Annotated Bibliography

1) The stakes of our project are the lives of African-American women who are put behind bars for non-violent offenses, specifically drug offenses. We are directing our podcast towards law students who are looking to become public defenders and district attorneys. With that being said, the average public defender and district attorney are not familiar with the lives of the people they prosecute and defend. Nor are most of them familiar with the hardships drug offenses cause African-American families because of The War on Drugs. Students are taught to value numbers, statistics and efficiency in school rather than people. If law students take this sense of motivation into their practice, black women who commit drug offenses will be seen as another badge on a prosecutor’s jacket, rather than a person who is being taken away from their family. The

This reading allowed me to realize that all scholarly work does not best represent the people it is meant to cover, and that personal accounts have validation because of lived experience. This validated the stories of African-American women who are affected by the incarceration system. I consulted "Ferguson v. City of Charleston, South Carolina: "Fetal Abuse," Drug Testing, and the Fourth Amendment" as well. This reading was critical in my Wiki article, and helped me use factual evidence to discuss The War on Drugs, by talking about how systematic racism plays a role in black women being sent to jail, specifically for their urine samples being drug tested without their consent. I also consulted a video of a mother who successfully escaped the cycle of poverty and drug use. Her children either ended up in college, or the Marines, and as a success story, her major recommendation is that drug use needs to be treated as an illness. This backs up my proposal to decriminalize it and treat in in drug treatment facilities rather that