More Than the Average Person.

Mass incarceration was a product of the War on Drugs. I personally have formed the opinion that drugs were put into communities of certain people on purpose, and though I don’t have proof or data on this, many of my family members and friends have had similar conclusions.

Anyway, drugs were placed into certains communities, of which were black communities, and drug use and sale were vilified. People more so got in trouble for selling them just to make ends meet, just to make a life for themselves, and sometimes their families. Just trying to live and take care of others went punished.

This is exemplified by this quote from John Ehrlichman

“You want to know what this was really all about?”, “The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people. You understand what I’m saying? We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities. We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.”

The problem is that the average person doesn’t acknowledge that this is a problem that we are still facing. People know that these kind of things are happening, but don’t do anything about. The State of Denial is the idea of disassociating ourselves from the problem, because “We did not cause it” or “It’s not my problem.” The truth is that if you live in the country of the problem, then it is your problem, and it does not matter who started it, it’s our job to fix it.

We do have these kinds of mentalities with education to. We are all very cynical about the education system, but we struggle when it comes to solutions, and thats when not just people at my community partner start to suffer, but our future generation’s education suffer too, then the whole country fails.

I like the concept of Justice for families. What I enjoy the most is the idea of taking money away from prisons and putting them towards families. It’s gives people wrapped up in the criminal “justice” system a chance to have the support of the families. In the face of adversity, support is always what we need.