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“Tough and Smart” the RESILIENCE of the WAR on DRUGS DURING the OBAMA ADMINISTRATION Matthew D

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“Tough and Smart” the RESILIENCE of the WAR on DRUGS DURING the OBAMA ADMINISTRATION Matthew D 11 THE RESILIENCE OF THE WAR ON DRUGS “Tough and Smart” THE RESILIENCE OF THE WAR ON DRUGS DURING THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION Matthew D. Lassiter In July 2015, President Barack Obama toured the El Reno Federal Correc- tional Institution in Oklahoma and met with a multiracial group of six in- mates, all serving lengthy sentences for drug offenses committed in their youth. The encounter, filmed for an HBO documentary calledFixing the System, represented the first time a current U.S. president had visited a fed- eral prison. Obama identified the differing punishment for nonviolent drug cases as the primary evidence of racial bias against African Americans and Latinos in the criminal justice system, from arrest rates to prosecutorial discretion to sentencing outcomes. After exiting the cell block, the presi- dent told the assembled media that “a primary driver of this mass incarcera- tion phenomenon is our drug laws—our mandatory minimum sentencing around drug laws. And we have to consider whether this is the smartest way for us to both control crime and rehabilitate individuals.” Obama empha- sized the $80 billion annual cost to taxpayers of maintaining the world’s largest prison system and noted the bipartisan opening for criminal justice reform in Washington and in many state capitals. He then specifically dis- S tinguished “dangerous individuals who need to be incapacitated” from non- S violent drug criminals, “particularly young people of color,” who should be L L 162 Zelizer.indb 162 11/1/2017 8:47:08 AM T HE RESILIENCE OF THE War ON DruGS 163 diverted into treatment programs and provided with education and job training. Obama, who acknowledged marijuana and cocaine use in his 1995 memoir Dreams from My Father, sought to humanize the prisoners he had just met as “young people who made mistakes that aren’t that different than the mistakes I made,” except that their communities lacked the safety net of institutional resources and second chances. But the nation’s first African American president also reiterated his tough- on- crime philosophy, because “there are people who need to be in prison, and I don’t have tolerance for violent criminals. Many of them may have made mistakes, but we need to keep our communities safe.”1 The Obama administration’s “tough and smart” approach to drug and crime control largely operated within the political boundaries of bipartisan consensus and pursued a moderate reform agenda during an era of unprec- edented activism against racially discriminatory policing and heightened consciousness about the broader system of mass incarceration. Many factors shaped Obama’s cautious and incremental approach to drug policy reform, including the White House belief that an explicit “black agenda” promoted by an African American president would generate white backlash, the con- siderable power of “law and order” forces in the federal bureaucracy and in Congress, and not least the robust support for criminal prohibition and in- terdiction by most Democratic officials and the president himself.2 Obama first deployed the “tough and smart” formulation during a 2007 campaign appearance at Howard University, where he rejected the “false choice be- tween being tough on crime and vigilant in our pursuit of justice.” The Dem- ocratic candidate endorsed the logic of criminalization—“if you’re convicted of a crime involving drugs, of course you should be punished”—while em- phasizing that even many Republicans agreed that nonviolent offenders should be diverted into treatment.3 The 2008 Democratic Party platform likewise advanced a “smart on crime” blueprint that promised to be “tough on violent crime,” prioritize treatment over incarceration for drug abusers, and maintain the longstanding federal interdiction campaigns against Mexi- can and Colombian traffickers.4 In its firstNational Drug Control Strategy (2010), the Obama administration promised to move in a “new direction” through a “balanced public health and public safety strategy” that combined the traditional commitment to law enforcement and border interdiction with more funding for prevention and rehabilitation programs. The administra- tion pledged to promote “alternatives to incarceration” for nonviolent drug S offenders while disrupting trafficking networks and deploying law enforce- S ment to “rid our streets of the drug dealers who infect our communities.”5 L L Zelizer.indb 163 11/1/2017 8:47:08 AM 164 MATTHEW D. LASSITER President Obama’s commitment to balanced policies of drug control, combining “smart” public health solutions for deserving victims with “tough” law enforcement crackdowns on predatory criminals, was nothing new and indeed closely resembles the rhetoric and blueprints of every presidential administration since Richard Nixon proclaimed a federal war on “drug abuse” in the early 1970s. Nixon also championed a “balanced ap- proach” of public health rehabilitation for addict-v ictims and tough punish- ment for traffickers, and he signed comprehensive drug legislation that offset discretionary possession penalties (as leverage to coerce users into treatment) with lengthy mandatory sentences for “professional” suppliers. The major federal drug and crime control laws enacted during the Nixon era passed Congress with near unanimity, a pattern of bipartisan policy- making that continued with the Anti-D rug Abuse Act of 1986 and the Vio- lent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, signed by Republi- can Ronald Reagan and Democrat Bill Clinton, respectively.6 During his presidency, Barack Obama frequently criticized the “bipartisan cause to get tough on crime” during the 1980s and 1990s, especially the mandatory- minimum sentencing laws that exacerbated racial inequality and mass in- carceration, but carving “smart on crime” exceptions for some nonviolent drug offenses did not disrupt the broader patterns of either drug prohibi- tion or the carceral state.7 While Obama and other key administration offi- cials repudiated the martial discourse of a “war on drugs,” they consistently opposed the transformative alternatives of legalization or decriminaliza- tion, even of marijuana, simultaneously labeling drug abuse and addiction a “disease” and advocating criminalization to compel offenders into treat- ment.8 Despite some important reforms, the resilience of the federal war on drugs during the Obama administration reflects the bipartisan consensus that the criminal justice system should ultimately regulate the illicit drug market and the parallel refusal to acknowledge that prohibition itself cre- ates the context for violence and crime, whether by traffickers or law en- forcement, both domestically and internationally. The Reform Debate: Balance versus Legalization Barack Obama entered the White House after a quarter century of expo- nential growth in the American prison system resulting primarily from “get tough” political choices rather than rising crime rates, in particular the bi- S partisan policy commitment to increased mandatory- minimum sentences S and harsher policing and prosecution tactics in the intertwined wars on L L Zelizer.indb 164 11/1/2017 8:47:08 AM T HE RESILIENCE OF THE War ON DruGS 165 crime and drugs. The Obama administration also encountered a more fluid political climate than at any point since the 1970s, with many state govern- ments experimenting with diversion programs for nonviolent offenders, and civil rights and civil liberties organizations popularizing the concepts of “mass incarceration” and the “New Jim Crow.”9 The incarcerated popula- tion in the United States exceeded 2.3 million at the end of 2008, more than quadruple the total in the early 1980s. Federal and state correctional institu- tions held more than 1.6 million prisoners, with the remainder in local jails and 5 million more people on probation or parole. In the federal and state prison systems combined, 93 percent of inmates were male and the racial breakdown totaled 38 percent African American (triple the population rate), 20 percent Hispanic (1.2 times the population rate), and 34 percent white (half the population rate). One out of every one hundred American adults resided in a prison or jail during 2008, including one out of nine African American males between the ages of twenty and thirty-f our. Half of all inmates in state prisons were serving time for violent crimes (includ- ing robbery), alongside about one- fifth each for property and drug convic- tions. In the federal system, conversely, slightly more than half of the 201,280 prisoners were serving sentences for drug felonies, a product of the increasing federalization of the war on drugs during and after the crack epi- demic of the 1980s and a jurisdictional as well as political explanation for the Obama administration’s primary reform focus on nonviolent drug criminals.10 From the start, the Obama White House portrayed its balanced philoso- phy of public health and public safety as a new departure in federal drug and crime control, with the second half of the “tough and smart” equation designed to neutralize the epithet of “soft” as a descriptor of medicalization and rehabilitation. President Obama named Gil Kerlikowske, the chief of the Seattle Police Department, as director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy, responsible for coordinating international interdiction and domestic enforcement, prevention, and treatment programs throughout the executive branch. Kerlikowske, the fifth consecutive “drug czar” from a law enforcement or military background (since 1991), did strike
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