Transcript for:
History and Impact of the War on Drugs

My family came to America fleeing persecution in Europe. For my mom's parents, it was the pogroms of Russia, in which thousands of Jews died. For my dad, it was Hitler, the creation of ghettos, and the final solution that killed millions. As children, my brothers and I were taught that we were the lucky ones who made it out.

But with that luck came a responsibility. Never again didn't just mean that people like us shouldn't suffer. It meant others shouldn't suffer either.

Join me here. Won't you be seated, please, ladies and gentlemen? Come on, Dr. Jaffe.

Mr. Krogh. Mr. Rook. All right.

Ladies and gentlemen, I would like to summarize for you the meeting that I have just had with bipartisan leaders. America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. Gold teeth, maybe in his 30s, and he wears like a turban on his head. Louie and the crew. Keep in mind that school is going to let these students out in 15 minutes.

Shit. The discrepancy measures the distance by which we have not yet attained democracy in these United States. I'm sure we've got problems over this nation, but never forget, there's nothing wrong with America today that a good election won't cure. You go right up Charles Street, right?

Go past Fletch. That's why I believe the tide of battle has turned, and we're beginning to win the crusade for a drug-free America. What shame that we American people could so act and be so non-understanding.

Okay, deal is good. Okay, guys. Amen.

If he doesn't put you in jail, wonderful. Nobody with any sense likes to go to jail. But if he puts you in jail, you go in that jail and transform it from a dungeon of shame to a haven of freedom and history.

All of it. All of us must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. And to all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright, tonight we prove once more that the true strength of our nation comes from the enduring power of our ideals, democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope. My name is Nanny Jetter. I was born in Crewe, Virginia, a very small town.

Coming north, I figured I would prove that I was going to conquer everything that needed. to be cock. Nanny Jetter was like a second mother to me.

Though she started out working for my family, she was never a nanny. Nanny is actually her name. To it, they just have some of everything.

Tonight is a celebration night. Our families were close, and her children and grandchildren were my playmates growing up. I'm the precious, you hungry? But as we got older, I saw many of them struggling. with poverty, joblessness, crime, and worse.

Senator Obama has an advantage, but it's still very, very early in this night. Oh, Lord. When I asked Nanny what she thought might have gone wrong, her answer was surprisingly simple.

I think drugs. Drugs is a monster. The killing, the stealing, the people being destroyed.

It's devastating. What happened to my son with drugs? I would love to change that.

Drugs in America. Pollsters have identified that as the number one issue in this country. Smoking cigarettes and taking drugs in growing numbers.

Doctors find out who has taken an overdose of crack. The battle to control the drug market is deadly. Most of the victims are young blacks who live in the...

To understand what drugs had done to Nanny Jetter's family and others like it. I wanted to get out on the road to talk to people. I know firsthand the devastation we as a family have had to endure because of the drugs.

Putting it before my kids, putting it before my mom, my sister, my dad. I had two kids and I kind of lost them to the streets because of my own problems. Time and again, I learned how one person's struggle had grown into a crisis for their family and the community.

By a show of hands, how many people here had any kind of drug involvement and why they're injured? I'm in there for selling drugs. I have a life and 30-year sentence. I killed a guy back in 1984. How'd that happen?

I just, dope, and out of my head, and I wound up shooting a guy in the mouth and killed him. But as I began to look around, the very real problems associated with drug abuse began to seem just one part of an even larger problem facing the country. It's absolutely true that drugs have destroyed.

Lives that heroin and cocaine for example do nothing to engender individual dignity But while covering the drug war as a journalist for more than a decade I came to understand that what drugs haven't destroyed the war against them has War against drugs is heating up somebody down the road said we're gonna fight a war against illicit drugs because drugs are bad Okay, there's no argument there but Think about where we are 30 years later. You know, if you look at all the money spent on drug enforcement, on prisons, on probation officers, judges, narcotics agents, on interdiction and everything else that has expanded due to the war on drugs, it gratifies us and makes us feel like we're tough on crime. crime.

Put them away. Put them away where they belong. But to what end?

We are the jailing is country on the planet beyond Saudi Arabia, China or Russia. Nobody jails their population at the rate that we do. And yet drugs are pure than ever before.

They're more available. There are younger and younger kids willing to sell them. It'd be one thing if it was draconian and it worked. But it's draconian and it doesn't work.

And it just leads to more. We got people. We hitting the shit from the store.

Thank you, I appreciate that. Making it work for you, man. I'm gonna really pump the game on with that.

I'm not a big super drug dealer. Yo, yeah I got some weed too. I do what I have to do, I know how to survive. You know I dib and dab if I have to. It's not hard to tell that these is the junkies, right?

Hey, get out of here with that! I think these... the economy thrives with the drug money. You got judges that's getting high toll. You got cops that's sniffing coke.

You got people with good white-collar jobs that can afford their habits, and that's the only difference. Yo, the boys is behind us. The boys is behind us.

When I think about people living in inner cities, city neighborhoods, think about the principle of equality of life chances. You should not be able to enter a hospital ward in an inner city hospital of newborn babies and predict with near certainty on the basis of their class, background, and race where these kids, where these healthy newborn babies are going to end up in life. The Dope Block, that's what this is. 77 Crownwell I got it on my own.

This is where I'm from. For now. Every war starts with propaganda.

With the drug war, our definition of what a drug user or drug seller is... What did your mommy tell you about drugs? Montreux.

...became almost a wartime cartoon of the enemy. We eat coke. crack your choice some folks will tell you that i'm dealing in poison but hey do i look like the kind of guy that would do that to a kid like you but the truth is the drugs aren't yours you're just a minion you're somebody without any real authority selling somebody else's dope It's like fearing the guy who's at the drive-out window with the Burger King.

Basically, it's just about survival. I feel like sometimes, like, cops and shit, they view you as, oh, you live over here, but they don't view you as, like, damn, like, was it your choice? I was born in a dump.

My mama died and my daddy got drunk. He left me here to die or grow. I wouldn't want to work anywhere else. I feel the need to be here as a minority supervisor.

It's predominantly a minority neighborhood. A police station for what? I didn't go nowhere! What we deal with here is a lot of lower-level narcotic activity.

No, well, we do the drugs. We do mostly drugs and prostitution. Go ahead, Papi. We're good to go. I'll stop making my way up there.

Yeah, sometimes I think you can trace any crime you want to drugs. Speaking of drug users or abusers... Magic Man! What's up, dog? Just cause I got to get that big stain.

You still ain't drinking, right? Dean, you still ain't drinking, right? No. How long's it been?

I've been sober. I've been jumping, man. How long's it been?

I'm bright. It's been two months now. Good for you.

All right, bro. You have a good one, brother. Dean, magic man for 90s.

He's been around forever. We like to look at the war on drugs as black hats and white hats and good guys and bad guys and victims and offenders. And on the ground, it's a lot more mixed up than that.

Go ahead, Chip. The guy in Chelsea just re-upped with powder in. Oh, the drugs are never going to be gone. I don't... that's...

forget that. To say you're going to be drug-free completely... In drug work, you never really got that...

satisfaction, I suppose. Because you don't get rid of drugs. I mean, along the way, you know, you have small victories here and there. But if you look at the big picture, how are you getting anywhere?

You could certainly be frustrated. Go get him. I'm coming right up now.

Don't let him run. Don't move. Anybody else in your store? No, no one.

It's empty? Yes. I'll be really on it in a second. I'm going to get you the search wand.

Sit tight, buddy. Woo! Wow, kid, you can smell it in here.

You want a haircut? No, I'm going to sit there. You sure? I can... Practice?

Nah. Chip, he's got cocaine residue on his scales too. Hello? Hello?

Yeah, baby. I'm in the middle of doing something, honey. Why?

Bye, honey. Just doing my job, buddy. I'm not mad at anybody, man. I made the mistake to decide what I did and...

...I don't fucking deal with the consequences. If you talk to people in law enforcement, they believe that the community is completely corrupt. Want to buy some weed? How about coke?

You want to buy some coke? They believe everybody's living off drug money, that there is no moral center. They see communities that blame everybody but themselves for what's going on. And then you talk to those communities and they genuinely believe that law enforcement is using drug laws to destroy the community. Over time, I have discovered that everybody involved hates what's going on.

It's interesting with this war on drugs, how little the American people know. I've never thought about it before. Like how people feel about drugs or anything like that?

That's what you mean, a war on drugs? As I started to ask around, I found that if people knew anything about the war on drugs, they thought I was talking about something in a foreign country. 6,500 people died in Mexico in drug-related violence last year.

Yet surprisingly, very few seem to have any idea of the war going on in their own country. I haven't heard. heard the term war on drugs since the 80s.

The biggest drug industry in the world isn't in Mexico. It's not in Colombia. It's not in Afghanistan. It's in the United States.

We in the United States, perhaps our dirty little secret is that between 10 and 16 billion dollars are spent by... Americans to pay for these illegal drugs, creating a demand. The thing with the war on drugs is it tries to deal with the health problem as if it was a legal problem. Addiction is an effect of human unhappiness and human suffering.

When people are distressed, they want to soothe their distress. When people are in pain, they want to soothe their pain. So the real question is not why the addiction, but why the pain?

One of the realities is most people getting arrested in this country for drugs are selling drugs to support their own habit. And if you stand in a federal court, you're watching poor, uneducated people be fed into a machine like meat to make sausage. It's just bang, bang, bang. Next.

My mother used to tell me that I was going to die before I turned 18. I think I believe that when I was like 14 years old, that's when I really started gangbanging. I started getting in fights and stuff like that. Now, I'm 28 years old, being sentenced for 50 grams of crack cocaine. I am Mark Bennett, United States District Court Judge for the Northern District of Iowa. And in my 15 years, I've sent over 2,600 people to federal prison.

I grew up around gang members and drug dealers. Them was my role models. Coming in here today, Maurice Halterwinger's best chance, best chance, is a sentence of 20 years. Drug laws, it turns out, often carry what are called mandatory minimum sentences, below which a judge cannot sentence a defendant, no matter what the circumstances. You've got a guy like Maurice Holtewanger who grows up in a bad family situation with...

heartbreaking details of how he got where he is today. But even if Judge Bennett wanted to give him a sentence below 20 years, he can't. My mother was addicted to drugs.

I don't remember my father at all. Why? He got killed when I was like three years old. There was a lot of death around me.

I've seen a lot of people die. I've got a lot of friends that's dead. But, uh... Hmm.

It could have been worse. We're here in the Bible Belt, you know, law and order Oklahoma. The prison is the largest employer in the county. Employees live all around here, and if you take out a prison, the towns would just dry up. I don't know that there's a job I could do better in the whole world.

I guess they should have wrote prison guard on my forehead when I was born, because it just fits me. The job was built for me. We incarcerate women at the highest per capita rate in the nation.

Males incarcerate, I believe, the third highest rate. We have 1,500 inmates, the majority of our drug or drug-related crimes. I'm here on a 12-year drug trafficking sentence, trafficking crack cocaine.

I'm 34 years old. I've been here since I was 23. I'm doing a life sentence for a second-degree murder. I killed a guy behind a bad drug deal in Oklahoma City. I've never been high on a piece of dope in my entire life, but I've sold tons.

tons of unfortunately. We have a nice, secure facility. I can keep anybody you want to keep, and I can keep them for as long as you want to keep them. The facility itself is as secure as it can get. Lift the genitals up.

Turn around and spread your butt. Spread it with your hands. As it turns out, drug laws have become so harsh that even the nonviolent can now be locked up for sentences, once reserved for violent crimes. I think that a lot of times we're locking up everybody just because we're mad at them. We need to lock up the people that we're afraid of.

They need to be locked up, but not the people that we're mad at. I mean, I'm a law and order guy. Go ahead. I'm a firm believer, no free rides. Here you recognize that your chances to manipulate the system are done.

That door slams behind you and you have absolutely no ability to control what goes on on the other side of that door. You can't open the door. This is where most people, if they're a newcomer, a first-time offender, where they really figure out that this is prison. And this is what the next 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 years of your life looks like.

This is it. While following the steps that so many Americans take through the world of the drug war, I couldn't help but notice that at every stage, Black Americans were disproportionately represented. You know, in any war you've got to have an enemy.

And when you think about the impact, particularly on poor people of color, there are more African Americans under correctional control today in prison or jail, on probation or parole, than were enslaved in 1850, a decade before the Civil War began. And that's something we haven't been willing to look in the mirror and ask ourselves, what's really going on? As it turns out, nearly everyone I talked to knew all about the impact of the drug war on Black America.

There's no question that the criminal laws impact disproportionately on foreign minorities. Certainly disproportionate number of black people are prosecuted. Yet while people could tell me all about their firsthand experience of this, very few had any idea where it came from.

Here is America as you and I like to think of it. The land of the free and the home of the brave. But from every part of the nation come newspaper headlines telling us of an enemy. America's secret enemy number one. Summertime and the living is easy.

The drug war began as a war on dangerous narcotics, at least on its face. You know, you can trace modern drug enforcement back to the early 50s, when you started to see the rise of sort of the urban narcotics squads, the narc. Government agencies charged with the enforcement of narcotics laws have been able until recently to decrease steadily the number of addicts in the United States.

It was at least plausible as a policy because the use of dangerous narcotics was truly a counterculture. It was the jazz man's vice. It was in the back alleys.

It was furtive. There was no mass marketing. There were no drive-up drug corners.

It was a very small percentage of the American population that was engaged in the use of heroin or cocaine. In the 1950s, as drug use was growing among Americans of all backgrounds, law enforcement became increasingly focused on one group in particular. Why'd you turn the dogs loose on the policemen? Are you telling me that this happened or are you asking?

I'm asking. No! There's a narcotic in there. Black man born free, at least that's the way it's supposed to be. There's no question that there was a passion with which the early narcotics enforcement culture pursued black America.

even though the The addict population was always distinctly biracial. In the 1960s, drug use grew widespread in America. But for black communities, increasing poverty pushed the sale and use of drugs most often onto the street, making them an even greater target for law enforcement. By the late 60s, most urban areas had a mass market for drugs.

By the 80s, you were really looking at the drive-thru window. You were looking at McDonald's. At that point, you can't claim that you're trying to isolate a countercultural phenomenon.

You're fighting a war against a whole community. Amazing grace, how sweet the sound. October 2009, I joined Nanny Jetter at the funeral of a family member I'd known growing up.

Over the years, drugs had deeply affected her life, and the event brought back difficult memories for Nanny. My son James, he died in 89 or 87. I can't quite remember. Before he died, he said, Mommy, I'm just tired of it. I cannot live this life. It doesn't matter what I do.

I just want to die. All I know, my son used a needle. Though I'd known about James' death at the time it happened, I didn't know the extent of his addiction, nor how widely drugs and the drug war had affected Nanny's family. It wasn't until I started catching up with childhood friends...

Bubbles. You're kidding me. ...that I began to realize the full extent of it. It'd be fast enough our family. I didn't realize my father was heroin addict. Yeah, man, I got the news in jail.

Who are you in jail for? Drugs. The war on drugs has been going on for so long, man, it's tough.

If that wasn't there, man, I'd just say, God got to intervene on this. Again and again, I heard how drug laws had done more to punish individuals and their loved ones than to mount a serious effort to prevent drug abuse. But if this is what the drug war was doing to Nanny's family, what was it doing to other families?

There's a structural problem in the country that we keep ignoring. We have two million people in our jails and prisons, and a million of them are African American, most of them are males, many of them for nonviolent drug offenses. That is a pattern that has overwhelmed the African American community because we get a whole generation of kids who now have the assumption that they're destined to be in the criminal justice system. What people need to see today is that the next generation of children right now, with the barriers they face, aren't going to be like I was or like my parents were or like my grandparents were, a generation better than those who preceded them. At the precinct they told me that my charge was a conspiracy charge.

Conspiracy of 50 grams or more. I messed up. That's all I'm thinking about is... I messed up.

A reputed member of a notorious drug gang was caught in a drug bust in St. Albans today. 24-year-old Anthony Johnson of New York was arrested along with two other people during a drug raid. Investigators say Johnson had been bringing crack from New York to sell in Vermont.

Right now you've pled guilty to a charge which requires a five-year mandatory minimum. You know what that means? I can't get less than five years. That seems harsh when you think about the fact that he is not violent at all.

So it's critical to present Anthony as far more than a drug dealer. John Pack is one of the best criminal defense lawyers in Vermont. He came to me and said, Susan, I really need your help.

With this kid, I really believe that he was, you know, in the wrong place, didn't have a lot of options. Though Anthony Johnson was arrested in rural Vermont, he is originally from the very same New York housing project where I first met Shaniqua Benitez. So you know Anthony? Yeah. Anthony Johnson, he's 24 years old, and he's looking at 5 to 40 years of jail.

You know, by the time he gets out, he won't have a life. Following Anthony's legal team as they investigated the steps leading to his arrest, I started to learn more about where he came from. More clearly than before, I could see how the vicious cycle of the drug war spans generations. I wish my father was way different, you know? I remember one day I was outside in front of the building, and I noticed I'm doing a little hand-in-hand.

Ever since then I figured he was a drug dealer. And then after that I kinda seen him a couple times doing that. Nah, never asked him. Cause I don't ask those questions.

I knew. So I didn't really want to hear his answers. That's why I didn't really ask.

Alright now. When I heard of it, he's selling drugs, to be honest with you, to be totally honest with you, it didn't surprise me from where we was at, where we came out of, where we lived. The drug dealers are looked at as really the leaders of the community.

If your moms can't pay rent, they help out on the rent. If you need a little bit of food, sometimes they will give money to your household for food. It's like back in the days, magic had to come. Converse out.

Everybody wanted the new Converses, and he would get them for you. The drug dealer would come right up the block from us, five or six of us. You pick out a pair, you pick out a pair, you pick out a pair.

We come back on the block. We all carrying sneaker boxes. He in front of us.

Oh, everybody running over to us. Oh, we get the magics. You get the magics. You got the magics. And then we would tell him where we got them from.

The next step is every time he comes on the block, you're always under him. He wants his water from the store. He'll give you a $5 bill.

Go get me a water. You know the change is yours. Half these waters he didn't drink. Ice cream truck came, always bought us ice cream.

and he didn't even have to pay. He'd tell the ice cream man, hey, yo, give them. And ice cream man gave us all ice cream. Honestly, I loved them. I loved them because when they came around, it was Christmas.

As you get older, they say you get your own money. Sell drugs. Sell drugs.

I don't know how to sell no drugs. I say, he's like, you don't have to know how to sell them. Just stand there. I'll send them over to you. He gave me the drugs.

I stood there, and he would point. and they'll come to me. And I had my own sneaker money. I had my own movie money. And then I had my own power.

My role models wasn't nobody famous, you know? I mean, where I come from in the neighborhood, there was Hood famous, you know, my big brother Dennis Johnson. He came from doing the same thing.

But it was mostly one person, my man Tay. He was everything I wanted to be. He had the girls, the clothes, you know, the jewelry, the cars, the money.

That's what I wanted, you know. But I wanted to be Tay, I wanted to be Lil Tay. Tay schooled me to the game, you know, he showed me how to get money without working. Hey, John, I somehow just missed your call. I just wanted to double check with you and give you a chance to talk to Alicia about where we're at and what Anthony's looking at.

They're trying to go for five, but if not anything under ten. They're not trying to make him go beyond that. Yeah. Like, the five to 40 was scaring me. I was always proud of him, but I just always figured that he was okay, that he was good, you know.

I know I screwed up because you know you need that father figure in your life. I know my daughter, she need me and I don't want me and her to have the same relationship me and my father had. Looking at me in pictures and gotta say that's my daddy or come to a visit and you know I gotta tell her daddy's at school when I speak to her on the phone or something you know.

Cause I don't want to tell her that I'm in jail. Watching Anthony's child sleep hundreds of miles from the father she's never met, I could see the painful cycle gripping his family. But I also had to honestly wonder what compelled him to make the choices he did. It's very interesting people ask the question, what about personal responsibility? The only thing you don't do is blame criminals for the crime that they committed.

You blame everybody else and everything else. You know, I wish the answer were that simple. But let's just take a little step back.

There are structural impediments. What you see over and over again in urban America are kids who live in a crowded home, and who are hungry when they go to school, who lack attention because they've heard noise and gunshots and other things where they live. I don't think people fully understand. In the inner city, these kids are making rational choices.

I profiled a girl who was like this, a 10-year-old girl. The minute she steps out her front doorway, there are drug dealers out there, no economic opportunity. The school is warehousing her.

She doesn't see any prospects. How is she supposed to get out? At the end of the day, when there's not a lot of resources out here and your teachers aren't stressing you to come to class or not even caring, you know, you're not going to go to school. You're going to sell drugs.

You're going to do what you have to do. To go down to a drug corner in the inner city is the rational act of... Somebody going to work for the only company that exists in a company town.

When that is the only economy that's functioning in certain places in this country, what do we expect? Beyond the structural barriers that promote drug crime on the street, those arrested soon find themselves in a self-perpetuating cycle from which few ever really escape. People don't realize, for example, that when you arrest a young black man and he goes to jail, the first thing, when he gets out of the prison, he can't get a job in most places because of his record. If you have a felony charge, you need to be working.

You need to be trying to move yourself forward. If he wants to go back to school to go to college, he's ineligible by law for certain grants. Medical issues, if you have any... He can't get certain health care benefits. He can't live in certain neighborhoods.

His family that was the centerpiece of his life. If they're living in public housing, they can't take him in. The only people who deserve to live in public housing are those who live responsibly there. He can't vote.

Release from prison offers this idea that you're going to return to some kind of freedom, but in reality, for the rest of your life, you've got to check that box on employment applications, asking that dreaded question, have you ever been convicted of a felony? It becomes a vicious circle in which people cycle out of their ghetto communities into prison and back. As a physician, I'm concerned with the casualties of the war on drugs, which is the front-line users and petty dealers. But rather than seeing the drug problem in isolation, you have to see it in a social context. These are not problems, none of them...

that are just intrinsic to individuals. They all represent multi-generational family history, culture, social conditions, and human failure. You know, like, you say, all the things that you knew that when you was coming...

coming up that was wrong. Now I'm starting to do them, but I can't control it because I got these problems. I'm using drugs, I'm halfway selling drugs, I'm using drugs, and now I got these two little boys, pretty boys. And I don't know how to really be they dad.

I know I'm supposed to. I know I ain't have one. And I know I'm supposed to. I didn't know what, how to stop doing what I was doing, excuse me, to be they dad.

Seeing the pain Anthony's father carries over both his own choices and the impact of outside pressures, I wondered how a matter of public health didn't just inspire early drug laws, but became the full-blown target of war. America's public enemy number one. in the United States is drug abuse. In order to fight and defeat this enemy, it is necessary to wage a new all-out offensive. The U.S. war on drugs was initiated officially under President Richard Nixon to get his polls up.

For most people I talk to, the drug war as we know it today was born in the late 60s and early 70s under Richard Nixon. I have no sympathy for the pushers and the peddlers and the others in this country. We are going to restore freedom from fear in America again. When Nixon ran for president in 1968, he talked about the problem of crime in the streets.

The wave The wave of crime is not going to be the wave of the future in the United States of America. This is really the first time in a major way that the issue of drug crime became a national political issue. Richard Nixon is credited as the first to coin the term a war on drugs.

But what most people don't realize is that under Richard Nixon, two-thirds of the drug war budget was devoted to treatment rather than law enforcement. Because a program of law enforcement alone is not enough. Well, Nixon actually had some forward thinking in the war on drugs.

He understood the need to address addiction. This means that on the treatment of addicts, we must go parallel. And he actually did some things that were progressive, certainly by standards of what came after him. You know, you don't turn to the druggers unless you can't find satisfaction in another way, in your own life. The more I learned about Nixon, the more confusing he became.

Privately, he knew that he'd been far more successful with drug treatment than with law enforcement. But publicly, as the 72 election approached, Nixon returned to the simple crime-fighting rhetoric that had worked for him before. We must wage what I have called total war against public enemy number one in the United States. from a dangerous drugs. Nixon wins re-election in a landslide victory.

As Nixon's tough talk proved a recipe for electoral success, states across the country began passing tough new laws. Half the crime is caused by narcotic addicts. With New York's Rockefeller drug laws setting an example for harsh penalties that would soon be followed by other states. You guys better get ready. If you leave at 7.58, you are just almost out of time.

Yes, sir. You guys be careful. Okay.

Have a good day. Love you. Love you too. I am very much a law and order kind of guy.

I would rather have ten police cars than one soup kitchen, if you give me the choice. But sometimes I think that we need to be smarter about what those police officers are actually out there doing. Maybe because he's seen the epitome of a hardened prison. As an official, Mike Carpenter's perspective on the severity of drug laws caught me off guard.

I think a long time ago, we made drugs into this huge thing, and we've made it so illegal, and we've made it so illegal. made it such a national issue. With that tough on crime stance, I mean, you can't get elected if you don't profess to be tough on crime. First, we have to join together to ensure that drug dealers are punished swiftly, surely, and severely. You can't stay elected if you don't do things to be tough on crime.

It's to toughen sentences, beef up law enforcement, and build new prison space for 24,000 inmates. inmates. You know, nobody can afford to be the first guy to say say, wait a minute, we can't afford what we're doing, let's do something different, because if you even made a noise like you were going to be soft on crime in any way, you would be out of a job. You will be put away and put away for good. Three strikes and you are out.

You get in front of a camera and you talk loudly about, we need to lock up criminals, we need to make our streets safe, and so we become victims of the soundbite. American people want their government to get tough and to go on the offensive, and that's exactly what we intend. I think sometimes we have people doing a whole lot of time for not very much crime.

It's almost like they're paying for our fear instead of paying for their crime. For many working in corrections, I heard the same frustration. that political rhetoric not only floods their facilities, but robs them of the resources they need to do their jobs.

People want to lock people up and keep them locked away, and then when their sentence is over, they expect this person to be reformed or a different person. And if you haven't given them any skills or trained them, you know, how can they be? I'm the cabinet-making instructor here at Lexington Vo-Tech.

When these guys get out of prison, we find them a job and help them get a job. Keeps them working, makes them taxpayers of the state of Oklahoma. He's already got one strike against him that he's a convicted felon.

At least he can say, hey, I'm a licensed electrician or licensed... carpenter. For a lot of these guys they've never had self-respect I guess.

I mean it's been false self-respect because they were tough or because they stole a lot or because they sold a lot of drugs and this gives them the chance to anchor themselves to something good, these rehabilitation programs. Prison's not a nice place but I'm glad I came here. It's made me a better person. This program is probably the best thing that happened to me in my life.

We are seeking change, accepting that we cannot change our past, but we can change our future. The problem is when you get into lean budget times, the public, the citizens of Oklahoma say, if we have to spend money on something, let's spend money on fences, handcuffs, cell doors, that kind of stuff. The rehabilitation programs are often the first thing that get cut. If we don't have the resources available, that equates to not being able to give an offender a trade or a skill, and they end up going right back to the same deviant behavior on the outside.

I'm Larry Curley. I'm the marshal here in Magdalena. Magdalena is a small spot in the world. We're about 250 miles from the Mexican border. We have US Highway 60. It's a main corridor for drugs.

I need your driver's license, please, and your insurance. For the last 29 years in working in law enforcement, the major thing that's changed is the drug trafficking. What are you looking for? The drug guys?

Anything. Everything. At first glance, Marshall Curley seemed from a bygone era of law enforcement. I guess I'm going to portray myself as that kind of person. A man with a white hat, riding old silver.

But as enforcing drug laws has become the primary focus of the U.S. for police across the country. The nature of his work as a small-town marshal has changed as well. You got that? Two Hispanic males in a car, dark tinted windows. We want it on that side of the road.

Yeah. Okay. What are you going to tell her? She knows you're going to jail.

You can go ahead and put him in the car. Okay, if I check in there a little bit more? He's got some marijuana there. Ed, you arrest both these people and tow this car. That's what we're going to do.

We're fishing. We're fishing, but we're there again. I mean, if you look at trucks like this truck here, that's an Arizona truck. Somebody that's not going to stop and get a motel room.

Somebody that's been driving for 24 hours because they don't want to get caught. This is telling me that this person right here could be a drug trafficker. Because what's he doing that's giving you that impression? The truck and fast food. We're not supposed to be illegal to profile.

Right. But you kind of, after working so long, you kind of know who's doing something. So is it sort of phony when people say they don't profile? Oh, that's all phony. That's all phony.

If you don't profile vehicles, you're not in law enforcement. That's the way it is, man. You know? You know? Come on.

Okay, now what about profiling people? Profiling people, same thing. What's it, yeah.

We like to believe that the drug war has given law enforcement all these tools, all of this authority in which to pursue criminality and gangsterism. But actually what it did was, it basically destroyed the police deterrent in a very subtle and unintended way. Going up to 15th Street in Dixie. He's gonna have some crack for him and some oxycodone pills. Joe and I are both sergeants in major narcotics, and we don't do street-level drug deals.

We do, you know, larger quantity cases. We're looking for the dealers and the supplies. Okay, deal is good.

Guys, move in. A world away from Magdalena in the streets of Miami, I began to see the real impact of the drug war on law enforcement. Start thinking about why you're in handcuffs and maybe you can help yourself out, okay? So what happened is that the second guy, he's now running. Running on foot.

Yeah, that's where we believe he might have gone in there. I guess we're going to have to write this up as a separate case. Totally unrelated to the original drug deal we did, but we stumble upon a house where a couple of big stacks of money, a good amount of marijuana. That's sometimes how things happen. You know, they're not even planned.

Nobody respects good police work more than me. I spent more than a decade covering it, and there are a lot of detectives who I admire for their professionalism, for their craft. Hey, what's up? Can I help you? No, no, sir.

The drug Drug war created an environment in which none of that was rewarded. Come on over here for a second. Let's get his ID.

He's just cutting through the yard. A drug arrest does not require anything other than getting out of your radio car and jacking people up against the side of a liquor store. Probable cause?

Are you kidding? I don't want to say a majority of the people, but there's a good number of people probably in this area that are also involved in drug dealing. The problem is there's a real tendency on the part of law enforcement to think geographically. go throw resources at an area.

It's fish in a barrel for law enforcement. Anytime you need to make an arrest, you troll through there. Everybody committing crimes in that area gets arrested.

People who are in the area who aren't committing crimes get stopped. It makes everybody angry. Watching arrest after arrest, I began to see for the first time the destructive impact of drug laws not only on those they target, but on those who enforce them as well. The problem is that that cop that made that cheap drug arrest, he's going to get paid.

He's going to get the hours of overtime for taking the drugs down to ECU. He's going to get paid for processing the prisoner down at Central Booking. He's going to get paid for sitting back at his desk and writing the paperwork for a couple hours.

And he's going to do that 40, 50, 60 times a month, so that his base pay might end up being only half of what he's actually paid as a police officer. The most important thing right here. We're paying a guy for stats. You can leave them here, and then we can go back out and do this other deal.

Compare that guy to the one guy doing police work, solving a murder, a rape, a robbery, a burglary. If he gets lucky, he makes one arrest for the month. He gets one slip signed. And at the end of the month, when they look and they see, Officer A, he made 60 arrests. Officer B made one arrest.

Who do you think they make the sergeant? Okay, let's move in, guys, move in. In a city like, say, Baltimore, where I'm from, our percentage of arrests for murder, for rape and robbery are half of what they once were.

Our drug arrest stats are twice of what they once were. So what does that do? It makes a city unlivable.

It makes a police department where nobody can solve a fucking crime. Beyond the incentives that exist for individual officers, it turns out that whole departments have a monetary interest in increased drug arrests. Most people don't realize that the financial incentives built into the system virtually guarantee that the overwhelming majority of drug arrests in the United States will be for non-violent, low-level drug offenses. A couple months ago, we did a two-day operation. We arrested over 200 people, a majority of them for selling drugs.

A lot of the money comes out of seizures from the drug profits that the bigger players are making off of this. So I guess that money is being put to good use. So where do you get all that money?

That money's ours now. That's my money now. If I leave this room and I go out there and get my old truck, and I drive down the highway with $5,000 cash in my pocket that I earned, and if I'm pulled over by a state trooper who says, oh, you have a defective taillight or something, they can take that $5,000, never charge me with a crime, take my old truck to boot. Keep them forever. It's called RICO, Civil Asset Seizure.

It goes on every day in counties all over this country. Hey, can we get, uh, somebody get a toe slip for this fine piece of machinery? Yeah, see, I got $118,000.

I pulled over right here and we compressed the guy. With the $25,000 I got out of that seizure, that's what we bought this car for. Okay, so wait a second.

So the police department... operates on the money it seizes sometimes. This is legal within the state of New Mexico. It's allegedly legal.

No, it is legal. You're not getting the point of everything. No, I am getting the point.

Probable cause. What happens is, with every successive encounter between one of our drug warriors and a citizen that goes awry... The people are out here minding their own business.

...respect for cops and the laws they're trying to enforce is lost. The guy was upset because he's saying that we were stopping him illegally. It was unconstitutional.

He feels like he's been violated. Is that fair? Maybe not.

But I have a job to do. Despite their commitment to their work, officers I spoke to across the country expressed growing concern not only about the effectiveness of drug laws, but about their larger impact on the relationship between police and the public. That's one of the biggest hurdles, you know, how much time the community has spent feeling like they couldn't. Trust the police. In Providence, officers who 20 years ago appeared on TV as the picture of tough-on-crime cops today seem conflicted over how things got where they are and what a better approach might look like.

If you're going to go out there and go and cause chaos, the Marines will put you on a structured program, and the military is a structured program. Send them to a boot camp, see how they make it on the boot camp. National Service. National Service, something. I mean, we're doing our part out here and it's frustrating a lot for us because it just seems like because they're addicts they find themselves committing the same crime that just put them in the jail, say, you know, a week or so prior.

Hold on a second. Whoa! What's going on? Let me see your ID, please. Let me see your ID.

My ID? Come on, you've got so many responsibilities, what do you know about the parents? Listen, you're treating your kid out.

Well, that's easier said than done when you have absentee parents. Why are you motherfucking doing this to me? Relax, man. Relax.

Some of these households, the father is non-existent. The mother is trying to raise a family. Those kids, the percentage of kids that break out of that is really low.

What's wrong with me? I'll tell you what else bothers me. You're going to hang around all the time, huh? If you keep having kids... And you can't afford them, you know what?

You gotta be a certain responsibility. I'm not saying to friggin' control or spade them, but Christ. Nooted them, you know?

But come on. Jesus. What they should do.

I'd pay them like five or ten thousand dollars to get like a vasectomy or something. It's cheaper in the long run. Why are you laughing, Pat?

Watching seasoned drug warriors struggle for answers to what they see as an unwinnable war. We're actually doing them a favor, tell them. Getting them in out of the cold. I wondered what it was about drugs that made them such a perceived danger in the first place.

You have to understand the war on drugs has never been about drugs. U.S. Customs officers and police are having another drive to round up dope smugglers.

Here's millions of dollars worth of deadly heroin, enough, they say, to kill six million people. Looking to find out more about the longer history of drugs in America, I found an unlikely source in Lincoln historian Richard Miller. His research put drug laws in a fascinating historical context. Historically, anti-drug laws have always been associated with race. In the 1800s, certain kinds of drugs that are illicit today were common in this country.

Cocaine was widely used. Heroin. People using drugs was something that was just ordinarily accepted. Opium, for example, was used by middle-aged successful whites, often housewives in the South.

If people were addicted or abusing drugs, they were viewed sympathetically as people who had to be helped. It was seen as a public health issue rather than a crime issue. One of the first changes was on the West Coast when smoking opium was made a criminal offense. Now, why would opium smoking be illegal in California but not in Mississippi? What was going on in California that was a concern about smoking opium?

Well, as it turns out, it had nothing to do with opium itself. The concern was with the people associated with smoking opium, and that was the Chinese. who had come to this country, and many of whom were in California, working hard, working for very little pay, and becoming part of the American success story. But their success was taking jobs away from white workers. So politicians got together and decided they gotta find something about the Chinese for which they can be criminalized to get them out of the way.

Now, of course, you can't throw people in jail simply because they're Chinese. But you can throw them in jail because they smoke opium. In the same way, we saw things going on with cocaine.

Again, it was middle-aged, successful people in this country, business executives, physicians, housewives, all perfectly legal. But then around the turn of the century, cocaine began being associated with blacks. They could withstand police bullets, it was thought. They can work hard all day, all night long, and all day long again, threatening the jobs of white workers.

And so laws began to be passed against cocaine. You're not arresting these people officially because they're black, you're arresting them because they've committed some sort of drug violation. Next, of course, we see the change in reputation that hemp has had. Hemp was a legitimate crop from colonial times forward, a widely appreciated commercial product.

But then in the 1930s, hemp changed into something vicious and fearsome called marijuana. Because at that time, marijuana smoking was being associated with Mexicans, working hard, working cheap. And once again, what was being outlawed was not being Mexican, but just some habit associated with Mexicans.

These laws set up a very dangerous precedent of racial control. It seemed that time and again, drug laws targeted any immigrant group seen as a threat to the established economic order. But how then did Black Americans, who came to this country over 200 years ago, become the primary target of drug laws in the modern era. Well, the way to think about African American history in the 20th century is as an immigrant story. I mean, the transition from the rural to the urban, it's one of the great mass migrations in the history of the world.

When blacks came out of slavery, they were heavily concentrated in the South in farming-type jobs. As industries were expanding in the North, blacks were recruited to come to work in factories. This gave rise to the great migration of Blacks flowing into urban areas.

Before she came to work for my family, Nanny Jetter had joined the wave of Black Americans who'd moved north during the Great Migration. She took me down to her childhood home in Southern Virginia. We grew up rumbling through the woods with a beautiful outside life.

The old Victoria would play and somebody would square dance and it was a completely different world. I love life in the South. Now, in that environment that seems so wonderful in the South, why did you ever decide you wanted to leave the South?

I left the South because I had to. Jim Crow, during that time, you couldn't, black people, if they was raped, they couldn't say they was raped. So you never hear of rape.

Only the white lady got raped. But the black woman, I was innocent. But people didn't think I was innocent. No one knew I was leaving. I wanted to bring my children up different.

North was the way out. I thought it would make a big difference. Nanny had never spoken so openly about her past and what it was that had compelled her north. But as I learned more about her life, I began to see the deeper roots of the drug war for black American families like nannies. Sadly, what many of these families came to find is that they had not really...

They escaped Jim Crow at all, but found themselves in a new system of racial control. A new Jim Crow. Racially discriminatory laws across America ensured that poor people of color migrating from the South would be confined to certain parts of the city that we now think of as ghettos.

Very few people know this, but if you go back and you look at how African-American housing patterns were established in the 30s and 40s, even as a result of the New Deal, the FHA, which was a Democratic New Deal program to inspire homeownership in the midst of the Depression, did more to create ghettos than any other federal program before or since. Why? Because when they were creating the culture of homeownership in America, they were exclusionary to black people. They put them in the areas that were maybe a little bit economically depressed.

and subject to heavy rentership. And then they redlined those areas, and they would not write FHA mortgages in those neighborhoods. Once those areas were redlined, that was basically a design for a ghetto. In 1950, people in these neighborhoods were poor, but they had jobs.

By 1960, we're talking about the jobless poor, because industries had moved out of the inner city, leaving behind concentrated populations of poor people, vulnerable. to drug trafficking and all of the other problems associated with joblessness. And what happens when groups are denied access to the core economic engines in a society?

They create their own out of prohibited economies. That was true of the Italians and the Irish and the Jews and everybody else who came to the cities a generation before African Americans arrived. In 1969, during that time, I couldn't get a job.

It was like all the doors were shut. When I came to work for your parents, I was happy just to have this job. Do you remember the first time you saw me?

Yes. I was about three days old when your mom brought you home from the hospital. That was the first time I seen you. You were a beautiful baby that I fell in love with. You became my baby.

I loved your family. I guess I never dreamt that you guys would ever leave New Haven. I've always known that when I was very young...

my family circumstances improved, and we moved from Connecticut, where my dad had been a doctor, to a comfortable suburb of New York City, where he'd started a successful business. What I didn't know was how this had impacted Nanny and her family. Your mom, she said, my husband's going to double your pay if you can go with us. I felt more money would make a better life for my family. Eugene, that was the wrong thing to do.

I was always working. in New York, whilst my kids were in New Haven. My youngest son, James, he started smoking marijuana at 14, and at 20, he started to really go into drugs.

It is so amazing how you spend your life providing, loving your kids, that you don't see the mental part that's going on in their life. In turn, then you look at white kids, they have... They're a parent and they have a housekeeper that loves them. But yet still, your kids are most of the time alone.

And what happened? He got, he died with AIDS from used, you know, needles. As Nanny and I returned to New Haven together, I suddenly saw my birthplace with new eyes, processing so much I hadn't understood about the intersection of James's life and my own. But what else had I missed?

Growing up in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, I guess like many people, I imagined things were going to get better for Black America. But as it turned out, in many ways, the worst was yet to come. Growing up in Florida, I remember thinking that I never wanted to leave Florida.

I used to tell my friends, like before we'd go out and do some illegal activity, I used to give them pep talk and say, you know, God is on our side because he knows that we're poor and God wouldn't have us be poor, so he understands what we're doing. And, you know, I actually believe that shit. Carl Hart was part of a generation of black men who experienced firsthand the most dramatic escalation of the drug war in American history. Today, a professor of psychology at New York's Columbia University, his past experience remains a driving force.

force in his work. Growing up in the 1970s and 80s, many of my friends and family members got caught up in drug use. So I was always interested in drugs of abuse.

What I do today is that I actually give people drugs in the laboratory to study the effects of drugs like methamphetamine, cocaine, marijuana. Though Carl's academic research is on the science behind addiction, his own experience has shown him how often drug laws are shaped less by scientific concerns. than by political ones.

In the 1980s, like many people in the black community, I was concerned about the havoc that drugs were wreaking in our community or the havoc that I thought drugs were wreaking in our community. And that brings us to the major and sweeping effort that I'm announcing this morning. In the long history of the drug war, no single chapter would turn out to impact black America more deeply than the eight years of the Reagan presidency. What will you do when someone offers you drugs?

While Nancy Reagan's popular slogan, Just Say No, took what would seem a motherly approach to drug prevention, her husband took a far tougher approach. We will utilize the FBI, the DEA, the IRS, the ATF, Immigration and Naturalization Service, United States Marshals Services, and the Coast Guard. We intend to do what is necessary to end the drug menace and to eliminate this dark...

evil enemy within. When Reagan announced that he was planning to rev up the drug war more than ever, it was political opportunity. Because at the time, drug crime was actually on the decline, not on the rise. Less than 2% of the American population even identifies drugs as the nation's top priority.

But then, of course, they got lucky. Crack cocaine. Crack, the super addictive and deadly cocaine concentrate. Crack hit the streets and suddenly there was just hysteria about this brand new demon-like form of cocaine. Today, there's a new epidemic.

Smoke. Smokable cocaine, otherwise known as crack. It is an uncontrolled fire. The American people want their government to get tough and to go on the offensive. And that's exactly what we intend, with more ferocity than ever before.

Please, If smaller cities don't have a crack crisis now, they will soon. They're just carrying on like it's their living room, like this is their home, like they belong here. And they don't belong here.

What we saw were images of black urbanites on TV smoking crack cocaine over and over and over. And then these incredible stories were associated with crack cocaine and they were taken as fact. The drug so powerful it will empty the money from your pockets, make you sell the watch off your wrist, the clothes off your back, or kill your mother. Yep, that's what we're seeing. But if you go back to the 1920s and the 30s, this is what people were saying about marijuana.

This elven takes that frying pan from the stove and kills his mother with it. Not a very nice thing to look at, but this is marijuana. If you say that now in our society, people will look at you like you're crazy. But whenever you have a new drug introduced into a society, you can say incredible things about that drug and people will believe you.

Our society is now infested with drug abusers. There was a tremendous fear of this epidemic that was going to overcome all of us, not only with drug addiction, but with the violence and terror that was going to come out. out of this.

And tremendous fear led to this view that the criminal laws would save us. Democrats as well as Republicans got on board to pass a whole new generation of mandatory sentencing laws. These laws raced through Congress in record time. There were virtually no hearings held, no consultation with experts who knew something about drug abuse. The yeas are 97, the nays are 2. This is something that had to be dealt with, and of course, you know, election year fever did take hold of some people.

With overwhelming support, Ronald Reagan signed into law an unprecedented array of mandatory minimum sentences for drug crimes. But no drug would receive harsher penalties than crack. The penalties were outrageous.

That is, the penalty for crack cocaine was made 100 times more punitive than for powder cocaine. Acceptance of coke is widespread, commonplace among professionals. Whites were using powder cocaine in boardrooms, in suburban America. Blacks were using crack cocaine in public housing and on the street. And what's the response?

Just wipe me out straight off the map for nothing. 57 years for some small rock, man. You I'm saying I want to know why I'm being treated like I murdered somebody, you know.

Over time, as the number of blacks in America's prisons for drug crimes skyrocketed, far outpacing the number of whites, many people, including many judges. began to question the disparity in sentencing between crack and powder. Well, that's the major reason why I've agreed to be interviewed. In my view, it is not fair to have a 100 to 1 disparity in the difference between powder cocaine and crack cocaine, and let me explain what that means.

A crack defendant with 5 grams of crack cocaine is treated the same as a powder cocaine defendant with 100 times more weight. In other words, 500. grams of powder cocaine and I don't think most people realize this what is the difference between powder cocaine and crack cocaine do you know all crack cocaine comes from powder cocaine the difference is you add baking soda water and heat from an oven that's the only difference I run a group called Families Against Mandatory Minimums. I started it in 1991. I think what I didn't know was how incredibly hard it would be to change the laws. Julie Stewart first learned about the severity of mandatory minimums when a family member was picked up on marijuana. want to charge us.

After my brother was arrested and sentenced to five years in prison, I started meeting other families whose kids were in for so much longer. And I realized my brother was lucky. He only got five years.

Crack penalties are ridiculously disproportionate. to all other drugs. In her fight against mandatory minimums, Julie took her cause to the U.S.

Sentencing Commission, where she found a powerful and unlikely ally. I'm Billy Wilkins, and I was the first federal judge in the nation selected by President Ronald Reagan to serve as the first chair of the United States Sentencing Commission. In 1995, the Sentencing Commission actually voted to make crack and powder cocaine exactly the same. Now, is crack a dangerous drug?

Yes, it is. Is it highly addictive? Yes, it is. but But the commission looked at this on many occasions and found that sentencing crack cocaine 101 was unjust. There can be no doubt that the higher penalties for crack offenders fall disproportionately on minority defendants.

51% of the crack is used by the white population. In Los Angeles, California, there has not been one white conviction. Not one. Yet despite the evidence presented by judges and experts, Congress was unyielding. insistent on maintaining the crack powder disparity.

I must just tell you, in my view at least, the findings are very vulnerable. These people are killing our kids. These people are disrupting society.

These people are wrecking our society. I don't think people understand really how crucial this is, how serious this is, what's really going on. Looking at Maurice's case today, he's facing a double mandatory minimum from 10 years to 20 years. Does he deserve a 20-year sentence? I don't think so.

In 2005, after years of concern from the bench about unfair sentencing, the Supreme Court ruled that judges should be given back a certain degree of discretion to determine what a fair sentence should be. In response, Judge Bennett did something historic. Yes, I'm the first United States District Court judge to do a one-to-one sentencing ratio between crack and powder cocaine. Judge Bennett gave me a one-to-one ratio instead of a hundred-to-one. So he took my guideline from, like, 30 years to, like, I think I was under 10 years or right at 10 years.

But it didn't help. In Maurice's case today, the justice was trumped by the mandatory minimum. Judge Bennett's decision to use a one-to-one ratio turns out to have been largely symbolic, since Congress's complex system of mandatory minimums has the final say.

The minimum on a conspiracy is 10 years, and then with me having a prior drug felony, the minimum is 20 years. So I got a 20-year sentence today. This has backfired.

I mean, if I go around the country and I see all the people in jail for unbelievable sentences, how did this go wrong? Well, I don't know that it went wrong. It's just, I guess, the system worked. The system worked the way... Congress planned for it to work.

They're not going to come home and campaign on the fact that I'm for more lenient sentences for drug dealers. Taking on the drug cartel and winning the drug war. Just the opposite.

I'm going to come home and campaign. I want tough sentences for drug dealers. I just think we need tougher sentencing.

But whether Congress started out with race in mind or not, it turns out, in fact and in practice, that... Minorities are targeted by these mandatory minimums, the 100 to 1 ratio, more than others are. And that's not good.

And it's very interesting because African Americans do not use crack cocaine any more than whites. In fact, whites use it more. African Americans make up 13% of the population in the U.S. and they're about 13% of the crack users.

In other words, the rest of the users are white and brown, which is kind of amazing because... 90% of the crack cocaine defendants in the federal system are African American. I came back to South Florida for multiple reasons. To attend a scientific meeting.

And to attend some court proceedings. And of course I'm here to see my family, because they're all here. Like so many people I met in the world of the drug war. Carl Hart's story turned out to be far more complex than I'd originally understood. After overcoming great odds to break out of his past, Carl suddenly found himself drawn back into the world he'd left behind.

Yes, sir. And on the other charge, the possession of cocaine charge, you'd be pleading no contest? Yes, sir. So Tobias is my son who I found out was my son about eight or nine years ago.

He was 16 when I found out. and Tobias is now 26. Withhold adjudication, I mean. Nine years later, I'm still struggling with it because I am responsible for this person being here, but yet I had no influence on how this person was shaped. Right now, he has two open charges. He has a cocaine charge.

It's not encouraging. So your situation, how are you doing business-wise? Surviving?

Ain't too good. Christmas around the corner looking ugly. Yeah.

You should also make sure you get a little small, legitimate gig. I don't care what it pays because... Hang on, hang on, hang on. Just hear me out. The thing is, I'm just afraid that you go before a judge and then they're going to say, Hi.

you get in your loop. All them kids, I ain't gonna be able to take care of them kids with no $8, $7 an hour. You know, you can do whatever you want in life, but if you got all this stuff hanging over your head, you're gonna be shackled by the system. Please, man, just do those little small things that I asked you to do, you know?

All right. So I'm out, man. All right, bro. See you later.

All right. It's just difficult because I know it's fate. I mean, it's the same shit that we grew up with, so it's these cycles.

You know, particularly in light of what I'm trying to do with my life, it's just sad. Okay, so about 35 million Americans report using some illicit drug in the past year. But there's this sort of general belief that black people are using drugs disproportionate to their numbers in the population.

I like to see empirical... evidence be used in our shaping of public policy. Now, all of this was completely missed in the hysteria in the mid-80s and 90s about crack cocaine. After spending so much of his career studying drugs, drugs, and drug laws in the black community, Carl's focus has turned to a new drug and a new target for law enforcement. There is a new drug epidemic in the United States, methamphetamines, or meth, like crack.

In the 1980s, meth is cheap, potent, and leads addicts to serious crimes. All across America, we've got people who are trying to lure children into using meth. By the 1990s, we were seeing a similar phenomenon occur with methamphetamines as we saw with crack cocaine.

It said meth and told me to get through my exams. But the people who are primarily associated with methamphetamine use are poor white folks in trailer parks. A fully operational methamphetamine lab.

And also gay folks. Two sort of despised groups. We don't like that at all.

We can't stand people like that. When we think about the country's response to methamphetamine, methamphetamine users have been vilified. the reason we have to recognize it is so we can be careful or more critical than we were with crack cocaine. Iowa, Nebraska, Missouri, this is the heartland of the methamphetamine problem.

How many of you are here on meth sentences, though? Wow. Now, how many of you did I personally sentence? For a long time, crack cocaine was the drug that was populating the prisons. Methamphetamine though has rapidly caught up with it and probably overtaken it.

Today, the average person I sentence in a drug case is a non-violent, blue-collar worker who lost their job and then turned to manufacturing methamphetamine to support their habit. And we treat them like they're kingpins. With their rates of incarceration rising, white inmates have started to receive the kind of harsh sentences that blacks have faced all along.

Hey, what's going on, man? If I leave here tomorrow... Would you still remember me? My name is Kevin Ott. My number is 203093. I'm in here for trafficking.

Methamphetamine. I start my 14th year in just a couple of months, and I will be here until I die. Yeah.

I have life without parole for three ounces of methamphetamine. I'm as free as a bird now. I can't remember it, man. It's been too long.

Yep, I fucked up. But I don't think I should die for it. I have life without parole, which means I'll stay in prison until I die. That's a death sentence in my opinion. A slow death sentence.

I have to wait until I die. The reason I started with meth is because I got laid off. Somebody said, here, try to sell some of this and get you a little extra money.

And then I started using it, and then I had to sell it to pay for it. How much is three ounces of methamphetamine? It will fit in a small envelope.

If you've been busted for two prior drug charges, smoking pot, having pot, or methamphetamine, whatever it is, and then you get a trafficking charge, they give you life without parole. It's mandatory. Life without parole.

Kevin has always been a good son. That's Kevin. Oh, you've got to see this.

That same sweet little boy. Kevin's father was drafted and was sent to Vietnam. He looks very much like a boy. He was a boy.

He went to Vietnam and came home a very down-to-earth father. damaged boy. He saw people that were maimed, injured, shot and killed, and I think he became addicted to heroin to help ease his personal pain.

After losing Kevin's dad, Kevin kind of stepped up and felt like he was the man of the household. When I first came in, there was only a few of us, five or six at the most. A couple of years ago, I heard that there were There were 92 people in the state of Oklahoma that had life without parole for drugs. It just keeps growing. Hey, Ott.

Yeah. You got a visit. All right.

I fought it, and it's over with. It's been over with probably nine years. I took it all the way to the Supreme Court, and they wouldn't hear it.

So here I am, waiting for the law to change or something. A commutation from the governor? I don't know. The time I've been locked up, my mother has lost two of her brothers, one of her brother's daughters, directly related to drugs.

Hi, Mom. Hi, Abby. And then my sister, my youngest sister, eight years younger than me, was coming to visit me in prison at Granite and died in a car wreck.

It's been pretty bad for my mom. She's pretty strong. Today, people have to understand that the drug war is actually a war on all Americans. And I think people keep saying, well, that's about them.

Well, no, it's about you. No one ever imagined when they saw so many African Americans getting locked up, getting long sentences, that it would apply beyond the black community. But it does.

Unemployment at 9%. America is struggling through the worst recession since 1975. Thousands of people, jobless and hopeless, look for a way out and find trouble instead. Before I got hooked on drugs, I looked down on drug addicts. And then I became one.

Oftentimes we hate what we fear. Like this guy here. He was a drug dealer, so I looked down upon him too, and I turned into a drug addict and a drug dealer. You know, a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century, which is that we shrugged off so much of our manufacturing base, so much of our need for organized labor, for a legitimate union wage, for union benefits, for the types of jobs in which you could raise a family and be a meaningful citizen.

We got rid of so much of that that, oops, we marginalized a lot of white people. One in every eight Americans has had to visit a food bank over the last year. And lo and behold, white people, when they're marginalized, when they're denied meaning, when they're denied meaningful work, they become drug addicts too.

And they become involved in the methamphetamine trade, and they start turning themselves over to the underground economies that are the only ones there to accept them. Capitalism is fairly colorblind in the end. Our economic engine, when it doesn't need somebody, it doesn't need somebody, it doesn't give a damn who you are. White people found that a little bit later than black folk, but they found it out.

After hearing so much about the failure of the drug war and the enormous harm it does, I wanted to better understand what drives it. Far from the front lines of the war, I discovered a vast and less visible world of people who in their own ways play a part. This chair, in comparison to other types of restraint chairs, is the most humane.

The person in the chair can breathe very easily and it's not restrictive. The war on drugs has to be a war at every level. It has to be a war on the streets of the cities.

It has to be a war at the state level. And it has to be a war at the federal level. It's just like fighting the war on terrorism.

Before, in the prisons, I guess the only choice was you could get a Torah or a Bible. Things have changed now. Anybody want their free copy of the Quran?

All sorts of people start to get a vested interest, a financial interest, in keeping the system going. We're in the business of applying corrections with products. It's a growing market.

Prisons, there's a lot of prisoners in the United States. That's what I mean by growing. Now you got me feeling awkward because of the camera.

Put it down. This company, CCA, we are the leader and the largest in the world as far as private prisons and jails. We are profitable.

We're highly rated. rated in the stock market, it hones your ability to do it less expensively because we have to earn a profit. There's a whole range of corporations, the taser gun manufacturers, private health care providers, phone companies.

whole communities that now depend on prisons as their primary employer, now deeply invested in the drug war and this system of mass incarceration. And all these people are not trying to do anything wrong, they're trying to make society better. But their actions combined together become part of the thrust that makes the bad parts of the drug war more feasible and more practical.

The thing with the war on drugs is, and the question we have to ask is, not why is it a failure, failure but why given that it seems If it seems to be a failure, why is it persisting? And I'm beginning to think, maybe it's a success. What if it's a success by keeping police forces busy? What if it's a success by keeping private jails thriving?

What if it's a success keeping a legal establishment justified in its self-generated activity? Maybe it's a success on different terms than the publicly stated ones. Perhaps not surprisingly, it was people on the inside who turned out to be most aware of the dangerous pressures that outside forces exert on the system.

My job is to keep the people inside who are supposed to be inside. And I'm going to do my job. But as I've come along in corrections over the last 20 years, I've just kind of watched it grow into this thing.

I mean, it's almost a self-fulfilling prophecy. You build a bed, they fill the bed. It starts sucking in money at an astronomical rate, and it just grows and grows and grows of its own accord.

You almost can't stop it. You can't afford to stop it. And so now you start talking about, well, you know, we could cut some corners and we could reduce.

or What about if we reduce by closing that facility? Employees are hoping the governor will reconsider his plan to close the prison. Wait a minute, you can't do that.

My community will dry up and blow away. The private prisons, they actually go to a town and say, if you'll use your tax money to buy the land and build a facility, we'll rent it from you and you'll get rich and we'll get rich and we'll all be rich together. Well, that only... It works if there's prisoners in the bed, so now you're starting to find people that fit the criteria.

Now you actually can pay people to go out and look for people that fit the criteria, and now it's going to grow faster. You can't let that town fail, so you can't change the way you think about locking people up. So you need a new enemy.

It's the same enemy, you just need more of them. Though my journey had begun with a simple question about one person's life, it was forcing me to confront unsettling realities facing the country. And yet the full weight of the situation had still not been revealed to me in its starkest historical terms. Yeah, let's say it this way, because it's more honest.

Instead of saying, let's get rid of all these drug addicts and drug dealers, and once we throw away the key on them, we'll solve this problem. Why don't you try saying it to yourself this way? All these Americans that we don't need anymore, The factories are closed. We don't need them. you know, the textile mills, they're gone.

The GM is closing plants. We don't need these people. They're extra Americans.

We don't need them. Let's just get rid of the bottom 15% of the country. Let's lock them up.

In fact, let's see if we can make money off locking them up in the short term, even though it's going to be an incredible burden for our society, even though it's going to destroy these families, you know, where these people are probably integral to the lives of other Americans. Let's just get rid of them. You know, I mean, at that point, why don't you just say kill the poor?

If we kill the poor, we're going to be a lot better off. because that's what the drug wars become. My father was a war crimes investigator in Europe after World War II, and we often talked about his experiences.

I was reading the work of Raoul Hilberg, who wrote about the destruction of European Jews and the Holocaust. We've long known that the process of destruction... was an undertaking step by step.

I realized that there was a chain of destruction, that what he was talking about could be expressed by links in a chain. Around the world, in more than one society, people do the same things again and again, decade after decade, century after century. Now this chain of destruction begins with the phase we can call identification, in which a group of people is identified as a cause for problems in society.

People start to perceive their fellow citizens as bad, they're evil. They used to be worthwhile people, but now all of a sudden for some reason, their lives are worthless. The second link in the chain of destruction is ostracism, by which we learn how to hate these people, how to take their jobs away, how to make it harder for them to survive.

People lose their place to live. Often they're forced into ghettos, where they're physically isolated, separate. from the rest of society.

The third link is confiscation. People lose their rights, civil liberties. The laws themselves changed, so it's made easier for people to be stopped on the street, patted down, researched, and for their property to be confiscated.

Now, once you start taking people's property away, you could start taking the people themselves away. And the fourth link is concentration. Concentrate them into facilities such as prisons, camps.

People lose their rights. They can't vote anymore, have children anymore. Often their labor is exploited in a very systematic form.

The final link in the chain of destruction is annihilation. Now, this might be indirect by, say, I say withhold. medical care, withholding food, preventing further births. Or it might be direct, where death is inflicted, where people are deliberately killed.

These steps tend to happen of their own momentum, without anybody forcing them to happen. I think a lot of people would be disturbed and outraged by the thought that any part of this process could be going on in America. But it wasn't until I began studying the drug war that I realized that some of these same steps were happening. For instance, identification. All of us agree that the gravest domestic threat facing our nation today is drugs.

The way to take a problem... and make it a huge problem, is first you ask the wrong question, and then you'll feel it's the wrong answer. Who's responsible?

Let me tell you straight out. Everyone who uses drugs. Everyone who sells drugs.

and everyone who looks the other way. You identify people, their characteristics. You make them other, using fear-mongering as if they're the cause of our problems.

These people are killing our kids. These people are disrupting society. These people are...

People are wrecking our society. Secondly, ostracism. Society learns to hate drug users. If you're a casual drug user, you're an accomplice to murder. You apply special laws to them that don't apply to others.

Now, all of a sudden, these people who've previously just been identified as drug users become criminals. If you break the law, you no longer have a home and public housing. The ultimate effect is isolation. being cut off from mainstream society. We started out, we identify them, we figure out who they are, then we start making laws to prevent them from being around our children.

You push them out of the places where they may be successful, and so, where do they go? The area of the least opposition, the modern American ghetto. We managed to isolate the poor economically. You force them out of the place where they could live and work and possibly be successful, and now you make them, you make them criminals.

So once the economics has done its business, then you can have different levels of policing. You can change the rules. You're under arrest.

For what? You got a bench warrant. Probably for drugs. Hey guys, you know the program.

Get the hands up, turn around. Confess. Any property they find on you can be subjected to civil forfeiture.

That money's ours now. That's my money now. Federal and local police seize these vehicles after their occupants allegedly purchased cocaine and other drugs. If we're seizing their property...

It's really a simple next step to start seizing their persons. Holloway was arrested on charges of resisting arrest and wandering with the intent to buy drugs. In the drug war, there's more that's being confiscated.

What's being taken from them is all hope in a future. What y'all getting them for? The war we told you would be narcotic. With the drug war, we've gone as far as the concentration phase. My government says we're fighting a heroic war against drugs, strong and the war against people who use drugs.

And frankly, a lot of them are just going to have to be locked up. Extraordinary numbers of people are in prison because of drugs, yet it is not a place to get drug treatment. They come out, and then we're surprised that we have the highest recidivism rates, and that results in this cycle of incarceration and overcrowding.

This concentration of people, whether it's in inner city ghettos or in prisons, creates a culture of hopelessness that is incredibly corrosive. When they don't have any prospects, people turn to drugs. And then we'll pursue them, and we'll be able to hire a bunch of prison guards and parole officers and narcotics detectives and drug treatment people.

In the short term, some people have jobs. Annihilation. That's not happening with the drug war in this country. But there are subtle but real ways that don't involve indiscriminate mass killings, such as preventing births. $200 cash payments to women addicted to crack to be sterilized.

Violence in prisons. Severe overcrowding sparked jailhouse riots. 27 inmates died yesterday.

People swept up in drug war violence. 140 drug killings this year. An Iraqi war veteran was killed after SWAT team officers stormed his Tucson, Arizona home in a drug raid that turned up no drugs. Now, it's important to remember or to realize it isn't that the war on drug users is the same as what happened in other societies, but that both are wars on ordinary people, people who are just like us. You've got to have an enemy for everything.

The way that Germany in the 30s rebuilt their infrastructure, rebuilt their industries, and rebuilt their pride, their nationalism, was by saying that these people, this group of people, is the cause of all of our woe, and if we hate them, we'll be better off. Well, we're not doing that, are we? I don't think it's to that extreme, but we do say those people are bad for us, and if we hate them, our lives will be better.

So everybody's got to have an enemy. The drug war is a holocaust in slow motion. And it's not somebody arguing racial superiority or arguing for the destruction of a given race or religion.

That doesn't exist. Let's be honest about what was unique to the Holocaust. But there is an incredible destruction of human life that is class-based, not race-based, but class-based, that is going on and is going on under the guise of a war against illegal narcotics. B95.5, B95.com, Father's Day with more. It's not me and the first time seeing it, all right?

They don't even know. I mean, I know they want people to learn a lesson, but to be honest, all of this time is not really helping anybody. For instance, my daughter. All it's doing is making her grow up like me, like the cycle's just continuing, you know?

That was a letter that was written by your aunt. She wrote it to the judge. I ain't never read it, man. Dear Judge Bennett, I just wanted you to know a little bit about Maurice. When he was six months old, his father was murdered.

That was a sad day. My sister then began using drugs, and soon after, her young kids' lives were turned upside down. All the years I spent in...

narcotics. I didn't go out there every day and say, you know, let's inflict some harm on the community. I think, you know, an unintended consequence was that, yeah, we probably did, you know, we probably did inflict harm.

Two young kids with a mother. Kevin has been locked up 13 years. So now we write letters and we call and we email just with a prayer that somebody will hear us.

Because our day will come and I believe it will come. I don't think my son is going to die in prison. Walking away and leaving him is the hardest thing that I do.

I don't know what the solution is, but I know that the solution can't be more of what's got us to this spot. It can't be more of the same. America's drug problem, a result of hundreds of years of history, economic policy, social policy, and misunderstanding. So let's not make the most visible manifestation of it, that is to say people being out there in the street and using, the problem. It's not the problem, it's simply a manifestation of the problem.

It's simply a symptom. It's sort of like saying that the problem with pneumonia is that you cough. Let's suppress the cough and that's okay.

Well, you can suppress the cough. That lung will still be inflamed. And that lung tissue is still being damaged.

You've got to deal with the whole picture. After 40 years of incalculable human and economic cost, it's hard to imagine how something so deeply rooted in American life can possibly be changed. Mr. Chairman, we find ourselves as a nation in the midst of a profound, deeply corrosive crisis that we have largely been ignoring at our peril.

But at many levels across the country, there are people trying to change things. After 30 years, all of my colleagues were afraid for the politics. We have to go a different way. You have never had so many people on the same side in this issue because we fought a war and we've been unsuccessful.

Let's return to the focus on prevention of crime. How do we prevent people from becoming drug addicts? How do we prevent people from being incarcerated?

Too many people in jail that don't need to be there. There's a lot that is not working. In recent months, under increasing public pressure, the first signs have emerged that the drug war, after decades of failure and unsustainable cost, may indeed be changing. Congress took action today to fix what many have called a very unfair gap in federal sentencing rules for crack cocaine as opposed to powdered cocaine. President Obama signed a new law at the White House today cutting the ratio to 18 to 1. We view that as a compromise, we view that as not providing full justice, and we won't rest after that's adopted.

Yet despite a few first steps toward reform, those experienced with criminal justice know it will take more than experts, activists, and a handful of courageous lawmakers to undo the damage that decades of drug laws have caused. Understand that the political infrastructure is so wedded to the status quo, that they're so consumed with the next election, that there will never emerge a shred of leadership that will change the situation. It's up to us. What do we want?

Drug law! When do we want it? Now! No longer can drug laws serve as a stimulus package for prison communities on the back of poor people. My takeaway from the past 15 years isn't that we need to wait until we get consensus.

It's that we need to do what's right. If there are people like this body who are the sentencing experts that are supposed to tell Congress and tell the public what the right thing to do is, I just urge you to do it. I believe it is in the interest of every American that we thoroughly examine our entire criminal justice system.

You need to care about that person down the block because the same rights that they have, you have. And if you let their rights be compromised, your rights are compromised. At some point you have to stand up and say it's not okay.

You know if there's anything ever gonna be done about this, this is gonna change, it's gonna have to come from the people out there that are gonna have to help. We can't do it from here. Do you know what it's like to go home at night knowing that you did a personal injustice?

I did an injustice to Maurice. I'll amend the charge on her to a violation of unlawful possession of marijuana, 220-105. Back in 2008, when I began filming, despite the excitement surrounding the election of Barack Obama, the thoughts Nanny Jeter shared that night would stay with me more than any other. I feel I cheated myself out of what I could have accomplished. Like, I never knew that I wanted to be in politics, to be a voice for someone, to say what was wrong, whether it changed or not, but to make known that it's wrong.

You, Jim, I've learned so much and I try to tell it to other people, but it's like people rather go down the same road that you went down before they learn. You make mistakes through life. It's like mistakes is always there.

You make a lot of mistakes with your life, but when you somehow blow your kid's life, you always think about it. But about all, I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to. It belongs to you.

I don't understand the wall drugs. All I know is I miss my son. This is children's