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Title: Nelson Rockefeller, drug laws, incarceration, and the neoliberal punitive state:
Post by: © tweed on November 29, 2011, 05:40:21 PM
Nelson Rockefeller, drug laws, incarceration, and the neoliberal punitive state: a modest plea for Rehabilitation and Leninism will be EXCLUSIVELY released HERE within 24 hours.  be excited!


Title: Re: Nelson Rockefeller, drug laws, incarceration, and the neoliberal punitive st
Post by: FEMA Camp Administrator on November 29, 2011, 06:52:26 PM
Leninism. Yay.


Title: Re: Nelson Rockefeller, drug laws, incarceration, and the neoliberal punitive state:
Post by: © tweed on November 30, 2011, 03:54:11 PM
The Rockefeller Drug Laws (RDL), enacted in 1973, gave New York what was at the time the most stringent set of drug laws in the nation. The Act mandated lengthy prison sentences for those convicted under the statute, elevating the distribution of drugs to a level on par with rape or murder.  This marked a watershed moment for New York’s iconic Governor Nelson Rockfeller, RDL’s namesake, who through the 1960’s had championed programs that coerced treatment and rehabilitation for those convicted of drug crimes.  Much of the United States would soon follow suit.   48 of 50 states would pass laws adopting mandatory minimum sentences in the decade after RDL, and in 1986 such sentences were adopted at the federal level with the passage of the Anti-Drug Abuse Act.
   
The nationwide move towards imprisonment for drug offenses has led to a prison boom.  This boom has affected blacks and Hispanics at rates disproportionate to their share of the population or actual use of drugs.  While evidence exists that Rockefeller and the proponents of punitive drug measures understood that minorities would be disproportionately impacted, law enforcement tactics, the court decisions that abet them, and the role of urbanity in increasing visibility of the drug economy have also played crucial roles.

The War on Drugs has been costly and has not produced a decrease in drug use rates or even street prices¹.  Because of the cost and inefficacy, an increasingly visible scientific and academic consensus, and shifting popular opinion, the tide has begun to turn back towards the treatment and rehabilitation methods.  This is evidenced by declining incarceration rates and the increase of the role of drug courts. 

The ePamphlet below is divided into three parts.  First, I explore the history of the implementation of RDL in New York.  The second part is more expansive in focus and looks at the nationwide phenomenon of racially disproportionate drug incarceration.  (A disclaimer here, as I forecast a possible concern: I do not believe looking at studies and research done concerning other areas of the United States constitutes a logical leap or lack of focus in this situation. The statistics provided of New York’s pattern of incarceration under RDL align with the numbers and general themes present throughout the country.  Analysis of the RDL situation in a vacuum would be an error; after all, as aforementioned, 48 of 50 states and the federal government ‘copycatted’ RDL quite quickly.)  And third, I offer a short conclusion, detailing the 2009 effective repeal of the RDL and offering signs that mass incarceration for drug offenses may be on its last legs.
______________________________________________________________________________
   
Historians have often posited that the increase in the “punitive state” came as a reaction to the liberal gains of the 1960s².  Along with liberal legislative advances such as the Civil Rights Act, Voting Rights Act, and introduction of the Medicare insurance program came the rulings of an “activist” Supreme Court.  In a series of rulings, the Court moved to “incorporate” aspects of the Bill of Rights (i.e., applied them to the states as opposed to just the federal government), and in so doing, extended a variety of new protections to criminal defendants.  1961’s Mapp v. Ohio birthed the exclusionary rule, which prevents any evidence obtained by law enforcement in violation of the Fourth Amendment’s protection against unlawful search and seizure from being admissible in court. In 1963’s Gideon v. Wainwright, the Court ruled that the Sixth Amendment to the United States Constitution required state courts to provide an attorney criminal defendants charged with serious offenses if he could not or would not afford one himself.  (This ruling extended the decision in 1932’s Powell v. Alabama to non-capital cases). The notorious “Miranda warnings” read by police to suspects in order to preserve admissibility of foregoing testimony finds it origins in the Court’s 5-4 decision in Miranda v. Arizona (1966). Later in the decade the Court moved to expedite the process of public school desegregation in Alexander v. Holmes County Board of Education, stoking the flames of a brewing culture war. These currents contributed to a resentment of educated liberals by the white working class, which saw redistributive policy as being driven by the remoteness of liberals from their concerns and daily lives.  As one (presumably white) New York man wrote to Governor Rockefeller, “We need the national guard in NYC.  This educated moron [Mayor John] Lindsay is all but destroying us.  I would rather see martial law, or civil war, than present conditions.”³

Richard Nixon understood these attitudes and exploited them well.  His success in white suburbia led in significant part to his close victory over Vice President Hubert Humphrey in the 1968 presidential election.  In 1971, Nixon declared a “War on Drugs”.  Cynically enough, his policies contained a strong component of rehabilitative measures, including the repeal of federal mandatory minimum sentences for possession of marijuana and adoption of federal drug treatment programs as a part of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970.  His rhetoric, however, told another story.  The language by both Nixon and Rockefeller was sharp and designed to construe the “addict” and drug “pusher” (or “dealer”, in today’s vernacular) as outside of the boundaries of respectable society⁴. Drugs, largely before seen as mainly a concern of the urban ghetto, had moved into white suburbia and furthered the fears of “invasion”.  A 1974 New York State report noted that as late as 1969, the federal government considered heroin use to be primarily a “black problem”, but by the early 1970s it had become clear that it had spread to white neighborhoods.  Depicting a progressive contagion model between the classes, the report states that “Lower middle-class whites began to show up in hospitals with addiction-related problems; then middle class people began to seek help for drug-related problems; and, finally, a cross-section representation of all levels of society was seen…”⁵

Having seen a close friend’s family “torn apart” due to heroin abuse⁶, Rockefeller’s motivation to tackle the growing American drug problem was with little doubt sincere.  However, it is clear that he was aware of the potential implications for his own personal career goals.  As a candidate for the Republican nomination in 1964, Rockefeller, representing the party’s theretofore hegemonic Eastern establishment, was defeated from the right by renegade conservative Barry Goldwater.  Motivated by spite and/or ideology, Rockefeller refused to campaign for the Goldwater ticket in the general election against Lyndon Johnson and Humphrey⁷.  Rockefeller understood the need to appeal to the voters that had propelled Goldwater in order to be nominated in 1976. 


Title: Re: Nelson Rockefeller, drug laws, incarceration, and the neoliberal punitive state:
Post by: © tweed on November 30, 2011, 03:55:52 PM
Concurrent with the nationwide shifting tide towards the aggressive language of a ‘War on Drugs’, Rockefeller was laying the groundwork for his own move towards the punitive.  In 1972 he dispatched department store executive William Fine to Japan on a mission to discover what accounted for that country’s extremely low rate of recreational drug use.  Fine’s report back to the Governor emphasized Japan’s extremely harsh treatment of drug dealers.  He wrote, inter alia, “The thing that impressed me most of all is the single minded conviction they have that public interest is above human rights when it comes to an evil… the Japanese, obviously, were willing to give up the soap box movement on human rights in order to rid the public of the evil abuses of drugs.”⁸.  This sentiment flies in the face of the rash of 1960s Supreme Court decisions aforementioned, which emphasize the inalienable rights of all, including suspects, as well as the importance of a coherent and deliberate process.  This wholesale rejection of a line of logic important to the 1960s liberal technocracy was sure to appeal to men like the one who above wrote to Rockefeller about the “educated moron”, Yale graduate and New York Mayor John Lindsay.   

Rockefeller’s political motivations behind the push for drug criminalization are further evidenced by his actions at a social gathering in late 1972.  Also in attendance were Fine and California Governor Ronald Reagan, assumed to be Rockefeller’s main rival from the Goldwaterist right in the upcoming presidential primaries.  Fine and Reagan got to talking, and Reagan, who was always more interested in ends than in means, came away quite impressed with Fine’s findings.  Reagan requested a copy of Fine’s report to Rockefeller, and Fine went to Rockefeller on behalf of Reagan’s request; Rockefeller declined permission to pass along the report⁹.  Biographer Joe Persico wrote of the career-conscious Rockefeller: “The thunderbolt was to be fired by him.”¹⁰

And fired it was.  In his January 1973 State of the State address, Rockefeller unveiled his plans to overhaul New York’s approach to the drug problem.  Rockefeller’s speech included a section that amounted to nothing less than a wholesale rejection of the public health-based, treatment-centric approach he had supported throughout his tenure as Governor and that New York had poured close to a billion dollars (over $4.8 billion in inflation-adjusted 2010 dollars) into since 1962.  The thunderbolt came cloaked in the language of getting tough and serious on a raging epidemic.  He demonized the “hard-drug pusher” as “more cruel” than “a cold-blooded killer”, citing the need for “an effective deterrent to the pushing”.  Stating “society has no alternative”, he called upon the Legislature to enact a law penalizing “all illegal drug trafficking in hard drugs a life sentence in prison.”¹¹  (It should be noted that in the language of the time, “hard drugs” included not just narcotics as chemically defined, but also marijuana.  The original RDL covered marijuana, but these provisions were carved out in 1979, leaving New York with some of the most lenient marijuana possession laws in the country).

Rockefeller’s proclamation “shocked the political establishment” and drew criticism from both his left and right.  A notable critic from the left was John Lindsay, himself a former “Rockfeller Republican” who switched over to the Democratic side of the aisle in 1971 in order to facilitate an ill-fated 1972 presidential bid.  Lindsay accused Rockefeller of “lashing out” and “taking some drastic step”, and went on, “We all know how empty it is to promise victory over crime by an emotional call to lock the criminals up and throw away the key.  That is not a battle plan.  It is merely a deceptive gesture, offering nothing beyond momentary satisfaction and inevitable disillusionment.”¹² The New York Civil Liberties Union also did what it could to lobby against the bill from the left.

Some black leaders did fear that the enactment of what would become RDL would be racially disparate.  There was, however, division within the black community, between those who felt the law would target blacks and others who favored aggressive action on an issue that was devastating communities.  In an attempt to assuage these concerns, Rockefeller staged a news conference with five black community leaders in Harlem who supported the measure, among them longtime anti-drug crusader ‘Reverend Dempsey’.  Perhaps the most damning evidence that exists on Rockfeller’s understanding of the racial implications of RDL is testimonial.  It was noted above that William Fine, the unlikely inspiration for New York’s drug law overhaul, was a department store executive.  The man who was supposed to be Rockfeller’s main authority on drug issues was Howard Jones, the head of New York’s Addiction Control Commission.  Jones, who was black, was not consulted prior to the State of the State address, and strongly disapproved of the measure.  When he left the room after expressing his opposition to the Governor, Rockefeller, who listened to Jones’ plea “coldly and silently”, remarked, “he’s just looking out for his people.”¹³

However, the most powerful opposition to the machinery of the Rockefeller proposal came from the right.  The worry from the law-and-order establishment was that a flurry of drug arrests would overload court dockets.  District Attorneys came out early in opposition to the bill.¹⁴  This fear was exacerbated by the prohibition on plea bargaining in the original Rockefeller bill, meaning every case would have to go before a judge and many more of the accused would see nothing to lose in taking their case to a jury trial.  Such concerns led to a compromise in the Senate, which passed the bill by a vote of 41-14 with an extension of parole to certain lower-level offenders.  The bill faced a bit more resistance in the Assembly.  New York’s Conservative Party, which held considerable sway in the state’s upstate and outer-borough regions, announced its opposition to the bill in late April.  Prosecutors and police lobbied heavily against the bill, favoring a version forwarded by Republican-Conservative Dominick L. DiCarlo, an Assemblyman from Brooklyn.  Both Rockefeller’s and DiCarlo’s bills served for stiff increases in penalties for drug traffickers and some version of mandatory minimums.  However, the DiCarlo bill rejected Rockefeller’s severe restriction on prosecutorial plea-bargaining.  Not at issue was the general get-tough thrust of the times; Conservative party executive director Serphin Maltese was careful to iterate, “We applaud the hard-line stand now being taken by Governor Rockefeller.” ¹⁵

The final version of the bill was signed by Rockefeller on May 8, 1973.  Prior to the passage of the law there were five categories of felony in New York State: A, B, C, D, and E, listed in order of descending severity.  RDL added the subcategories of A-I, A-II, and A-III, in order of descending severity.  Drug activity that qualified for A-I felony status included possession of two ounces or sale of one ounce.  “Sale” was intentionally defined broadly, such that, for example, passing a joint or needle around a circle for common use would qualify.  An A-I felony carried a mandatory minimum sentence of fifteen years with a maximum of life, and the only acceptable way to ‘plea down’ was to enter a guilty plea for a A-II or A-III felony, part of the compromise with the Conservatives in the Assembly.¹⁶

RDL and its progeny led to an explosion of incarceration.  Between the passage of RDL in May 1973 and 2002, over 150,000 New Yorkers were imprisoned under RDL for non-violent drug offenses.  This marked a 500% increase in the prison population. Incarceration counter-intuitively continued to grow through the 1990s despite a decrease in crime rate, thanks to high arrest rates, prison commitments for drug offenders, and lingering lengthy mandatory minimum sentences handed down in decades past.  In the late 80s, RDL convicts rose to about 45% of total prison commitments in New York and stabilized at around that number¹⁷.

New York’s incarceration boom has been racially and regionally disparate.  The demographic characteristics of those incarcerated under RDL “are distinctive and significantly different from those of the general population of NY State as a whole, or even those of the rest of the NYS prison system”.  Blacks and Hispanics accounted for a staggering 94% of inmates sentenced under RDL in the year 2000.  This is compared to 77% of the total inmate population and 33% of the total NY State population.  In addition, 80% of RDL inmates hail from New York City’s five boroughs, as contrasted with 70% of other inmates and 44% of the total State population. ¹⁸
 
This pattern finds echoes throughout the United States.    Denser and poorer areas facilitate the ease of drug “sweeps” and arrests.  One study finds “visibility” of drug transactions as directly explicative of drug arrests.  The study notes that one explanation of the limited effectiveness of law enforcement based substance abuse programs is that they “focus on visible manifestations of substance use.”  A study of hard drug trafficking in six major cities found that whites were more likely than blacks to travel outside of their own neighborhood to purchase drugs, and more likely to purchase drugs indoors.  Therefore, “visible drug use and sales in a neighborhood may not necessarily imply elevated rates of drug use by residents in that neighborhood.”¹⁹  

A regression analysis conducted as part of the study above moves to confirm the suspicions about race, visibility, and urbanity.  The study used data taken from random digit dialing in urban areas that “were more urban, more African American, and poorer than the United States at large.”  While little connection was found between reported drug use and neighborhood characteristics, “much higher percentages of respondents in areas with high degrees of neighborhood disadvantage, high proportions of minority residents, and high levels of population density reported they had frequently observed drug sales.”²⁰ It also found that black or Hispanic ethnicity “was positively associated with reports of visible drug sales, negatively associated with drug use, and not related to drug dependency.”²¹


Title: Re: Nelson Rockefeller, drug laws, incarceration, and the neoliberal punitive state:
Post by: © tweed on November 30, 2011, 03:58:55 PM
The Supreme Court since the 1980s, once stocked with justices appointed by Nixon and Reagan, took up a role opposite to that of the Court in the 1960s that expanded protections for defendants.  Consistently, the Court has ruled to expand the powers of police to search and seize narcotics and thereby whittled down the strength of the Fourth Amendment.²² Justice John Paul Stevens, himself appointed by Gerald Ford, noted the trend in his dissent in California v. Acevedo, a case that upheld the warrantless search of a bag locked in a motorist’s trunk: “[Since 1982], the Court has heard argument in 30 Fourth Amendment cases involving narcotics.  In all but one, the government was the petitioner.  All saved two involved a search and seizure without a warrant or with a defective warrant.  And, in all except three, the Court upheld the constitutionality of the search and seizure… this Court has become a loyal foot soldier in the Executive’s fight against crime…”

The on-the-ground law enforcement facilitated by the above Court rulings has waged primarily against black Americans.  The disproportionate figures above are a pattern nationwide, and cannot be explained merely by patterns of drug use.  This has been the case since Nixon initially declared the War in 1971, and it found new life with the Reagan-era crackdown on crack cocaine.  An illustrative case study was performed by researchers in the city of Seattle.  While approximately 70% of Seattle is white, and whites constitute a majority of those who were engaged in drug commerce, 64.2% of those arrested under drug statutes were found to be black.  This is partially explained by the concentration of minorities in densely populated, urban areas.  The researchers were unable to come up with a ‘colorblind’ explication of the disparities they found in Seattle, as, “The focus on crack users… did not appear to be a function of the frequency of crack transactions compared to other drugs, public safety or public health concerns, crime rates, or citizen complaints.”  They then moved to conclude that the Seattle Police Department’s drug law enforcement efforts “reflect implicit racial bias: the unconscious impact of race on official perceptions of who and what constitutes Seattle’s drug problem.”²³

 This “unconscious perception” is reflected by a study of Americans’ perceptions of the identity of a drug offender.  When asked to close their eyes and imagine a drug offender, subjects “did not picture a white middle class man snorting powder cocaine or college students smoking marijuana.  They pictured unkempt African-American men and women slouched in alleyways or young blacks hanging around urban street corners”²⁴
The federal renewal of the War on Drugs came with the 80s crack epidemic.  The perception of drug users as “racialized others” has deep roots, dating back to the Congressional debates over the Marihuana Tax Act in 1937.  Cocaine had gained prevalence among upper- and middle- class whites for a long period prior to its appearance in the cities in smokeable form.  Only the latter prompted a “nationwide orgy of media attention”²⁵ and the ensuing federal crackdown.  The “one hundred to one ratio” gained notoriety; for example, the possession of five grams of crack earned a mandatory minimum five year federal sentence, while it would take five hundred grams of power cocaine to earn an equivalent sentence. 
______________________________________________________________________________
States have moved towards decriminalization and rehabilitation in the past decade.  New York passed reforms of the RDL in 2004, 2005, and 2009.  The 2004 reform, known as the Drug Law Reform Act (DLRA), allowed for retroactive resentencing of those convicted of A-I felonies under the RDL.  The 2005 amendments to the DLRA extended this to A-II felonies.  The DLRA also increased the doubled the quantities of drugs needed to qualify for A-I and A-II felonies, from four ounces to eight ounces, and from two ounces to four ounces, respectively.

The 2009 DLRA served as a comprehensive reform of the drug punishment system; some have called it ‘the Fall of Rockefeller’.  It gave more power to the judiciary by removing mandatory sentences for those convicted of class B felonies, or those convicted of class C felonies who have prior convictions on their criminal record.  Another key component is the “diversion procedure”, which allows courts to divert the accused to treatment in lieu of pleading guilty of facing a trial.  This marks a U-turn from the RDL, which itself replaced state-sponsored treatment programs.  It also extended the resentencing provisions to those convicted of Class B felonies before the passage of the 2005 DLRA.  As part of a compromise with more hard-line factions, two new drug crimes were added to the books as part of the 2009 statute.  One is operating as a major drug trafficker, which is meant to target drug “king-pins”.  The other is the sale by an adult of age twenty-one or older of a controlled substance to a minor under the age of seventeen.  The king-pin crime is a Class A-I felony, and the criminal sale to a child is a Class B. 

The addition of the king-pin law is a wink to one of the major failures of the original RDL.  Because major drug dealers rarely are on the street selling drugs, only the more unimportant foot soldiers of drug running operations were swept up by the law.  Such street dealers were unable to provide law enforcement with meaningful intelligence even if they so desired.The tide of the past 40 years appears to be turning.  A quick glance over incarceration statistics shows that, after long periods of elevation, the past decade has seen a decline.  A 2010 article reported that New York City’s incarcerated population was at a 24 year low²⁶.  The tide of public opinion is also turning.  A Gallup poll taken in October 2011  showed a slim majority of Americans in favor of legalizing marijuana, up from 12% 1969²⁷.  A ballot proposition in California in 2010 that would have served to legalize and regulate recreational marijuana narrowly failed and similar propositions are seeking to reach California and Nevada ballots in the 2012 cycle.  Given the demographic breakdown of opinions on marijuana, which show a large generational gap, it is likely but a matter of time before one of these propositions passes, eliciting a showdown with federal law.

 This is due to both a growing and convincing academic consensus²⁸ on the failure of the punitive drug control regime, but also contains a significant desire for cost reduction.  A 2001 estimate put the total cost of the War on Drugs at $40 billion annually.  One of the main arguments used by the California legalization proponents was that significant tax revenues could be raised, to help close budget shortfalls that have become all too common in several of the largest states in the nation, including New York and Illinois.  This allows states to turn the red ink of housing criminals in prison (U.S. Justice Department estimates run as high as an average cost of $25,000 per year to house a prisoner²⁹) to the revenue of a “sin tax” on marijuana, or, possibly, other drugs. 

RDL’s bookends both provide illustrations of the United States’ turning tides in the War on Drugs.  When enacted, it represented the pent up frustrations of a white working and middle class that saw the 1960s liberal establishment as working against them.  While these driving sentiments partially explain the disparate racial impact of harsh drug control policies, several factors that have evolved since could not have been foreseen by policymakers.  The clustering of minorities in urban areas, where drug transactions are most visible, contributes to this impact.  Also instrumental have been several Supreme Court decisions which have expanded the power of police and other law enforcement to conduct largely urban drug ‘sweeps’.  The tide is, however, slowly but surely turning against mass incarceration.  An increasing medical and scholarly consensus favors a treatment-based approach, and budget-conscious states are eager to listen.   Public opinion, which favored RDL’s enactment by a 2-to-1 margin in February of 1971³⁰, is also shifting in this direction, with a new generation rising to prominence which did not experience the turbulence of and reaction against the 1960s.   


Title: Re: Nelson Rockefeller, drug laws, incarceration, and the neoliberal punitive state:
Post by: © tweed on November 30, 2011, 03:59:18 PM
           Endnotes
1. "Debt, Drugs and Democracy, Noam Chomsky Interviewed by Maria Luisa Mendonca."NACLA Report on the Americas 33.1 (1999). Chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. <http://www.chomsky.info/interviews/19990312.htm>.
2. Kohler-Hausmann, J. ""The Attila the Hun Law": New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Making of a Punitive State." Journal of Social History 44.1 (2010)
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. This is taken from a 1974 report prepared by the Temporary State Commission to Evaluate the Drug Laws, chartered by the New York state legislature.
6. Mancuso, Peter A. "RESENTENCING AFTER THE ―FALL‖ OF ROCKEFELLER: THE FAILURE OF THE DRUG LAW REFORM ACTS OF 2004 AND 2005 TO REMEDY THE INJUSTICES OF NEW YORK‘S ROCKEFELLER DRUG LAWS AND THE COMPROMISE OF 2009." Albany Law Review (2010): 1535-581.
7. English, David. Divided They Stand. London: Beaverbrook Newspapers Unlimited, 1969. Print.  I obtained a copy of this book while volunteering at a used bookstore as a thirteen year old.  It is an account of the 1968 presidential election written by a British journalist assigned to cover it for the London Daily Express.  I am nearly certain that it is long, long out of print.  It helped to fuel my interest in elections ‘as a spectator sport’, and contributed to my impulse purchase of Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 in September 2007, which is roughly a 1972 version of Divided They Stand, albeit in Thompson’s maniacal ‘gonzo’ style.
8. Kohler-Hausmann.  See cit. 2.
9. Ibid.
10. Joseph E Persico, The Imperial Rockefeller: A Biography of Nelson A. Rockefeller (New York, 1982)
11. "'Let's Go from Worse to Bad'" New York Times 7 Jan. 1973.
12. Kohler-Hausmann.  See cit. 2.
13. Ibid.
14. Farrell, William. "D.A.'s Assail Rockefeller Drug Penalties." New York Times 7 Feb. 1973. Print.
15. Clines, Francis X. "G.O.P. in Assembly Delays Drug Bill; Prospects for Passage Now Uncertain; Plea Bargaining at Issue Cost of Programs." New York Times 1 May 1973.
16.  Mancuso.  See cit. 6.
17. Drucker, Ernest. "Population Impact of Mass Incarceration under New York's Rockefeller Drug Laws: An Analysis of Years of Lives Lost." Journal of Urban Health: Bulletin of the New York Academy of Medicine 79.3 (2002).
18.  Ibid.
19. Saxe, Leonard, Charles Kasushin, Andrew Beveridge, David Livert, Elizabeth Tighe, David Rindskopf, Julie Ford, and Archie Brodsky. "The Visibility of Illicit Drugs: Implications for Community-Based Drug Control Strategies." American Journal of Public Health91.12 (2001): 1981-994.
20. Ibid.
21. Ibid.
22. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New York: 2010.
23. Fellner, Jamie. "RACE, DRUGS, AND LAW ENFORCEMENT IN THE UNITED STATES." Stanford Law & Policy Review 12.2 (2009): 257-92.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. Roberts, Sam. "As Crime Rate Drops, New York’s Jail Population Falls to Lowest Level in 24 Years." New York Times 10 June 2010.
27. "Illegal Drugs." PollingReport.com. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. http://www.pollingreport.com/drugs.htm
PollingReport.com compiles the topline results of opinion polls conducted in the United States.
28. Nakdai, Lisa R. "ARE NEW YORK’S ROCKEFELLER DRUG LAWS KILLING THE MESSENGER FOR THE SAKE OF THE MESSAGE?" Hofstra Law Review(2002).
29. "The Cost of Keeping Prisoners Locked up." KKCO - Home. Web. 30 Nov. 2011. <http://www.nbc11news.com/home/headlines/84420397.html>.
30.  Mancuso.  See cit. 6.


Title: Re: Nelson Rockefeller, drug laws, incarceration, and the neoliberal punitive state:
Post by: minionofmidas on December 01, 2011, 05:37:03 PM
It was a good read, but where's the leninism?


Title: Re: Nelson Rockefeller, drug laws, incarceration, and the neoliberal punitive state:
Post by: © tweed on December 04, 2011, 03:08:06 PM
It was a good read, but where's the leninism?


was a joke, Sir.