The consequeces of the "War on Drugs"

Over Christmas break, my mom and I had an interesting conversation about education and the current situation. I usually don't take the conversation towards the prison-industrial complex.
But the conversation turned at some point when I mentioned school-to-prison pipeline and the funding disparities between schools and prisons. (Prisons, if you're wondering, are much better funded than schools.) Since the "War on Drugs" began in the 1980's, the prison system has exploded. Get this:

Since 1970, the number of people behind bars in this country has increased 600 percent.

Wow. And if you think that the increased incarceration levels affect all communities equally. Think again.

According to Human Rights Watch (Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs, 2000) although whites are more likely to violate drug laws than people of color, in some states black men have been admitted to prison on drug charges at rates 20 to 50 times greater than those of white men.

So what does that have to do with education? Plenty. The most recent issue of Rethinking Schools focuses on School-to-Prison Pipeline that the war on drugs and other punitive measures in schools have created. Legal scholar Michelle Alexander put it well:

"The wave of punitiveness that washed over the United States with the rise of the drug war and the get tough movement really flooded our schools. Schools, caught up in this maelstrom, began viewing children as criminals or suspects, rather than as young people with an enormous amount of potential struggling in their own ways and their own difficult context to make it and hopefully thrive. We began viewing the youth in schools as potential violators rather than as children needing our guidance."

Alexander goes on to add:

"The bigger picture is that over the last 30 years, we have spent $1 trillion waging a drug war that has failed in any meaningful way to reduce drug addiction or abuse, and yet has siphoned an enormous amount of resources away from other public services, especially education. We are in a social and political context in which the norm is to punish poor folks of color rather than to educate and empower them with economic opportunity...But the reality is we’re not going to provide meaningful education opportunities to poor kids, kids of color, until and unless we recognize that we’re wasting trillions of dollars on a failed criminal justice system. Kids are growing up in communities in which they see their loved ones cycling in and out of prison and in which they are sent the message in countless ways that they, too, are going to prison one way or another. We cannot build healthy, functioning schools within a context where there is no funding available because it’s going to building prisons and police forces.

Where does this leave those of us who are fighting for change in the education system? I'm not sure. But I do believe that public education as we know it now will likely not exist in the future. It can't. You can't have good public schools if you can't fund them. You can't have public schools where the punitive measures push out students. We have to rise up against this lie that increased policing and imprisonment is actually helping our communities and country. The education and empowerment of future generations depends on it.