Michelle Alexander War On Drugs Summary

Michelle Alexander starts her book by taking us on a trip back in time to the start of it all: the Civil War. Now, we all learned about the Civil War in middle school and high school and how the great Abraham Lincoln abolished slavery and freed all the African Americans with the Emancipation Proclamation. In chapter 1, she really touches on this and on history, the beginning and end of slavery and the beginning and end of the Jim Crow Laws. Refreshing our minds of our country’s history and how the Jim Crow Laws came to end with Brown vs. Board of Education. She mentions this idea of a caste system and how it revolves around the color of one’s skin. Going off this idea that the caste system is based off race, she breaks it down into three parts:

She describes that the mass incarceration policies that were made are a “comprehensive and well-disguised system of racialized control that functions in a manner strikingly similar to Jim Crow”(Alexander2016). The War on Drugs escalated quickly in 1982 with the Reagan administration, claiming that they were responding to the crack cocaine epidemic that was going on around black neighborhoods and ghettos. The Reagan administration actually were contributing to the high rise of crack cocaine consumption in the US, mainly inner cities. Alexander points out that the Drug on War had escalated way before 1982, in the mid 1980’s the use of crack cocaine had escalated so quickly that they Federal Drug authorities had to publicize the issue and use scare tactics to try to get control over the

Since the Reagan officials tried harder to stop the Drug Enforcement Administration from exposing the illegal activities that were taking place, the more violence was being caused in these inner city neighborhoods, which lead to more arrests for possession. Now, Michelle explains how the War on Drugs has the most impact on African Americans in these inner city neighborhoods. Within the past three decades, US incarceration increase has been due to drug convictions, mainly. She states that, “the US is unparalleled in the world in focusing enforcement of federal drug laws on racial and ethnic minorities.”(Alexander2016). The percentile of African American men with some sort of criminal record is about 80% in some of our major US cities(Paul Street, The Vicious Circle: Race, Prison, Jobs, and Community in Chicago, Illinois, and the Nation (Chicago Urban League, Department of Research and Planning, 2002). MIchelle referred to these becoming marginalized and calls them “ growing and permanent undercaste.” (Alexander2016, pp