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All Eyez On Me': America's War On Drugs And The Prison-Industrial Complex, André Douglas Pond Cummings

Faculty Scholarship

In 1971, President Richard Nixon named drug abuse as “public enemy number one” in the United States. Since that time, an explicit “War on Drugs” has dominated the political imagination of the United States. Since declaring a War on Drugs, domestic incarceration rates have exploded, particularly in the African-American and Latino populations. Politicians such as Nixon, Barry Goldwater, and Nelson Rockefeller each advocated for harsh drug laws and severe criminal sanctions because they argued a strong correlation existed between drug addiction and crime. These claims have dominated legislative enactments since the 1970s, virtually ignoring those who argue that drug addiction …