Clinton Helped Create the New Jim Crow

Yesterday, former U.S. President Bill Clinton addressed the NAACP National Convention. During his address, he acknowledged that he was wrong for increasing sentences for drug offenses.

In Michelle Alexander's brilliant masterpiece, The New Jim Crow, she fully explains how truly wrong Clinton was.  He paved the way for the New Jim Crow.  Ms. Alexander states that:

Despite the jaw-dropping impact of the "get tough" movement on the African American community, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans revealed any inclination to slow the pace of incarceration. To the contrary, in 1992, presidential candidate Bill Clinton vowed that he would never permit any Republican to be perceived as tougher on crime than he...

Once elected, Clinton endorsed the idea of a federal "three strikes and you're out" law...The $30 billion crime bill sent to President Clinton in August 1994 was hailed as a victory for the Democrats, who "were able to wrest the crime issue from the Republicans and make it their own." The bill created dozens of new federal capital crimes, mandated life sentences for some three-time offenders, and authorized more than $16 billion for state prison grants and expansion of state and local police forces. Far from resisting the emergence of the new caste system, Clinton escalated the drug war beyond what conservatives imagined possible a decade earlier. As the Justice Policy Institute has observed, "the Clinton Administration's 'tough on crime' policies resulted in the largest increases in federal and state prison inmates of any president in American history." (page 55)

Ms. Alexander further asserts that Clinton "ended welfare as we know it" and established a "life-time ban on eligibility for welfare and food stamps for anyone convicted of a felony drug offense-including simple possession of marijuana."

Yet, this is the man that y'all adore. This is the man that y'all call the first black president. Smoking weed, playing the saxophone, being raised in a single parent household and being a womanizer don't make you black or "colored". Such a suggestion is racist.

While Clinton was locking up massive numbers of black people, his wife, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, stood by his side and supported those oppressive policies. We need much more than an acknowledgement of the obvious. We need clear answers to tough questions. We need reforms to correct the disaster that Bill Clinton helped create.

Marijuana Should Be Legalized

Happy New Year, folks. Colorado celebrated the New Year by blazing up some weed. The Huffington Post reports that:

For more than 70 years, the sale of marijuana for recreational use has been criminally prohibited in the United States. But that ban, as it has existed for decades, ended Wednesday in Colorado.

The historic first, legal sales of recreational marijuana to those 21-and-older began in the morning at select dispensaries in Colorado -- the first state in the nation, and the first government in the world, to control and regulate a legal recreational marijuana industry.

A couple of months ago, the Nation reported that:

Over the last fifteen years, police departments in the United States made 10 million arrests for marijuana possession—an average of almost 700,000 arrests a year. Police arrest blacks for marijuana possession at higher rates than whites in every state and nearly every city and county—as FBI Uniform Crime Reports and state databases indisputably show. States with the largest racial disparities arrest blacks at six times the rate of whites. This list includes Alabama, Illinois, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Nevada, New York and Wisconsin.

Big city police departments are among the worst offenders. Police in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York have arrested blacks for marijuana possession at more than seven times the rate of whites. Since 1997, New York City alone has arrested and jailed more than 600,000 people for possessing marijuana; about 87 percent of the arrests are of blacks and Latinos. For years, police in New York and Chicago have arrested more young blacks and Latinos for simple marijuana possession than for any other criminal offense whatsoever.

Other large urban areas that make huge numbers of racially biased arrests include Atlanta, Baltimore, Buffalo, Cleveland, Dallas–Fort Worth, Detroit, Fort Lauderdale, Houston, Las Vegas, Memphis, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Tampa and Washington, DC. And across the United States, one-third of marijuana arrestees are teenagers; 62 percent are age 24 or younger; and most of them are ordinary high school or college students and young workers.

I do not condone the use of marijuana. I never have and will never use it. However, in light of the discriminatory enforcement of drug laws in this country, I believe that marijuana should be legalized and regulated like any other controlled substances. Everyone knows that the War on Drugs has been a complete failure. It has not stopped anyone from using drugs. As documented in Michelle Alexander's masterpiece The New Jim Crow, it has only led to the mass incarceration of black people.

President Obama Begins to Fight the New Jim Crow

Yesterday, President Obama took a step in the right direction.  Slowly, he is chipping away at the New Jim Crow.  For that, I commend the brother. The New York Times reports:

President Obama, expanding his push to curtail severe penalties in drug cases, on Thursday commuted the sentences of eight federal inmates who were convicted of crack cocaine offenses. Each inmate has been imprisoned for at least 15 years, and six were sentenced to life in prison.

It was the first time retroactive relief was provided to a group of inmates who would most likely have received significantly shorter terms if they had been sentenced under current drug laws, sentencing rules and charging policies. Most will be released in 120 days. The commutations opened a major new front in the administration’s efforts to curb soaring taxpayer spending on prisons and to help correct what it has portrayed as inequality in the justice system.

In a statement, Mr. Obama said that each of the eight men and women had been sentenced under what is now recognized as an “unfair system,” including a 100-to-1 sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses that was significantly reduced by the Fair Sentencing Act of 2010.

“If they had been sentenced under the current law, many of them would have already served their time and paid their debt to society,” Mr. Obama said. “Instead, because of a disparity in the law that is now recognized as unjust, they remain in prison, separated from their families and their communities, at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars each year.”

The commutations have come during a pendulum swing away from tough mandatory minimum sentencing laws enacted a generation ago amid the crack epidemic. The policies fueled an 800 percent increase in the number of prisoners in the United States. They also carried a racial charge: Offenses involving crack, which was disproportionately prevalent in impoverished black communities, carried far more severe penalties than those for powder cocaine, favored by affluent white users.