With America wrapped in the coils of a budget crunch, can we afford a drug war?  Shouldn’t the appalling cost of mass incarceration be giving us a terminal case of sticker shock? 

Many pundits are looking for modest cutbacks in prison populations and narcotics task forces in the years ahead.  No need to worry, they suggest, the new Jim Crow will soon collapse under its own weight.  It might be a slow process; but change is inevitable.

Michelle Alexander isn’t convinced.  Her article, “Obama’s drug war,” will appear in the December 27th edition of  The Nation along with several shorter pieces written by notable drug war critics like Bruce Western and Marc Mauer. 

Most of the articles in this series advance common sense public policy arguments construing the war on drugs as a misguided attempt at crime control.  Most of the writers know it ain’t that simple, but when you’re writing for the Nation you reach for arguments that click with white liberals.

Michelle Alexander comes bearing bad news.  The war on drugs and mass incarceration cannot be scaled back, she says, “in the absence of a large-scale movement—one that seeks to dismantle not only the system of mass incarceration and the drug war apparatus but also the habits of mind that allow us to view poor people of color trapped in ghettos as ‘others,’ unworthy of our collective care and concern.” (more…)