To continue on my blog of injustices in America’s criminal justice system, I’d now like to turn the topic towards one of its biggest offenses: racism. It would be ignorant to say that this racial discrimination doesn’t play a role in the system our country currently uses. This prejudice has been around for hundreds of years, but was amplified in our modern prison system thanks to President Richard Nixon’s 1971 campaign called the “war on drugs.” John Ehrlichman, one of Nixon’s right-hand men, admitted that this was a blatant attack against Black people. He said, “We knew we couldn’t make it illegal to be … Black, but by getting the public to associate … [Black people] with heroin. And then criminalizing [them] heavily, we could disrupt [the] communities.” It was clearly a diabolical plot in order to increase anti-Black sentiment in the U.S. by labelling them as “dangerous druggies.” Many have tried to emphasize the importance of this issue, including famous rapper Jay-Z who narrated a YouTube video that explained the effects of this policy firsthand.

Ronald Reagan’s following presidency only continued to worsen the already racist system. It was during the 1980s that Reagan emphasized to the people the disparity between powder cocaine and “crack,” the latter being a more inexpensive version of the traditional drug that’s typically sold and used in poorer communities. This was once again another obvious attack on the Black community, as the criminal justice system decided to give out worse sentences to those arrested for crack rather than powder cocaine. This lead to a huge spike in non-violent drug offenses since its implementation, approximately 400,000 by 1997 compared to just 50,000 in 1980 according to the Drug Policy Alliance.

This evident racism is not just something of the past when it comes to America’s criminal justice system, we are still in need of improvement. However, the U.S. is beginning to move towards more reasonable drug offense sentences in the future, starting with the legalization of marijuana in 15 states (along with Washington D.C.). This is only the first step, though. It is not only necessary to decriminalize non-violent drug offenses, and in turn remove the racial disparities within the United States’ criminal justice system, but also to help these drug offenders receive treatment to combat their difficult addictions. Like I said in my previous blog post, we must look towards rehabilitation as the answer to fix our system, and along the way fight the coinciding racial discrimination and drug criminalization that currently plagues our country. To end on a hopeful note, in 2020 Oregon passed the first ever “all-drug decriminalization measure” called Measure 110. This is a huge win, as it allows for drug offenders to have more accessibility to treatment instead of being criminalized. We must all look toward a better future ahead of us.