The United States is known for its love of freedom and yet the United States has 25 percent of the World’s prison population. The United States may be known as the land of the free but it is far from it. The United States justice system puts the poor and people of color in prison while letting off the rich because they can afford bail and private lawyers. Justice is supposed to be blind but it pays attention to the rich. The United States has been justifying enslaving people of color for hundreds of years. The movie 13th revealed how the systematic oppression of African Americans has evolved throughout the years through slavery, segregation, Jim Crow and presidents who have tough on crime, which has led to mass incarceration …show more content…
Population and crime go hand in hand. Nixon blamed the rise in crime on people of color. He said that there needs to be a war on crime which later turned into the war on drugs. The Nixon administration admitted that the war on drugs was about putting African American men in jail. The Ronald Reagan administration was the one that made the modern war on drugs. From the year 1970 to 1980, there was almost a 200,000 increase in people who were incarcerated in the United States. During the 1980’s, a new drug became incredibly popular with inner city people, crack cocaine. The crackdown on crack was harsher than on cocaine because cocaine was mainly used in the suburbs where all the middle class white people lived compared the use of crack cocaine which was mainly used by people of color who lived in the inner city. The mandatory sentencing for crack cocaine was much higher than sentencing for powder cocaine. The news had a considerable amount of influence on criminalizing African American men. FBI statistics say that African Americans were overrepresented in the news as criminals. News that criminalized black people influenced black people to support the policies even though they