in a vicious cycle of poverty as well as vicious organized corruption involving law enforcement and justice departments.

This has created a cycle of ex-convict and delinquent youths robbed of their “manhood” while imprisoned, combined with women of low self-esteem (another story), trapping them in a world protected by environment toxins that inevitably leads to premature death, imprisonment, drugs, or unfulfilled dreams.

Society does not recognize its role. Every time a black youth ventures outside his invisible fence of concentrated poverty and gets harassed or murdered it has a profound and pervasive impact. Perhaps this is why such news is not covered – only black-on-black crime is covered. Until a few months ago, I had no idea of the magnitude of structural racism destroying families in communities of color.

Seen from the eyes of black youths, the world is not a hospitable place. Black youths ‌are viewed suspiciously and deemed criminals by society. Black youths and communities are aware of these beliefs.

Imagine Black youths out to have FUN yet can’t because white adults stare, show fear at their presence, stare past them, clutch their handbags, follow them in the store and even arrest when item are legal.

How would you feel if your children shared such experiences?

Black youths cannot go to a convenience store without being accosted, followed or watched by store staff. Perhaps some of this suspicion is justified, but most is not.

Solution: As adults: Show black youths the same respect you show other youths – start with a genuine smile – and be prepared to be amazed at the results.

Many children from communities of color lack exposure, making communication difficult. Definitions and non-verbal cues have different meanings for them.

 

Was the War on Drugs Successful?

The War on Drugs legalized racial profiling in the minds of police officers, law enforcement, and the justice department. A brief review of articles noted in the US Citizens database gleaned many established and new observations. Granted, these observations are anecdotal; therefore, these are areas for further investigation. Racial profiling targets black persons, especially black youths. Racial profiling equals police harassment, with attendant police brutality and violence.

The magnitude of the devastation caused by the war on drugs on communities of color added exponentially to the psychological trauma of slavery, chronic discrimination, and an inferiority complex.

Many communities of color live in a state of dysthymia or chronic low-grade depression with many folks feeling helpless and hopeless about the future. Many search for meaning through religion, others through gangs, and still others through living in isolation. Remember at least one in three families have a loved one in prison. That is disruptive and defeating.

The War on Drugs resulted in mandatory sentencing of poor drug offenders. For example, possession of five grams of crack – a cheaper form of cocaine – carries a five-year sentence, while cocaine carries a five-year sentence only if the equivalent of 5,000 grams of crack is in a person’s possession. Similarly, stiff sentences apply to marijuana, which is now legal in a few states and has medicinal uses.

The War on Drugs started in the Ronald Raegan era, and the privatization of prisons took off with the Justice Department collaborating with private prisons after Clinton reduced the budget for law enforcement and the Justice Department.

Since then, explosive growth in prison populations suggests that private prisons have successfully rounded up the criminals from the War of Drugs. However, that was not the case, and it was just a smokescreen of stereotypes. Closer inspection of data refutes that claim by the demonstration of disparities in the justice system and law enforcement.

Private prisons and the justice department have a lucrative partnership, paid for by taxpayers, as they arrest targeted individuals despite known innocence. These innocent victims, usually challenged in self-defense, are subjected to repeated adult bullying by police officers, correctional officers, judges, and prosecutors. They become the main pool or source of income for private prisons and judges.

One wonders if police officers and correctional officers are selected for their brutality and, perhaps, their affiliation with white supremacy.

NYC charges about $168,000 per year for each prisoner. This sum does not include benefits and other essentials. NYC does well, considering the accommodations at Rikers. States get more taxpayers’ dollars to warehouse prisoners than they get to help poor families. NYC get $168,000 a year for each prison. Let that sink in while absorbing the landscape of America the police state.

Could the above serve as an incentive or driver behind the rise in incarceration rates and prison populations? The United States is 5% of the world’s population, yet it has 25% of the world’s prison population—2.2 million prisoners.

If prisons are packed with low offenders, how is crime controlled?

Distrust all in whom the impulse to punish is powerful

Friedrich Nietzsche

My thoughts: Police officers take the easy way out to increase their stats and make themselves look like crime fighters; however, police officers surreptitiously frame innocent victims while leaving gang members undisturbed to wreak fear and oppression in communities of color. Police Officers choose victims rather than finding criminals.

Please share your thoughts… I am interested as I work on the database.

CHP-beating-with-test

Also please contact me by August 6 with feedback on the kickstarter campaign.

-Part 2 –

Prison Reform Benefits Education Reform | A System of Care Part 2

https://failuretolisten.com/2014/07/23/prison-reform-benefits-education-reform-part-2/