It costs the taxpayers $12,000 per year to educate an NYC high school student, and $140,000 a year to jail one.
The investment in expanding the prison industrial complex directly parallels that of the ascension of accessible narcotics within the center city. Heroin and cocaine, even marijuana to a certain extent, were considered only for the wealthy. Poor people would have to medicate themselves with alcohol and other various sundry household products. The accessibility of narcotics within the center city also caused a sharp increase in the instances of violent crimes.
Combine all the violent offenders along with the non-violent (sellers, users) and you have a system that is bursting at the seams because it can’t lock people up fast enough. The question you posit now is a fair one.
“What do the NY State Rockefeller drug laws have to do with this movie?”
These laws create different mandatory minimum sentencing guidelines for those arrested with illegal narcotics in their possession. The laws established an awkward inverse proportion of jail time for those people found to have relatively small amounts. As we learned earlier, cocaine and heroin were traditionally the vice of the wealthy because of their price point. More accessible narcotics meant more arrests and more bodies in prison for long stretches even though many of those receiving multi-year terms were in fact narcotics users.
So it was possible for a drug abuser to receive the same sentence as his corner dealer depending on the amounts in their possession. Both parties would receive greater sentences than someone convicted with fifty times the amount they held. The Rockefeller drug laws were just a spoke in the wheel of supremacy and the destruction of the center city. These laws would not have had the effect they did if cocaine and heroin weren’t made accessible to disenfranchised communities in the first place.
The movie ‘American Gangster’ will focus its fiction on the exploits of one person, but the larger system will remain under the radar and out of the spotlight. There is a numbers game that is being played and the residents of the center city exist simply as pieces on an abacus to be slid from right to left and back again. Frank Lucas didn’t create this. He is more pawn than player.
