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.
Dallas, Here is where it gets not only murky but criminal.
The same folks that invest in the building/funding/creation of prisons around the country are the same ones who profit from the mini mum (not a typo) slave wage labor of the prisoners.
The so called criminal justice system enforces harsher and harsher penalties and longer sentences and the profit margin of the labor adds up to billions and the political reward is these low life politicians can brag about more folks in jail for a longer time and that alleviates the fear factor (a number one control agent of the masses) and allows politicians with no social reform platform to get elected over and over leading to, less options, less hope and more crime and therefore more profits for the supremacy-Ernie Paniccioli
Dallas penn i have a question.
How can my record label “fuckin sellout records” be in the bottom half when the artists i picked have the number 1, 3 and 4 singles in the damn country?
Everyone who say American Gangster more than a week before it hit theaters raise your hand. If you also heard Jay-Z’s American Gangster album more than a weeks before it’s release keep your hand raised. If by the time both of these projects get released you’re no longer discussing them because you’re all talked out about them keep your hands raised.
*Waits for Freeway, Alicia Keys and Mood Musik 3 to leak…I mean drop*
One.
Federal guidelines for crack dealing lowered:
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Cocaine-Sentencing.html?ex=1351569600&en=a829933f52c5be60&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss
^ Woohoo!
^Ever noticed how Crystal Meth sentencing is never discusssed… HMM.
According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.
The Prison & the Military industrial complex are intertwined. Modern day Slavery. As the presidental candididates hurl rhetoric and B.S. from there soap boxes none have any solid take on improving the economy.