History of the particular policy domain, social and political processes, like McGirr in “Making Radical Reform” and Alexander in “The Rebirth of Caste”, policies regulating the use of substances, the prohibition of alcohol in McGirr and the War on Drugs in Alexander, were developed in response to larger social and political power struggles around ethnicity and or race. In McGirr's reading, we can see an illustration of how prohibition was linked to racism affecting the latest immigration waves in the nineteenth century. In the New Jim Crow, Alexander described the racialization of drugs such as crack cocaine as the primary factor for the brutal policy response. The drug war in the United States has constantly exposed large amounts to criminalization, …show more content…
In her reading, McGirr emphasized that alcohol continued to make working-class men poor and violent toward their families, and also that heavy drinking was the main cause of several social and economic issues at that point. The social issues that were linked to prohibition. Prohibition was created to protect people and their households from the dangers of excessive drinking. Meanwhile, it had negative impacts, such as a change in criminal organizations related to unlawful alcohol manufacturing and distribution, which caused a growth in illegal trafficking and reduced tax income. There are several political contexts surrounding the Prohibition of alcohol and the War on Drugs and the focus on the role of ethnicity and race. Politically, in addition to …show more content…
According to Alexander, it shifted structures of racial control. Alexander’s main concern was racial control and we can see it in her first chapter where she lays out the shift from slavery which has been brought by the Civil War; it also lays out the criminalization of the war on drugs in the mass incarceration rate. She is making an argument that the emergence of criminalization and the war on drugs occurred as a part of the civil rights and black power movements and she argues that the original strategy of the war on drugs was the depoliticization of law and order. The drug war was obviously a racialized strategy, but the language of drug use and criminality is a way to avoid that. In a wide range of policy contexts, trying to regulate substances, alcohol, and drug policy has traditionally been a political tool. There are political tools concerned with issues of race and immigration and their methods of dealing with historical pressures and patterns, and they are altered to respond to specific social and political contexts, each of these is engaging aspects and processes. Alexander's reading sheds light on the reasons behind the variance in how drug use problem sufferers are portrayed. Emphasizing how race affects how policies are created and how behavior is criminalized. According to Alexander's reading, the racial group affected by addiction to drugs started