[We can choose to confront the historical roots and systemic
racism of the drug war and mass incarceration and to see the alignment
between people who want to end both. ] [[link removed]]

LET’S REJECT THE VIOLENT VS. NONVIOLENT CRIME DICHOTOMY TO END THE
WAR ON DRUGS  
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Kassandra Frederique and Danielle Sered
December 19, 2020
Truthout
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_ We can choose to confront the historical roots and systemic racism
of the drug war and mass incarceration and to see the alignment
between people who want to end both. _

Denver Police officers watch over the crowd at Civic Center Park on
July 19, 2020, in Denver, Colorado., Helen H.
Richardson/MediaNewsGroup/The Denver Post via Getty Images

 

November’s election saw criminal legal system and drug policy reform
win big at the polls. Oregon became the first state to decriminalize
all drugs, and voters overwhelmingly passed other reforms to drug
laws, even in deeply red states like South Dakota. Policing took
center stage in the national dialogue. And both the vice president and
president-elect in their first addresses to the nation promised to
“root out systemic racism” in the criminal legal system.

The people have spoken, and we are on the precipice of a new moment
for justice reform. But how we understand the scope of this collective
call for change — and the challenge to which Biden and Harris will
have to rise — stands to shape what our new world may look like for
decades to come.

Central to determining the outcome of that question will be whether or
not we as a nation move past one particular old and dangerous habit:
for decades, reforms have underscored a dichotomy between nonviolent
and violent offenses. This contrast often gets good traction, since it
allows people who support drug policy and lower-level criminal legal
reform to avoid having to grapple with the question of violence. It
has been a winning strategy — but only for certain victories and
people, and not without long-term costs.

The first shortcoming of this false binary is straightforward: it
curtails the chance of ending mass incarceration. More than half of
the people incarcerated in the U.S. are serving jail or prison
sentences for charges of violence. This means truly transformative
reductions in the number of people locked up in the U.S. will have to
include changing our responses to these crimes. There is no other way
about it.

A more subtle but no less insidious cost to this narrow understanding
of reform is that the reinforcement of the violent vs. nonviolent
dichotomy has at best ignored — and, at worst, amplified — the
narrative that has long underpinned mass incarceration in the United
States: the familiar though fabricated story of an imagined monstrous
“other” from whom we have to be protected at any cost. It is that
well-worn story that makes us choose prisons over hospitals, prisons
over schools, and prisons over — yes — noncoercive drug treatment.
It’s a story as old as our country’s founding and steeped, as our
nation is, in deep-seated racism.

From a human perspective, reformers’ failure to contend with this
narrative has left a critical dimension of our nation’s racism
unchallenged and unchecked. From a policy perspective, it has
inadvertently reinforced the notion that some people are beyond the
reach of reform efforts and, in so doing, has exacerbated barriers to
sentencing reform and alternative strategies like restorative justice
that would tackle serious violence differently and in a much more
transformative way. So, while it has obviously limited the prospects
of ending mass incarceration for crimes of violence, it has also
inadvertently created barriers to ending the war on drugs.

Just like the stories about merciless “superpredators” or “gang
members,” year after year, Hollywood cranks out the same
one-dimensional tropes of violent international drug trade
organizations with stories that are almost entirely divorced from the
very real daily harms caused by prohibitionist policies — from
increasing the likelihood of overdoses to diverting critical resources
away from meeting people’s basic needs and into enforcement. Like
the narrative about “robbers” and “murderers,” this narrative
of the malicious drug seller (almost always Black or Brown) is
disconnected from the reality of people who sell drugs and conceals
the structural harm done to communities behind stories of individual
evil. Together, these stories limit what we can envision and tolerate
in our responses to violence, whether related or unrelated to the drug
trade, even as evidence shows prison actually increases, rather than
decreases, the likelihood that someone will cause further harm.

Moving past the violent vs. nonviolent false binary will allow the
drug policy reform movement to affirm that while drug markets are not
inherently violent, at the same time, unregulated drug sales can cause
harm.

But this imaginary division is not our only option. Instead, we can
choose to confront the historical roots and systemic racism of the
drug war and mass incarceration and to see the alignment between
people who want to end both. Moving past the violent vs. nonviolent
false binary will allow the drug policy , preform movement to affirm
that while drug markets are not inherently violent, at the same time,
unregulated drug sales can cause harm. Drug reform work can then build
on and borrow from existing alternative responses to violence work and
allow us to find ways of repairing harm that do not over-rely on
punishment.

When the wide sphere of people who say they are committed to drug
policy and justice reform set aside this tired and harmful narrative,
we will no longer have to pretend that instances of drug users causing
harm to themselves or others do not exist in order to win.
Policymakers will then be able to broaden the terrain beyond
rethinking drug possession, but also include reforming our nation’s
approach to people who sell drugs. This will give us an opportunity to
address the challenges associated with drugs and violence, recognizing
that prohibition has made them inextricable from each other. We can
then adopt transformative justice responses to violence that allow us
to imagine what it might look like for our nation not just to stop
criminalizing drugs, but to also enact reparations for the harm
inflicted on our communities after many years of criminalization, harm
that often drives both problematic drug use and violence.

And people committed to criminal legal reform more broadly can finally
move into the terrain of other violent crimes like assault, robbery
and murder that do not always arise from the drug trade but almost
always arise from the same underlying conditions that gave birth to
the war on drugs. Then we can advance solutions that align with what
the evidence proves time and again: that alternatives to incarceration
produce better results and more safety — including in responding to
violence.

If 2020 has shown us anything, it’s that our survival is tied to one
another in countless ways and that we cannot win one group’s freedom
or well-being by depleting the dignity and chances of another. It will
not be enough for policymakers, including the president- and
vice-president-elect, to just stay in cautious political territory and
only tinker with our nation’s responses to nonviolent crime while
avoiding the rest. The mandate of this moment and the people is far
greater. The sooner our new leadership comes to terms with the scope
of what will be expected of them, the sooner we will become, for the
first time, a nation that keeps its promise of safety and equity for
all.

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_Copyright © Truthout. May not be reprinted without permission. 
Reprinted with permission._

 

_Kassandra Frederique is the executive director of the Drug Policy
Alliance, a national nonprofit that works to end the war on drugs._

_Danielle Sered is executive director of Common Justice
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Danielle Sered is executive director of Common Justice
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