Racial Profiling: President Regan's War On Drugs

Racial Profiling, though a 300-year-old problem for Blacks, became an even bigger problem during the “War on Drugs” carried forward from President Richard Nixon’s original declaration off a war on drugs in 1971(Alexander 48). Presidents Reagan, Bush Senior and Bush Junior and President Clintons neoliberal “war on drugs” over the years saw the number of people incarcerated in U.S. prison rise from 300,000 to 3.1 million mostly minority Black and Brown people in prison or on probation. A 2010, U.S. Bureau of Justice stats report showed that during the war on drugs era black men had an imprisonment rate of close to seven times the incarceration rate of white men, with the rate of incarceration for black women nearly triple that of white women

Regan’s war on drugs was a partisan show of force by himself and carried over to the Republican administrations of Bush Senior Jr, including Democratic President Bill Clinton. The war on drugs policy was used to make people believe Regan’s racial containment strategy was premised on his concerns for the public safety of constituents who may fall victim to crimes committed by drug dealers and users. (Against Drug Prohibition) while it was widely reported Ronald Reagans’ son Ronnie Jr and former President George Bush jr, were both smoking weed and snorting

(The only difference in the 20th century is there are no lynch mobs or black people hanging from trees on a daily basis). A new form of “convict leasing” also emerged as a direct effect of the mass incarceration of hundreds of black’s as racial profiling and black men’s subsequent incarceration for nonviolent drug offenses, saw Black men once again in the 21st century, and 300 years after Slave Patrols and Jim Crow, they again are subject harassment for vagrancy by mostly white police, due to no available jobs, severe unemployment, and unfair sentencing laws similar to “black codes” and “convict leasing” of 1865. Racialized practices that 152 years later find black men, while incarcerated performing and providing free penal labor to white corporation’s once again or making a meager minimum wage of sixteen cents an hour, due to the war on drugs, racial profiling and “mass incarceration” that has occurred from 1981 to present. All tenets of Regan’s “War on Drugs” laws and policies that as mentioned were purposely centered on poor urban and black neighborhoods, that were already stripped of jobs, resources, and vital human and public services (Alexander