1NC

1
Legalization is the control and licensing of drugs through regulation (like
alcohol)- decriminalization is the de jure or de facto removal of legal barriers
DPFT no date
[Drug Policy Forum for Texas, non-partisan citizens group whose members include: Co-founder Dr. G. Alan Robison, is a National
Academy of Sciences award winning pharmacologist who chaired the department of pharmacology at the University of Texas
Medical School in Houston for over 20 years. Advisors include: Dr. Bryon Adinoff, Distinguished Professor and Director of the Clinical
Center for Addictive Diseases at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas Dr. Ferad Murad, winner of the Nobel
prize for medicine Dr. Susan Robbins, Graduate School of Social Work at the University of Houston, teacher of a national award
winning TV course, "Drugs and Society" Dr. Malcolm Skolnick, former Professor of Technology and Health Law at the School of Public
Health at the University of Texas in Houston, http://www.dpft.org/policy.htm, accessed 9.2.14]

Decriminalization: A system that punishes offenses by means other than prison. Fines for most
traffic violations are an example. In relation to drugs, it is normally limited to possession (and sometimes growth) of
small amounts (often around one ounce) and somtimes to sale of equally small amounts to adults. It is also often limited to
marijuana among the illegal drugs. There

is another distinction possible between de jure

decriminalization, which entails an amendment to criminal legislation, and de facto
decriminalization, which involves an administrative decision not to prosecute acts that nonetheless
remain subject to arrest and imprisonment under the law. Some cities have simply decided de facto to specify that enforcement of
some marijuana laws is the "lowest priority" for their police forces. Legalization:

A system that allows the use and

sale of drugs to adults under a system of regulation such as pertains to alcohol or perhaps
involving licenses. Many suggest there would be a ban on advertising and public use. If the alcohol model prevailed, different
states might vary the regulatory structure and legality might also be limited by local option to specific areas within a state.

Violation they dont regulate the weed market

Vote neg
Ground all of our kritik links and DA links are contingent on the regulation of
the market

2
Focusing on the War on Drugs obscures class as a common intersection of
interest and precludes uniting disparate interests this is specific to their
interrogation of a racial caste
Kilgore 14 *Professor at the University of Illinois, Mass Incarceration: Examining and Moving
Beyond the New Jim Crow, James, Crit Sociology March 18 2014, sagepub+
Racial Caste Alexanders term racial caste is a compromise which both illuminates and confounds. On one
level, racial caste clearly delineates a layer of the population of color which has been the primary target of mass incarceration. Yet,

Alexander, by her own admission, bases her work almost solely on African-Americans. Statistically this
makes sense, since during the period of her primary focus, 1980-2000, the rise in the incarceration rates of African-Americans was
astronomical and unprecedented. However, if

we examine statistics more broadly, it is not clear ultimately

who this caste includes, i.e. whether Latinos, Native Americans or whites are part of this caste
since all these groups experienced heightened incarceration rates 1980-2000 and also endure the
stigma of felon. I suggest that combining her notions of racial caste with some class and gender
analysis would enhance our understanding of mass incarceration. To begin with, let me dispel any notions
of sympathies with applying the traditional Marxists term lumpen proletariat in this instance. Mass incarceration has
been an assault on the poorest elements of the working class, primarily residents of deindustrialized inner cities driven into the category of criminal by a lethal combination of
economic necessity, social decay, media manipulation and, most importantly, harsh sentencing laws
and intensive police repression inspired by racially biased polices like zero tolerance and broken windows. The mix
of job losses in urban areas with increased police funding for drug squads, SWAT teams and
militarized law enforcement tactics has landed hundreds of thousands of young, working class
African-Americans in prison for lengthy terms, often for relatively minor drug-related offenses. All of this
points to the need for a broader perspective on notions of race and class in criminal justice.
There is a need to deepen earlier analysis by people like Parenti (2000), Gilmore (2007) and Wacquant (2009) to
more tightly align notions of racial caste with ideas on class, de-industrialization and the
reconfiguration of the spatial dimensions of cities Extensive research by Cardona and others at the Justice
Mapping Center (2010) shows how the prosecution of mass incarceration has typically been highly
concentrated in small working class areas. This narrow geographical focus has been highlighted by the concept of
million-dollar blocks city blocks where the state spends more than a million dollars a year
incarcerating its residents
In New York City, neighborhoods
which house 18% of the citys adul
In Wichita, Kansas,
where probation and parole revocations account for more than two-thirds of the citys admissions to prison each year, onequarter of all people on probation or parole live in only 8% of the city
In
Pennsylvania, taxpayers spend over $40 million to imprison residents of neighborhoods in a single
zip code in Philadelphia
, nearly seven
percent of all working age men living in the neighborhoods of a single zip code were sent to prison in 2008. (Justice Mapping Center,
retrieved August 30, 2012) Thus, the result of mass incarceration has been the economic and social devastation of large segments of
working class inner city neighborhoods. It is working class people who are being incarcerated, with blacks being the leading targets.
Nonetheless, as Wacquant (2010) has shown, low

income groupings from other segments of the

population are also being caught up in the sweep. Mass incarceration remains a distant reality for those of the
upper middle classes. From the law enforcement side, this spatial element is reflected in the notion of hot
spot policing where instead of trying to patrol the entire city, forces are concentrated in areas where crime supposedly occurs.
(Battin, 2004) Of course such areas are often co-terminous with areas where working class people of
color reside. In a study of hot spot policing in Memphis, Roh and Robinson (2009) concluded: Granted that racial disparity in

traffic stops at the individual level is substantially attributed to the disproportionate commitment of police resources at the
community level, police agencies still need to consider if such policing strategies, often named problem-oriented policing or hot spot
policing, resonate well with the ideal of democratic policing, the longstanding imperative for the American police. Democratic
policing is often understood as the antonym of inequality, seeking an equal distribution of police service or police control over the
public. Thus, unequal

amount or different types of police recourses (sic) that are devoted to different
communities may appear undemocratic. People living in disadvantaged minority communities
may perceive that policing unduly targets their communities, if not minority individuals. Research done in
Champaign-Urbana, Illinois presented a much harsher picture. While police had apparently identified the
primary hot spots in the largely African-American north end and dedicated increased resources there, the
largest number of 9/11 calls came from the predominantly white campus area. This, coupled
with the disproportionate enforcement of drug laws against African-Americans noted by Alexander, raises
the specter of a racially-biased rather than evidence-based approach to defining hot spots.i Ultimately,
mass incarceration represents far more than mass imprisonment. It is also an attack on poor working class communities of color. As
Heather Thompson has pointed out mass incarceration matters to communities as both result and cause. It is the result of the War
on Drugs and other policies but is also ultimately a cause of the decimation of communities where these million dollar blocks are
located, where vast numbers of young males in their most productive years have been removed to steel and concrete boxes far from
home. To further explain this process, we need to get a clearer idea of what goes on in communities from which the young males
have been removed. For not only does the removal of large swaths of the male population shift financial, emotional and social
burdens onto women and children, those

left behind often face a frontal assault of their own from the
state. As Wacquant argues mass incarceration (or what he refers to as hyperincarceration) and the criminalization of
the welfare system constitute two sides of the same historical coin. (2010, 84). In parallel to the mass
incarceration of the 80s, which largely focused on African-American males, Reagan and his neoliberal henchmen
mounted a racialized and female-focused attack on the welfare system. Using the code of the Welfare Queen,
right wing politicians played on white resentment of an alleged mass of unwed African-American women who mothered babies in
large numbers and lived off the hard-earned dollars provided by white taxpayers. (Gustafson 2003; Kohler-Hausmann 2007) As
Kohler-Hausmann has pointed out these
public discourse by
330)

attacks framed welfare recipients, who were already burdened in the

the intersecting stigma of race, class and gender, as deceptive criminals. (2007,

The tough on crime rhetoric was fostered for and lobbied by the prison
system itself for the gain in capital. Even current rhetoric proves- Lobbying for
harsh sentences to keep up demand for correctional facilities
Bowie 12
*Nile Bowie, Global Research Fellow, Profit Driven Prison Industrial Complex: The Economics of
Incarceration in the USA Posted on 09 February 2012,
http://www.shoah.org.uk/2012/0/page/649/, access date 8/26/14, \\wyo-bb]
For anyone paying attention, there is no shortage of issues that fundamentally challenge the
underpinning moral infrastructure of American society and the values it claims to uphold. Under
the conceptual illusion of liberty, few things are more sobering than the amount of Americans who will
spend the rest of their lives in an isolated correctional facility ostensibly, being corrected. The United
States of America has long held the highest incarceration rate in the world, far surpassing any
other nation. For every 100,000 Americans, 743 citizens sit behind bars. Presently, the prison population in America consists of
more than six million people, a number exceeding the amount of prisoners held in the gulags of the former Soviet Union at any point
in its history. While miserable statistics illustrate some measure of the ongoing ethical calamity occurring in the detainment centers
inside the land of the free, only a partial picture of the broader situation is painted. While

the country faces an

unprecedented economic and financial crisis, business is booming in other fields namely,
the private prison industry . Like any other business, these institutions are run for the purpose
of turning a profit. State and federal prisons are contracted out to private companies who are
paid a fixed amount to house each prisoner per day. Their profits result from spending the
minimum amount of state or federal funds on each inmate, only to pocket the remaining

capital.

For the corrections conglomerates of America, prosperity depends on housing the maximum numbers of inmates for

the longest potential time as inexpensively as possible. By

allowing a profit-driven capitalist-enterprise

model to operate over institutions that should rightfully be focused on rehabilitation,

America has enthusiastically embraced a prison industrial complex.

Under the promise of maintaining

correctional facilities at a lower cost due to market competition, state and federal governments contract privately run companies to
manage and staff prisons, even allowing the groups to design and construct facilities. The private

prison industry is
primarily led by two morally deficient entities, the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA)
and the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut Corrections Corporation). These companies amassed a combined revenue of over
$2.9 billion in 2010, not without situating themselves in the center of political influence. The number of people
imprisoned under state and federal custody increased 772% percent between 1970 and 2009,
largely due to the incredible influence private corporations wield against the American legal
system. Because judicial leniency and sentencing reductions threaten the very business
models of these private corporations, millions have been spent lobbying state officials and political
candidates in an effort to influence harsher zero tolerance legislation and mandatory
sentencing for many non-violent offenses. Political action committees assembled by private
correctional corporations have lobbied over 3.3 million dollars to the political establishment
since 2001. An annual report released by the CCA in 2010 reiterates the importance of influencing legislation: The
demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by the relaxation of
enforcement efforts, leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices or through the
decriminalization of certain activities that are currently proscribed by our criminal laws. For instance, any changes with
respect to drugs and controlled substances or illegal immigration could affect the number of
persons arrested, convicted, and sentenced, thereby potentially reducing demand for
correctional facilities to house them . Legislation has been proposed in numerous jurisdictions that could lower
minimum sentences for some non-violent crimes and make more inmates eligible for early release based on good behavior. Also,
sentencing alternatives under consideration could put some offenders on probation with
electronic monitoring who would otherwise be incarcerated. Similarly, reductions in crime
rates or resources dedicated to prevent and enforce crime could lead to reductions in arrests,
convictions and sentences requiring incarceration at correctional facilities. Considering todays private prison
population is over 17 times larger than the figure two decades earlier, the malleability of the
judicial system under corporate influence is clear. The Corrections Corporation of America is the first and largest
private prison company in the US, cofounded in 1983 by Tom Beasley, former Chairman of the Tennessee Republican Party. The
CCA entered the market and overtly exploited Beasleys political connections in an attempt to
exert control over the entire prison system of Tennessee. Today, the company operates over
sixty-five facilities and owns contracts with the US Marshal Service, Immigration and Customs
Enforcement (ICE) and the Bureau of Prisons. The GEO Group operates 118 detention centers throughout the United
States, South Africa, UK, Australia and elsewhere. Under its original name, the Wackenhut Corrections Corporation was synonymous
for the sadistic abuse of prisoners in its facilities, resulting in the termination of several contracts in 1999.

NEXT, THE DETERMINISM OF CAPITAL IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE

INSTRUMENTALIZATION OF ALL LIFETHIS LOGIC MOBILIZES AND ALLOWS FOR
THE 1ACS SCENARIOS IN THE FIRST PLACE

DYER-WITHERFORD (professor of Library and Info. Sciences at the U of Western Ontario)

1999
[Nick. Cyber Marx: Cycles and Circuits of Struggle in High Technology Capitalism.]
For capitalism, the use of machines as organs of will over nature is an imperative. The great
insight of the Frankfurt Schoolan insight subsequently improved and amplified by feminists and ecologistswas that capitals
dual project of dominating both humanity and nature was intimately tied to the cultivation of
instrumental reason that systematically objectifies, reduces, quantifies and fragments the
world for the purposes of technological control. Businesss systemic need to cheapen labor, cut the costs of raw
materials, and expand consumer markets gives it an inherent bias toward the piling-up of technological power. This priority
enshrined in phrases such as progress, efficiency, productivity, modernization, and
growthassumes an automatism that is used to override any objection or alternative,
regardless of the environmental and social consequences. Today, we witness global vistas of
toxification, deforestation, desertification, dying oceans, disappearing ozone layers, and
disintegrating immune systems, all interacting in ways that perhaps threaten the very
existence of humanity and are undeniably inflicting social collapse, disease, and immiseration
across the planet. The degree to which this project of mastery has backfired is all too obvious.

Vote Negative to validate and adopt the method of structural/historical

criticism that is the 1NC.
METHOD IS THE FOREMOST POLITICAL QUESTION BECAUSE ONE MUST
UNDERSTAND EXISTING SOCIAL TOTALITY BEFORE ONE CAN HOW TO ACT
GROUNDING THE SITES OF POLITICAL CONTESTATION OUTSIDE OF LABOR
MERELY SERVE TO HUMANIZE CAPITAL AND PREVENT A TRANSITION BEYOND
OPPRESSION
TUMINO (Prof. English @ Pitt) 2001
*Stephen, What is Orthodox Marxism and Why it Matters Now More than Ever, Red Critique,
p. online //wyo-tjc]
Any effective political theory will have to do at least two things: it will have to offer an
integrated understanding of social practices and, based on such an interrelated knowledge,
offer a guideline for praxis. My main argument here is that among all contesting social theories now, only Orthodox
Marxism has been able to produce an integrated knowledge of the existing social totality and
provide lines of praxis that will lead to building a society free from necessity. But first I must clarify
what I mean by Orthodox Marxism. Like all other modes and forms of political theory, the very theoretical identity of Orthodox
Marxism is itself contestednot just from non-and anti-Marxists who question the very "real" (by which they mean the "practical"
as under free-market criteria) existence of any kind of Marxism now but, perhaps more tellingly, from within the Marxist tradition
itself. I will, therefore, first say what I regard to be the distinguishing marks of Orthodox Marxism and then outline a short polemical
map of contestation over Orthodox Marxism within the Marxist theories now. I will end by arguing for its effectivity in bringing
about a new society based not on human rights but on freedom from necessity. I will argue that to

know contemporary
societyand to be able to act on such knowledgeone has to first of all know what makes
the existing social totality. I will argue that the dominant social totality is based on inequalitynot
just inequality of power but inequality of economic access (which then determines access to health care,
education, housing, diet, transportation, . . . ). This systematic inequality cannot be explained by gender,
race, sexuality, disability, ethnicity, or nationality. These are all secondary contradictions and
are all determined by the fundamental contradiction of capitalism which is inscribed in the relation of
capital and labor. All modes of Marxism now explain social inequalities primarily on the basis of these

secondary contradictions and in doing soand this is my main argumentlegitimate capitalism. Why?
Because such arguments authorize capitalism without gender, race, discrimination and thus
accept economic inequality as an integral part of human societies. They accept a sunny
capitalisma capitalism beyond capitalism. Such a society, based on cultural equality but
economic inequality, has always been the not-so-hidden agenda of the bourgeois left
whether it has been called "new left," "postmarxism," or "radical democracy." This is, by the way, the
main reason for its popularity in the culture industryfrom the academy (Jameson, Harvey, Haraway, Butler,. . . ) to daily politics
(Michael Harrington, Ralph Nader, Jesse Jackson,. . . ) to. . . . For

all, capitalism is here to stay and the best that

can be done is to make its cruelties more tolerable, more humane. This humanization (not
eradication) of capitalism is the sole goal of ALL contemporary lefts (marxism, feminism, anti-racism,
queeries, . . . ). Such an understanding of social inequality is based on the fundamental
understanding that the source of wealth is human knowledge and not human labor. That is,
wealth is produced by the human mind and is thus free from the actual objective conditions that shape
the historical relations of labor and capital. Only Orthodox Marxism recognizes the historicity
of labor and its primacy as the source of all human wealth. In this paper I argue that any
emancipatory theory has to be founded on recognition of the priority of Marx's labor theory
of value and not repeat the technological determinism of corporate theory ("knowledge work") that
masquerades as social theory.

3
Marihuana legalization is part of the cycle of caste systems in the United States
White men get rich while black boys and men remain in prison for doing the
same things.
Short 14 (April M, Associate Editor at Alternet "Michelle Alexander: White Men Get Rich from
Legal Pot, Black Men Stay in Prison", Alternet, 3-16-2014,
http://www.alternet.org/print/drugs/michelle-alexander-white-men-get-rich-legal-pot-blackmen-stay-prison //wyo-zm)
But the ramifications of this momentous shift are left unaddressed. When you flick on the TV to a segment about
the flowering pot market in Colorado, you'll find that the faces of the movement are primarily
white and male. Meanwhile, many of the more than 210,000 people [4] who were arrested for
marijuana possession in Colorado between 1986 and 2010 according to a report from the Marijuana Arrest
Research Project, remain behind bars. Thousands of black men and boys still sit in prisons for
possession of the very plant that's making those white guys on TV rich. In many ways the imagery
doesn't sit right, said Michelle Alexander, associate professor of law at Ohio State University and author of The New Jim Crow: Mass
Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness [5] in a public conversation [6] on March 6 with Asha Bandele of the Drug Policy Alliance
[7]. Here

are white men poised to run big marijuana businesses, dreaming of cashing in big
big money, big businesses selling weedafter 40 years of impoverished black kids getting
prison time for selling weed, and their families and futures destroyed. Now, white men are
planning to get rich doing precisely the same thing? Alexander said she is thrilled that Colorado and
Washington have legalized pot and that Washington D.C. decriminalized possession of small amounts earlier this month. But she
said shes noticed "warning signs" of a troubling trend emerging in the pot legalization movement: Whitesmen in particularare
the face of the movement, and the emerging pot industry. (A recent In These Times article titled The Unbearable Whiteness of
Marijuana Legalization *8+, summarize this trend.) Alexander said

for 40 years poor communities of color have

experienced the wrath of the war on drugs. Black men and boys have been the target of
the war on drugs racist policiesstopped, frisked and disturbedoften before theyre old
enough to vote, she said. Those youths are arrested most often for nonviolent first offenses
that would go ignored in middle-class white neighborhoods. We arrest these kids at young
ages, saddle them with criminal records, throw them in cages, and then release them into a
parallel social universe in which the very civil and human rights supposedly won in the Civil
Rights movement no longer apply to them for the rest of their lives, she said. They can be
discriminated against [when it comes to] employment, housing, access to education, public
benefits. They're locked into a permanent second-class status for life. And weve done this in
precisely the communities that were most in need of our support. As Asha Bandele of DPA pointed out
during the conversation, the U.S. has 5% of the worlds population and 25% of the worlds prisoners. Today, 2.2 million people are in
prison or jail and 7.7 million are under the control of the criminal justice system, with African American boys and menand now
womenmaking up a disproportionate number of those imprisoned. Alexanders book was published four years ago and spent 75
weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, helping to bring mass incarceration to the forefront of the national discussion.
Alexander said over the last four years, as shes been traveling from state to state speaking to audiences from prisons to universities
about her book, shes witnessed an awakening. More and more people are talking about mass incarceration, racism and the war
on drugs. Often when people talk about the reasons certain communities are impoverished or lack education they blame the
personal choices or moral shortcomings of the people in those communities, but that way of looking at things has got it backwards,
she said. That these communities are poor and have failing schools and have broken rules is not because of their personal failings
but because weve declared war on them, she said. Weve spent billions of dollars building prisons and allowing schools to fail.
Weve decimated these communities by shuttling young people from their underfunded schools to these brand new, high tech
prisons. Weve begun targeting children in these communities at young ages. Alexander cautioned that drug policy activists need to
keep this disparity in mind and cultivate a conversation about repairing the damages done by the systemic racism of the war on
drugs, before cashing in on legalization. After

waging a brutal war on poor communities of color, a drug

war that has decimated families, spread despair and hopelessness through entire
communities, and a war that has fanned the flames of the very violence it was supposedly
intended to address and control; after pouring billions of dollars into prisons and allowing
schools to fail; were gonna simply say, were done now? Alexander said. I think we have to
be willing, as were talking about legalization, to also start talking about reparations for the
war on drugs, how to repair the harm caused. Alexander used the example of post-apartheid
reparations in South Africa to point out the way a society can and should own up to its past
mistakes. After apartheid ended, the nation passed a law called the Promotion of National Unity and Reconciliation Act of 1995.
Under the new law, a Truth and Reconciliation Commission was formed to "elicit truth" about the human rights violations that had
occurred. The commission recorded the statements of witnesses who endured "gross human rights violations" and facilitated public
hearings. Those who had committed violence could request amnesty from civil and criminal prosecution in order to share testimony
about what they'd done with the commission. At

the end of apartheid in South Africa there was an

understanding that there could be no healing, no progress, no reconciliation without truth, she
said. You cant just destroy a people and then say Its over, were stopping now. You have to
be willing to deal with the truth, deal with the history openly and honestly. Alexander pointed to
Americas tendency to shove its racist legacies under the rug rather than own up to them.
When the civil war ended, slaves were free on paper but they were left with nothing no 40
acres and a mule, nothing, Alexander said. The only option was to work low-paying contract jobs for the
same slave owners who had previously brutalized them. And after a brief period of
reconstruction a new caste system was imposedJim Crowand another extraordinary movement arose and
brought the old Jim Crow to its knees, she said. Americans said, OK, well stop now. Well take down the whites-only signs, well
stop doing that. But there were not reparations for slavery, not for Jim Crow, and scarcely an acknowledgement of the harm done
except for Martin Luther King Day, one day out of the year. And I feel like, here we go again. Last week, Obama pushed out an
initiative called My Brothers Keeper, focused on helping black boys who have fallen down the social ladder. Alexander said shes
glad Obama is shining a spotlight on the crisis facing black communities. However, she said Obama

has perpetuated the

backward way of framing the situation when he talks about the issues facing those
communities. "I am worried that much of the initiative is more based in rhetoric than in meaningful
commitment to address the structures and institutions that have created the conditions in
these communities," she said. Asked about the unlikely relationship forming between U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder and
Kentuckys Tea Party senator Rand Paul, both of whom are standing together to end mandatory minimum sentences for drug
offenders, Alexander responded she is wary of whether these politicians are making the right decisions for the wrong reasons. She
cautioned that politicians across

the political spectrum are highly motivated to downsize prisons

because the U.S. can no longer afford to maintain a massive prison state without raising taxes
on the predominantly white middle class. That shortsighted way of thinking fails to
recognize the larger societal patterns that keep the U.S. cycling through various caste-like
systems. If we're going to downsize these prisons and change marijuana laws and all that, in order to save some cash, but in
that process to change these laws, we haven't woken up to the magnitude of the harm that we have done, she said. Ultimately, at
least from my perspective, this movement to end mass incarceration and this movement to end the drug war is about breaking our
nations habit of creating caste-like systems in America, she said. She added that regardless of whether theyre struggling with
addiction and drug abuse or have a felony on their record, people deserve to be treated with basic human rights. How were we
able to permanently lock out of mainstream society tens of millions of people, destroy families? she said.

If were not

going to have a real conversation about that and ultimately be willing to care for them, the
others, those ghetto dwellers whove been demonized in this rush to declare war, were going to
find ourselves years from now either still having a slightly downsized system of mass
incarceration that continues to hum along very well, or we will have managed to downsize
our prisons but some new system of racial and social control will have emerged again
because we have not yet learned the core lesson that our racial history has been trying to
teach us.

Marijuana legalization creates a formal and informal marijuana economy that

continues the war on drugs on the illicit marketthis re-entrenches racism
because the law will attack communities of color for participating in the illegal
economy
Burns 14 (Rebecca, In These Times Assistant Editor, holds an M.A. from the University of Notre Dame's Kroc Institute for
International Peace Studies, where her research focused on global land and housing rights, interviewing Chicago-based activist
Mariame Kaba, founding director of the non-profit Project NIA, which works to decrease youth incarceration; David J. Leonard,
associate professor in the department of critical culture, gender and race studies at Washington State University, and Art Way,
senior drug policy manager at the Drug Policy Alliance in Colorado, which lobbied for legalization, 2-4-14, "The Unbearable
Whiteness of Marijuana Legalization" Altnet) www.alternet.org/drugs/unbearable-whiteness-legalization?page=0%2C2 **edited for
racist language**

More than half of all drug arrests are for marijuana-related offenses, according to a June 2013
study by the American Civil Liberties Union. So it was big news for drug-law reform activists
when, in January, legal sales of marijuana for recreational use commenced in Colorado. Thanks
to a 2012 state ballot initiative, the drug will now be taxed and regulated like alcohol.
Washington state is set to implement similar laws later this year, and nationwide, the tide of
public opinion seems to be turning: An October 2013 Gallup poll found that a majority of
Americans now support marijuana legalization. Many have hailed the easing of marijuana laws
as a breakthrough in the fight to end the War on Drugs. But others are skeptical. David Simon,
creator of the popular television show "The Wire," suggested that marijuana reforms could
actually set back broader efforts , telling an audience in London last summer, I want the *drug
war] to fall as one complete edifice. If they manage to let a few white middle-class people off
the hook, thats very dangerous. While voters in the relatively white states of Colorado and
Washington have backed reform, it still looks a long way off in states with the highest numbers
of incarcerated African Americans, such as Iowa, where African Americans are more than eight
times as likely as whites to be arrested for marijuana possession, according to the ACLU report.
In These Times asked three experts to discuss whether people of color will reap the benefits of
marijuana legalization. Joining the discussion were Chicago-based activist Mariame Kaba,
founding director of the non-profit Project NIA, which works to decrease youth incarceration;
David J. Leonard, associate professor in the department of critical culture, gender and race
studies at Washington State University, and Art Way, senior drug policy manager at the Drug
Policy Alliance in Colorado, which lobbied for legalization. In These Times: What impact can we
expect Colorado and Washingtons new laws to have on drug-related arrests? Art Way: There
will be a disproportionate benefit for those who have borne the brunt of marijuana prohibition.
African Americans are about three and a half times more likely to be arrested [in the United
States for marijuana-related offenses] than their white counterparts; Latinos are about two
times more likely. Were setting a paradigm that hopefully many other states will follow. ITT:
One worry has been that the high price of legalized marijuana will encourage [an
underground] a black market and that arrests for illegal distribution could actually increase .
Mariame Kaba: Im very concerned about how this is going to play out on the ground. Young
people who are selling drugs because they have no other job opportunities are definitively
not going to be able to participate in the formal economy through the dispensaries. Is law
enforcement going to go after those young people 20 times harder now? AW: Yes , I am
concerned that distribution charges will increase. Whenever you make change, especially
against law enforcements status quo, it often finds a way to circumvent that change and
maintain its budget . But we havent seen anything that will lead us to believe that is taking
place right now. And you have to realize that these new marijuana laws are part of a much

broader reform movement: Colorado has also been revising its criminal justice laws. The first
thing we did once Amendment 64 passed [in Colorado] was to lower criminal penalties for those
[between the ages of] 18 and 20 possessing marijuana. So we are already working on
preempting any type of net-widening. ITT: What impact will marijuana legalization have on the
War on Drugs as a whole? David J. Leonard: Any changes in the War on Drugs will require
continued organizing and agitation, because history has shown that one step forward has also
resulted in two steps back [for] communities of color . New York decriminalized marijuana in
1977. That clearly did not lead to the end of the War on Drugs in New York, or lessen its
effects on communities of color. Instead, the way the law was written provided the
foundation for stop-and-frisk , because the law made it a misdemeanor for marijuana to be in
public view, which basically fostered incentives to stop blacks and Latinos and tell them to
empty their pockets. So I have a number of concerns about the impact of these reforms on the
War on Drugs. To give just one other example: Does decriminalization apply to those who are
on probation and being drug-tested? MK: Another concern is whether, as the prices of
marijuana start climbing [because of legalization] and [poor] people turn to using other kinds
of drugs, those drugs then get painted as the worst possible drugs on the planet. The people
who are doing the worst drugs somehow always happen to be the most marginalized
people within our culture. Thats why its so important that we focus on uprooting the whole
architecture of the War on Drugs. If were not talking about the root issues of racism and
classism, there are bound to be unintended consequences.

Social Death constructs individuals as beyond meaning, never able to attain

value to life makes racialized violence inevitable and legitimate.
Cacho 12 (Lisa Marie, associate professor of Latina/Latino Studies and Asian American Studies,
with affiliations in Gender and Womens Studies and English, University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected
p.6-8 wyo-zm)
Certain populations very humanity is represented as something that one becomes or achieves, that one
must earn because it cannot just be.10 These populations are denied what political philosopher Hannah Arendt
calls

the right to have rights. 11 The bodies and localities of poor, criminalized people of

color are signifiers for those who are ineligible for personhood , for those contemporary (il)legal statuses
within U.S. law

that are legally illegible.

These statuses are legally illegible because they engender

populations not just racialized but rightless, living nonbeings, or, in Judith Butlers words, as something
living that is other than life.12 To be ineligible for personhood is a form of social death;13 it not only defines
who does not matter, it also makes mattering meaningful. For different reasons, undocumented immigrants,
the racialized poor of the global South, and criminalized U.S. residents of color in both inner cities and
rural areas are populations who never achieve, in the eyes of others, the status of living. 14
In her study of death, race, sexuality, and subjectivity, Sharon Holland observes that in the space of social death,
there is no full embrace of the margin here, only the chance to struggle against both a killing
abstraction and a life-in-death; neither choice is an appealing option.15 The killing abstraction is not itself abstract. It
references the ways in which racialized populations are made unduly vulnerable by global capitalism and neoliberal
restructuring, and it refers to the way they are positioned absolutely and necessarily beyond legal recourse. Urban
geographer Ruth Wilson Gilmore names these killing abstracting practices and processes racism: Racism is a practice of
abstraction, a death-dealing displacement of difference into hierarchies that organize relations

within and between the planets sovereign political territoriesIndeed, the process of
abstraction that signifies racism produces effects at the most intimately sovereign scale,
insofar as particular kinds of bodies, one by one, are materially (if not always visibly) configured by
racism into a hierarchy of human and inhuman persons that in sum form the category of human being.16
Racism is a killing abstraction. It creates spaces of living death and populations dead-to-others.17 It
ensures that certain people will live an abstract existence where living *is+ something to be achieved and not experienced.18
Engendered by corporate capital and the neoliberal state, ineligibility to

personhood refers to the state of being

legally recognized as rightless, located in the spaces of social death where demands for humanity are
ultimately disempowering because they can be interpreted only as asking to be given
something sacred in return for nothing at all. 19 By definition an inalienable right cannot be taken
or given away, and, therefore, it cannot really be reconferred. Regardless of citizenship status, whether people
of color deserve rights and resources is often questioned because those with social privilege
often still interpret economic, social, political, and/or legal integration as a (conditional) gift.20
Ineligibility to personhood is the contemporary manifestation of what Orlando Patterson refers to as the inalienability problem.21
In his seminal work on slavery and social death,

Patterson explains that the act of freeing slaves , specifically their

transformation from possession to personhood, was legally, economically, and conceptually

illegible.

Because

the master already owned anything a slave could give, freedom could only be

conceived of as granted, never actually purchased, so even though slaves paid dearly in one
way or another for their freedomfreedom itself was still regarded as a gift from the master or
mistress.22 When slaves bought their freedom, the transaction did not give them what their
master possessed by owning them, for the master does not convey dominion or power to the slave; he merely
releases him from his dominion.23 Buying freedom did not transmit empowerment; it reconfigured the slaves
relationship to the masters power.

The alternative is to refuse the politics of legibility by dis-membering social

value. You cant revalue something until you find out why life is valuable. Dismembering value is the critical first step. We should suspend the impulse to
reject criminalizing stereotypes.
Cacho 12 Lisa Marie, Associate Professor of English, Asian American Studies,
Latina/Latino Studies, and Gender and Womens Studies, Social Death: Racialized
Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected. P. 31-33

This book is not a critique of activists and academics who ascribe social value to devalued people and places but rather an
analysis of our limits and an examination of the reasons why other options are less accessible,
less influential, and, perhaps more often than we think, less intelligible. Contemporary progressive politics must rely not only
on what dominant groups find palatable (i.e., the family, legality) but also on the value practices that
will make social statuses recognizable as valuable to (and often for) the very privileged of U.S.
society. Because value is fundamentally relational despite all appearances to the contrary,82 to ascribe
(legible) value to devalued populations, we have to evaluate them in relation to differently
devalued groups and according to normative criteria. Indeed, as an explicitly comparative race project, my
analyses cannot escape these contradictions; nor can they offer a politics that finds a way out of the violence of value. Because
we cannot escape the devaluation in revaluation, I instead take up Barretts challenge: to re-member
the Other by dismembering value. 83 For me, this means suspending the impulse to reject

criminalizing stereotypes precisely because the mere chance to recuperate social value is
contingent on that rejection.

As Hong reminds us, a politics that rejects social value is inconceivable. When the

alternative to social value is social death, and social death means brutally exacerbated conditions of racialized violence,
incarceration, and coercion, the allure of legibility is undeniably difficult to resist. Indeed, imagining

a politics based on
the refusal of social value is an impossible, unthinkable option, one, in truth, outside of any
available notion of the political.84 Dismembering social value by refusing the lure of legibility remembers the other because it gives us the space to be more critical of the automatic ,
understandable impulse to deny and be offended by criminalizing stereotypes. In this space, the space of
social death, we can re-member the other by asking ourselves: Whom does this rejection really
benefit and whom does it hurt? This project is not concerned with whether something is
politically practical or logistically possible because these approaches need to assume that legal
apparatuses are legitimate and fixable. If we suspend the need to be practical, we might be
able to see [comprehend] what is possible differently. A focus on social death enables us to start
at the places we dare not go because it enables us to privilege the populations who are most
frequently and most easily disavowed, those who are regularly regarded with contempt, whose interests are
bracketed at best because to address their needs in meaningful ways requires taking a step beyond what is palatable, practical, and
possible. Like Barrett, Hong, and Holland, I find empowering oppositional narratives in the devastating spaces of social death and
their populations abstract existences, but empowering narratives do not necessarily give us happy endings. Nor do they always
leave us inspired.85 In the spaces of social death, empowerment

is not contingent on taking power or

securing small victories. Empowerment comes from deciding that the outcome of struggle
doesnt matter as much as the decision to struggle. Deciding to struggle against all odds armed only with fingers
crossed on both hands is both an unusual political strategy and a well-informed worldview. It is a choice premised upon what Derrick
Bell calls racial realism. Racial

realism is a form of unthinkable politics because it proposes we begin battles

weve already lost, that we acknowledge and accept that everything we do may not ever
result in social change. When implementing Racial Realism we must simultaneously acknowledge that
our actions are not likely to lead to transcendent change and, despite our best efforts, may be of more help
to the system we despise than to the victims of that system we are trying to help. Nevertheless, our realization, and the
dedication based on that realization, can lead to policy positions and campaigns that are less
likely to worsen conditions for those we are trying to help and more likely to remind those in
power that there are imaginative, unabashed risk-takers who refuse to be trammeled upon.
Yet confrontation with our oppressors is not our sole reason for Racial Realism. Continued
struggle can bring about unexpected benefits and gains that in themselves justify continued
endeavor. The fight itself has meaning and should give us hope for the future.86 Although racial
realism takes failure for granted, it does not equate failure with defeat. Accepting hopelessness is not
necessarily equivalent to abandoning hope. As Sara Ahmed writes in her critique of happiness, To kill joyis to open a
life, to make room for life, to make room for possibility, for chance.87 To take unthinkable politics seriously, we need to
entertain counterintuitive thoughts and practice imagining otherwise. To imagine otherwise, Fiona
Ngo argues, failure need not be overcome, rehabilitation need not be desired, subjectivity need not be recovered. Instead, she
insists, we

must conceive of an ethical stance that refuses to cover over the violence that
brought us to the present.88 If the critical task is not to resolve the contradictions of
reintegrating the socially dead

into

capitalist

society that sees most of humanity as a

necessary but negative resource , then it makes sense to mobilize against preserving this way
of life or the ways of knowing that this life preserves. Rather than breathe life into the
spaces of social death

(gentrification, privatization, and democratization),

we might

conscientiously

work

against the logic of survivability ,89 which in the United States sees the preservation of U.S.
capital as central and indispensable

to the American way of life. In neoliberal ways of knowing, the value of life is

subjected to an economic analysis and assessed accordingly: How has this person contributed to society? What will he or she

accomplish in the future? Is it worthwhile to invest in this neighborhood and its residents or will such an investment be only a waste
of resources? Lives are legibly valuable when they are assessed comparatively and relationally within economic, legal, and political
contexts and discourses, framed by a culture of punishment according to the market logic of supply and demand. This means that,
for the most part, value

is not ascribed to living life in meaningful ways, and it also means that those who
are socially devalued do not get to decide what makes a life meaningful or the terms by which
their lives are evaluated as meaningful or meaningless, as valuable or valueless. By figuring out new
contexts and ways of framing why life is valuable, we might figure out how to talk about
social problems in ways that do not require us to appeal to market values or to redirect
juridical and social repudiation toward other populations that constitute the negative
resource to American value.

Of course, we cannot discount that fighting for basic survival needs in immediate,

practical, and strategic ways is urgent, important work, but at the same time, a

meaningful life is not a luxury but

rather the purpose of the struggle itself, the difference between surviving and living.

Case
People in jail for marijuana possession are only .2% of the total population
the aff does nothing in the most ambitious scenarios
Caulkins and Sevigny 2009 - Carnegie Mellon Universitys Heinz School of Public Policy AND
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, University of Pittsburgh (July 31, Jonathan P.
and Eric L., How Many People Does the US Imprison for Drug Use, and Who Are They?
http://ibhinc.org/pdfs/CaulkinsSevignyHowanydoestheUSimprison2005.pdf)
The vast majority (85%) of the 274,324 people in prison in the U.S. in 1997 for drug-law
violations were clearly involved in drug distribution in one way or another. Many of the
remaining 15% (41,047) had at least some suggestion of possible current or past involvement
in distribution. The precise proportion of drug offenders in prison solely because they used
drugs is thus hard to pin down, but appears to be somewhere in the range of 2%-15%,
representing 5,380 to 41,047 individuals. Furthermore, only about one- third of the 41,047
individuals were in prison as new court commitments; most were already on parole or
probation before the infraction that led to their current incarceration. Almost half had a
current nondrug infraction that may have contributed to their incarceration. Even taking the
upper bound figure of 15%, the number of people in prison for their drug use is far lower than
would be implied by naively assuming that everyone convicted of drug possession was not
involved in distribution. Incarceration for drug use/possession thus appears to be a very
modest contributor (0.5%-3.6%) to the total sentenced U.S. prison population (1,137,210 in
1997). One reason is that the expected time served by these individuals is about half that for
those who were clearly involved in drug distribution. It is also worth noting that 50-80% of
arrestees test positive for some illicit drug and -15% of drug arrests are for possession
(Maguire and Pastore, 1997), so presumably if the criminal justice system wanted to
incarcerate many more drug users, that would be possible . Among those in prison for drug
use, almost 90% were involved with cocaine, heroin, and/or (meth) amphetamines. Just 5-7%
possessed only marijuana. Hence, the number of marijuana users in prison for their use is
perhaps 800-2,300 individuals or on the order of 0.1- 0.2% of all prison inmates . This figure is
roughly consistent with ONDCP (2005) and is well below Thomas' (1999) estimate of 9,700
based on the same survey because Thomas assumes that all inmates convicted of possession
were not involved in trafficking. An implication of the new figure is that marijuana
decriminalization would have almost no impact on prison populations , although it might well
have a bigger effect on other components of the criminal justice system. Another implication is
that the imprisonment risk due to drug use is low, perhaps on the order of one-and-a-half days
per year of use for cocaine, heroin, and (meth)amphetamines, and no more than about an hour
per year of use for marijuana. That is not to say that there are not many drug users in prison.
However, for heavy users of these four major drugs, the vast majority are in prison because of
nondrug offenses (68%- 75%) or drug distribution offenses (22%-26%). This implies that
comparing characteristics of imprisoned drug offenders with those of drug users is not helpful
for determining whether drug-related imprisonment falls disproportionately on one group or
another. Since most imprisoned drug offenders are involved in distribution, the relevant
referent group is drug distributors, not drug users.

Alt cause twice as many violent offenders as War on Drugs

Forman 12 *James Jr., Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School, RACIAL CRITIQUES OF MASS
INCARCERATION: BEYOND THE NEW JIM CROW,
http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/sela/SELA12_Forman_CV_Eng.pdf]
V. Ignoring Violence To this point, I have focused principally on crimes of violence and the state's response to such crimes. I part
company with the New Jim Crow writers in this regard .

They focus almost exclusively on the War on Drugs .

This approach made sense for early ACLU advocates such as Glasser and Boyd, whose only objective was to
curtail the drug war. It makes less sense for more recent proponents of the analogy, who attack the
broader phenomenon of mass incarceration but restrict their attention to punishments for drug offenders.
Other crimes--especially violent crimes--are rarely mentioned. The choice to focus on drug crimes is a
natural--even necessary--byproduct of framing mass incarceration as a new form of Jim Crow. One of Jim Crow's defining
features was that it treated similarly situated blacks and whites differently . For writers seeking
analogues in today's criminal justice system, drug arrests and prosecutions provide natural
targets, along with racial profiling in traffic stops. Blacks and whites use drugs at roughly the same rates, but
African Americans are significantly more likely to be arrested and imprisoned for drug crimes. As with Jim Crow, the difference lies in
government practice, not in the underlying behavior. The statistics on selling drugs are less clear-cut, but here too the racial
disparities in arrest and incarceration rates exceed any disparities that might exist in the race of drug sellers.

But violent

crime is a different matter . While rates of drug offenses are roughly the same throughout the
population,

blacks are overrepresented among the population for violent offenses.

For example, the

African American arrest rate for murder is seven to eight times higher than the white arrest rate; the black arrest rate for robbery is
ten times higher than the white arrest rate. Murder

and robbery are the two offenses for which the arrest
data are considered most reliable as an indicator of offending. In making this point, I do not mean to
suggest that discrimination in the criminal justice system is no longer a concern. There is overwhelming evidence that discriminatory
practices in drug law enforcement contribute to racial disparities in arrests and prosecutions, and even for violent offenses there
remain unexplained disparities between arrest rates and incarceration rates. Instead, I make

the point to highlight the

problem with framing mass incarceration as a new form of Jim Crow. Because the analogy leads
proponents to search for disparities in the criminal justice system that resemble those of the Old Jim Crow, they confine
their attention to cases where blacks are like whites in all relevant respects, yet are treated
worse by law . Such a search usefully exposes the abuses associated with racial profiling and
the drug war. But it does not lead to a comprehensive understanding of mass incarceration .
Does it matter that the Jim Crow analogy diverts our attention from violent crime and the state's
response to it, if it gives us tools needed to criticize the War on Drugs ? I think it does, because contrary
to the impression left by many of mass incarceration's critics,

locked up for drug offenses.

the majority of America's prisoners are not

Some facts worth considering: According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, in 2006 there

were 1.3 million prisoners in state prisons, 760,000 in local jails, and 190,000 in federal prisons. Among the state prisoners, 50%
were serving time for violent offenses, 21% for property offenses, 20% for drug offenses, and 8% for public order offenses. In

jails, the split among the various categories was more equal, with roughly 25% of inmates being held for
each of the four main crime categories (violent, drug, property, and public order). Federal prisons are the only type of facility in
which drug offenders constitute a majority (52%) of prisoners, but federal prisons hold many fewer people overall. Considering all
forms of penal institutions together, more prisoners are locked up for violent offenses than for any other type, and just under 25%
(550,000) of our nation's 2.3 million prisoners are drug offenders. This is still an extraordinary and appalling number. But even if
every single one of these drug offenders were released tomorrow, the United States would still have the world's largest prison
system. Moreover, our

prison system has grown so large in part because we have changed our
sentencing policies for all offenders, not just drug offenders . We divert fewer offenders than

we once did, send more of them to prison, and keep them in prison for much longer . An
exclusive focus on the drug war misses this larger point about sentencing

choices. This is why it is not enough to dismiss talk of violent offenders by saying that violent
crime is not responsible for the prison boom. It is true that the prison population in this country continued to grow
even after violent crime began to decline dramatically. However, the state's response to violent crime--less diversion
and longer sentences--has been a major cause of mass incarceration. Thus, changing how
governments respond to all crime, not just drug crime, is critical to reducing the size of prison
populations .

Their answer to all of this defense will be, but were a starting point for
abolition thats wrong the movement will have little effect on anti-black
racism and get coopted by Big Marijuana
Gogek 13 [By Ed Gogek, M.D., addiction psychiatrist, Why is pro-marijuana journalism so
inaccurate?, August 31, 2013, http://thecaseagainstmarijuana.com]
Then a week ago, the ACLU released a study showing blacks are four times more likely to be arrested for marijuana than whites,
even though the two races smoke pot at the same rate. It would be shocking were it not so misleading. There

reasons this report is far less meaningful than the ACLU would have us believe: 1.

are three
Police dont target pot-

smokers , and usually only find marijuana incidentally while searching someone whos been arrested or
are arrested for almost all crimes at much
higher rates than whites. Im not saying its fairin fact, Im sure that it isnt. Blacks, whites and hispanics are not
stopped for an entirely different reason. 2. African-Americans

inherently different, so if blacks are arrested for anything at higher rates, there is either something wrong with our criminal justice
system or something wrong with our culture and our society. However, despite the unfairness, blacks

are arrested for

violent crime at nearly four times the rate for whites, and property crime at nearly three times the rate. 3. A
study released last month by the drug czars office found half of all criminals tested positive for marijuana at
the time of their arrest. Those of us who work with addicts know that they carry their drugs everywhere, even when they
commit a crime. I have no numbers on this one, but if half of all people arrested for violent and property crime have been smoking
pot recently enough that its found on a drug screen, then an awful lot of them are probably carrying marijuana and getting busted
with it. So the

reason African-Americans are arrested for pot at nearly four times the rate of
whites is probably not because police target them for marijuana. Its most likely an artifact of
the very real fact that blacks are arrested for non-drug crimes at much higher rates than
whites, and criminals have a very high rate of marijuana use and possession. The point is this is not a
problem specific to marijuana. African-Americans are probably not being singled out for marijuana
arrests;

most of the pot is probably found incidentally when they are searched for other reasons, like being arrested for a non-

drug crime. Of course, that didnt stop newspapers across the country from running this story as a slam on marijuana laws. It didnt
stop the New York Times from saying incorrectly (as its headline) Blacks Are Singled Out for Marijuana Arrests. And It didnt stop
the NY Times or Washington Post from using the articles to discuss legalization. That raises a question:

why would

legalization of pot be the solution ? African Americans are disproportionately imprisoned for
violent crimes, and no one suggests legalizing those. Are these two newspapers and the ACLU so prolegalization that theyll bring it up even when its not germane? In fact, it raises two questions reporters have not asked: This story
ran in 193 news outlets, but did any of them get it right? Why is the ACLU targeting only marijuana arrests when the real issue is that
African-Americans are arrested at higher rates for nearly all crimes? And, why is the ACLU using this disparity to discuss legalization
of marijuana when legalization is not their proposed solution to any other crime that blacks are arrested for at much higher rates
than whites? Heres one possible answer to those two questions: Whats not in these news reports and should be is the $15 million
pro-marijuana billionaire Peter Lewis gave to the ACLU. If a group that got money from the Koch brothers or from the oil and gas
industry came out with a study questioning global warming, their funding source would surely be part of the story. Why does

marijuana get special treatment? This

big donation from a pro-marijuana benefactor might explain

why the ACLU has invested so much time and money trying to make marijuana the focus
when the real problem is that African-Americans are arrested at much higher rates for nearly
all crimes. It makes the ACLU seem to be more interested in promoting marijuana than in exposing racial injustice.

The War on Drugs is a bad starting point for an effective movement for racial
and social justice:
1. Academic and movement focus on War on Drugs trades off with movements
to improve prison conditions specific to their Alexander evidence
Forman 12 [James Jr., Clinical Professor of Law, Yale Law School, RACIAL CRITIQUES OF MASS
INCARCERATION: BEYOND THE NEW JIM CROW,
http://www.law.yale.edu/documents/pdf/sela/SELA12_Forman_CV_Eng.pdf]
Third, an

effective response to mass incarceration requires increased attention to how we treat

prisoners. Even if the movement to challenge mass incarceration is ultimately successful, America will continue to
have an enormous system of prisons and jails for a long time to come. And even if our prison
population shrinks substantially, some people will always need to be locked up--hence the
urgency of attending to the conditions in which prisoners are held. Prison conditions receive
too little attention among mass incarceration's criti cs, including the New Jim Crow writers. It is difficult
to say why this is so, but at least for the New Jim Crow writers, the explanation may lie in their focus on
the War on Drugs . After all, a strong case can be made that drug offenders (especially drug users, who
receive the bulk of the New Jim Crow writers' attention)

should not be incarcerated at all . Having framed the

issue in this way, these writers may feel less compelled to focus on improving prison
conditions . Whatever the reasons for the oversight, it must be remedied: How we treat those we
incarcerate is a critical front in the battle against mass incarceration. Consider Brown v. Plata, in which
the Supreme Court recently ruled that California must reduce its prison population in order to mitigate the unconstitutional harms
associated with overcrowding. The lower court, in finding for the plaintiffs, had warned that the state's continued failure to address
the severe crowding in California's prisons would perpetuate a criminogenic prison system that itself threatens public safety. Justice
Kennedy recognized that concern in his majority opinion, quoting then-Governor Schwarzenegger's acknowledgement that
overcrowding increases recidivism, as well as testimony from the Acting Secretary of the California prison system, who said that she
absolutely believe[s] that we make people worse, and that we are not meeting public safety by the way we treat people. The record
in Plata clearly illustrates that prison

conditions are not only a prisoners' rights issue, but are also a crime
prevention issue. Most prisoners, after all, are serving time for violent offenses. And even with longer
prison sentences, the vast majority of American prisoners will be released eventually. So we face a choice: Will we take
individuals whom we have judged unfit for life in the free world, expose them to further
violence, destabilize them psychologically, and deny them treatment for addiction, trauma,
and mental illness? Or will we attempt to create a system of support and rehabilitation for the
incarcerated? For their sake, and our own, the answer seems clear.

2nc
The legal system, especially with criminalization, structurally oppresses people
of color - refusal of the law is the only political choice
Delgado 98 - Professor of Law at the University of Alabama (Richard, Is American Law
Inherently Racist?, Cooley Law Review, Krinock Lecture Series, ssrn.com/abstract=2094562)
PROFESSOR DELGADO: You know it seems to me that the war on drugs is part of the story, but only part of it. It all
depends on what you decide to criminalize. For example, if you criminalize ingestion of crack cocaine much
more harshly than that of the powdered kind, then of course you are going to get a hugely disparate result
out of enforcement of the drug laws. If you decide that white-collar crime is not really criminal and go easy on
people who are guilty of embezzlement or S&L fraud that bilks the public out of literally billions of dollars, the same
thing will happen. If you decide that white-collar crime that takes the form of defense procurement fraud or manufacturing
of inherently dangerous products like DES or Pintos-if you decide that these are not crimes, even though they cause in the aggregate
more loss of life, more pain, more injuries, more deaths, or more lost dollars than all inner-city crimes or street crime put together,
then you will have a disparate impact, and you may be willing to entertain the possibility that it is not just accidental. Well, to this
point, today's debate has proceeded along fairly predictable lines. I have pointed out patterns of racism in American legal history,
while Professor Farber has emphasized times when that *382 system has lent a helping hand. Please bear in mind, though, that a

legal system, like a defective car, may need an overhaul, even if it is capable at other times of driving and serving
perfectly well. A system is inherently racist if two things are shown. First, that discrimination is a recurring
theme like a soundtrack in a movie or a leitmotif in a musical composition, silent at times perhaps but always there, always
returning. This, I believe, I have shown. Second, that the reason for its persistence is inherent in the
culture. I did not say biology of course, but culture. In that respect, consider three things. One. Consider how racism takes
different forms at different times, like one of those characters in a science fiction novel or movie. In one era, it is
blatant, open, and in your face. In another, it is subtle, institutional, embedded in seemingly neutral rules like a University of
Colorado at Boulder requirement that all first-year students live in a campus-residence hall: that is a neutral rule. However, many
students of color from Denver, thirty-five miles away, would prefer to live at home and commute saving the money, avoiding some
of the "Animal House" features of dorm life that go against Latino culture, and looking after their younger brothers or sisters who
may be flirting with drugs or gangs. In another era, racism takes the form of gentlemanly learned tracts with hundreds of footnotes
debating whether folks of color are genetically inferior. The players, the arguments, and the rationalizations may

vary
over time, but the gap in brown/white earnings, life expectancy, and social well being remains about the
same as though obeying some unseen law. Two. Notice how when courts and other official policy makers relax, or even
decide to help minorities, this happens more to advance white self-interest than to help the
supposed beneficiaries. For example, Brown v. Board of Education, the case that Professor Farber held up as the
crown jewel of American jurisprudence, decided in 1954, came down just as many U.S. servicemen and women of color were
returning to civilian life from military service, where many of them for the first time had experienced a relatively racism free
environment. Many of them probably would not have returned meekly to shining shoes and regimes of "Yes sir" and "No sir." For
the first time in a while, the possibility of real racial unrest loomed in the United States. At the same time, we were in the early
stages of a cold war against the forces of godless, ruthless communism. It scarcely would have served U.S. purposes well had the
front pages of world newspapers continued to show pictures of Emmett Till lynchings and southern sheriffs with cattle prods. Brown

occur not so much out of generosity or moral *383 imperative, but out of a need to
advance white self-interest. Later, when the celebrations died down, the great law reform case was inevitably
cut back quietly by lower courts or impeded by administrative foot-dragging or delay. Today, more black
school children attend segregated schools than when Brown v. Board of Education was decided.
Finally, consider how improvements for one minority group are often accompanied by worsening
treatment of another. When Brown v. Board of Education struck down school segregation, eliciting great
and deserved rejoicing, the United States government was ordering "Operation Wetback," a massive
deportation program for Mexican-looking people. Only two years later, an article [FN28] appeared in Duke Law School's
Journal of Law and Contemporary Problems approving the whole thing and urging more of the same. Reconstruction, which
and other breakthrough cases

saw great gains for African-Americans, saw the enactment of viciously anti-Asian immigration laws, in part as a sop to white
southerners concerned that caste might turn out to mean

little after all. Korematsu v. United States, [FN29] which

decided only ten years before Brown v. Board of Education. During World War II, we
were a little nicer to Blacks, Mexicans and Indians, needing them on the front and in war plants, but turned our backs on
Jews fleeing the holocaust. And, finally, recall how Justice Harlan, author of that ringing dissent in Plessy, [FN30] joined in a
virulently anti-Asian opinion in the Chinese Exclusion Case only a short time later. Well, I don't know about you, but for
me a pattern begins to emerge-like a figure in a photograph in a darkroom tub. Four centuries, four racial groups, three
mechanisms. Does that pattern warrant the conclusion that something inheres in American culture that renders
people of color recurrently one down? I am afraid so.
upheld Japanese internment, was

No net benefit legalizing criminal behavior conceals criminalized identities

making the impacts of the K inevitable.
Cacho 12 (Lisa Marie, associate professor of Latina/Latino Studies and Asian American Studies,
with affiliations in Gender and Womens Studies and English, University of Illinois UrbanaChampaign, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected
p.4-5, wyo-zm)
The practices and processes of criminalization, however, are often concealed when we reject
criminal stereotypes. The term criminalization has been used to refer to being stereotyped as a criminal as well as to
being criminalized, but its important to maintain a distinction between the two. Even though being stereotyped and being
criminalized are not mutually exclusive and often overlap, these have different relationships to U.S. law. To

be stereotyped
as a criminal is to be misrecognized as someone who committed a crime, but to be
criminalized is to be prevented from being law-abiding. To be stereotyped as a gang member means that
someone, perhaps a law-abiding citizen, was misrecognized as a gang member because of his or her racial background. In contrast,

gang members are criminalized because they have a different relationship to criminal law and
the U.S. justice system, because they face regulations other people do not have to follow, such as
gang injunctions, and because they deal with harsher and longer sentences because of gang
enhancement charges. Racial profiling both stereotypes nongang members and criminalizes gang members. For the person
who is racially profiled as well as misrecognized as a gang member, the injury is not just the act of racial profiling but also the act of
misrecognition.

Not only does criminalization preempt sympathy

for and empathizing with gang members,

ensures outrage on behalf of those who are misrecognized and falsely accused of being
behaving like)
In this vein,

it

(not

a gang member .

people who occupy legally vulnerable and criminalized statuses are not just excluded

from justice; criminalized populations and the places where they live form the foundation of
the U.S. legal system,

imagined to be

the reason why a punitive (in)justice system exists .

Although they are excluded from laws protection, they are not excluded from laws
discipline, punishment, and regulation. Their position evidences what ethnic studies scholar Yen Le Espiritu terms
differential inclusion.6 As Espiritu argues, marginalized groups are deemed integral to the nations
economy, culture, identity, and powerbut integral only or precisely because of their
designated subordinate standing.7 Certain vulnerable and impoverished populations and places of color have been
differentially included within the U.S. legal system. As targets of regulation and containment, they are
deemed deserving of discipline and punishment but not worthy of protection. They are not
merely excluded from legal protection but criminalized as always already the object and
target of law, never its authors or addresses.

As the foundation of law , certain racialized populations are excluded from its protections and
its processes of legitimation, but

they are

not

quite imagined as

completely outside the law

because to be outside the law suggests that eventual inclusion is possible.

When immigration law

excluded people of particular races and national origins from immigrating, it was not permanent. Because these laws explicitly
criminalized identities, they could be changed or rescinded to incorporate previously excluded groups. They did not, however,
fundamentally change the criminalized statuses such laws produced. For instance, Chinese Exclusion (1882) produced Chinese
illegal aliens.8 Repealing Chinese Exclusion (1943) enabled more immigrants from China to enter the United States legally, but it
did not change the vulnerable legal status of the illegal alien. The

illegal or unlawful alien is a status that forms the

foundation of immigration law, and, therefore, the unlawful alien cannot be incorporated into
immigration or naturalization law. Laws that have tried to address the problem of having an
undocumented, rightless population have only been able to make exceptions. The Immigration Reform and
Control Act of 1986, for example, provided a path toward legalization and citizenship for a specific contingent of undocumented
immigrants, but it did not change or decriminalize the rightless status of the illegal alien. All those who did not qualify (or could
not prove that they qualified) under the exemption would still be criminalized, demonized, and rendered rightless. Recent proposals
for a federal Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act (DREAM Act) also propose to create exceptions to current
immigration law (i.e., by giving a path to legalization to undocumented college educated students and undocumented persons who
serve the military). But the DREAM Act proposals do not address the fundamental problem of immigration law: that it creates a
permanently rightless status.

Legalizing marijuana will only protect the people who are already safe from
prosecution, poor minority individuals will still be criminalized.
Gulite 14 (Kelli, Graduate of The George Washington Universitys Honors Program with
degrees in Political Science and Criminal Justice. 3 ways marijuana legalization can screw poor
minorities http://thoughtsonliberty.com/3-ways-marijuana-legalization-can-screw-poorminorities, wyo-zm)
Between 2001 and 2010, U.S. law enforcement made over 7 million arrests for marijuana possession. In that time, marijuana
possession arrests made up 46% of all drug arrests. According to a recent ACLU report, racial disparity in marijuana possession
arrests is egregious and occurs all throughout the country. Despite the fact that whites use marijuana as frequently as blacks, blacks
are 3.73 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana possession, leading to devastating consequences in low-income minorities
communities. Luckily, the nationwide decriminalization of marijuana is almost here. In October, Maryland will be the seventeenth
state to decriminalize the possession of marijuana. Its not unreasonable to believe that the nationwide legalization, commercial
production, and regulation of marijuana will soon follow. A majority of Americans support legalization, the New York Times recently
came out in full support of federal legalization, and the two states that have already legalized marijuana, Colorado and Washington,
have only reported positive results. With the dawn of the commercial production of legal pot, it is important to keep in mind those
who the drug war has affected most, poor minorities. Yes, marijuana legalization would generate millions in tax revenue and could
provide a substantial boost to the economy. However, we should

be wary of regulations surrounding the

legalized commercial production of weed that protect big business or state interests to the
detriment of poor minorities. Here are three potentially harmful regulations: 1. Criminal Background Checks and
Occupational Licensing In Colorado and Washington, marijuana businesses have been subject to fairly strict
licensing laws. The Colorado Department of Revenue has an entire Marijuana Enforcement Division to review marijuana
business and professional license applications. To obtain an occupational license in Colorado, owners must
undergo a full criminal background check as licensees may not have any Controlled Substance
Felony Convictions that have not been fully discharged for five years prior to applying. Given
the well-documented disproportionate enforcement of drug policy on minorities, such
licensing requirements could easily and unfairly skew the new legal marijuana market in
favor of whites.

2. The Overbearing Costs of Marijuana Retail Licenses and Taxation Legalization proponents have

consistently argued that states should legalize in order to tax marijuana businesses and collect revenue from licensing fees. The
states that have legalized marijuana have taken this mantra to heart. Colorado made nearly $6 million in revenue from marijuana
dispensaries just this past month. One

Colorado marijuana business owner reported that permit and

licensing fees cost him $20,000 just in one year. While poor minorities were able to participate
in the illegal marijuana economy, they will not be able to participate in the legal drug

economy if the state continues to charge such enormous fees and taxes. 3. Zealously Persecuting Black
Market Distribution As it stands now, marijuana legalization has created a perfect storm to continue to
imprison poor minorities for nonviolent weed offenses. Poor minorities, who are more likely
to have felony drug charges, are largely unable to participate in the legal marijuana market. If
they do have a clean criminal history, they are still priced out of the market by bigger
businesses who can afford outrageously high state taxes and fees upfront. While dispensaries
are charging high premiums to cover their overhead, a black market for cheap marijuana will
emerge in poor communities. But now, laws intended to protect legal marijuana business
interests will be used to persecute those participating in the black market, as
decriminalization doesnt yet protect distributors or dealers. Going forward with marijuana legalization,
state policy makers should remember who marijuana prohibition hurts the most and regulate according to the interests of the
community as a whole, not according to the state budget. Advocates of legalization should also refocus their core principles: we
want to end prohibition because it is harmful and unnecessary, not because it will make state governments richer.

1NR
Alexander is wrong colorblind racism cannot explain the prison industrial
complex its all about political economy
Thomas, Syracuse English professor and black power activist, 2012
(Greg, Why Some Like The New Jim Crow So Much, 4-26,
http://imixwhatilike.org/2012/04/26/whysomelikethenewjimcrowsomuch/)
The true subject of The New Jim Crow and each of its chapters is practically this and this alone. The rhetoric of a War on Drugs does not share space
in Alexander with other language that is basic to other, prior political analyses of Black imprisonment or mass incarceration. There is no critical
language of capitalism or class or exploitation in The New Jim Crow. A few hesitant references to financial incentive or the profit motive in
drug law enforcement may be found, infrequently, in their place. Not even the often very chic language of a Prison Industrial Complex has any
presence at all. Forget James Boggss far more preferable language of a military-economic-police bloc in his American Revolution: Pages from a
Negro Workers Notebook (1963). The language of race and to a lesser extent racism is present, but the conceptualization of race and racism is in
any event weak, narrow, anemic i.e., liberal. The subtitle of The New Jim Crow is, after all, Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. The

state rhetoric of a War on Drugs is thus centrally entertained by Alexander without

entertaining it as a rhetorical disguise of capitalism, exploitation, militarism, mass/state murder,
imperialism or a cultural and political economy of white, anti-Black racism. It may be true that there are more
people in prisons and jails today just for drug offenses than were incarcerated for all reasons in 1980. However, no other reasons or pretexts for
imprisonment warrant any substantial attention in The New Jim Crow. Alexander concludes: Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass
incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs (Alexander 2012, 60). She would take Lyndon Johnsons War on Poverty
rhetoric seriously and lauds his Economic Opportunities Bill of 1964 (39); and, although she must note more than once that this alleged War on
Drugs does not target kingpins, let alone what we could call narco-trafficking, she still takes this federal rhetoric seriously on its own status-quo
terms. Her

contemporary interpretation of incarceration and criminalization is then

disconnected from the long history of Black criminalization by Anglo-North America which
predates the U.S. state formation and includes the white criminalization of enslaved African communities on plantations under
official chattel slavery as well as nominally free Black communities both in the North and the South in addition to the white criminalization of
Black/African-Diasporic communities under de jure or Jim Crow segregation or U.S. national apartheid .

If, en masse, Black people

have more critically catalogued everything from Driving While Black to Breathing While
Black as social crimes in this country, historically, the essential, white-defined crime of
Being Black cannot be reduced to a recent, color-blind side-effect of the selective
prosecution of drug offenses at the lowest socio-economic level. Richard Becker of the Party for Socialism
and Liberation (PSL) writes in The Real Drug Kingpins Are on Wall Street: Tackle the Drug Problem by Seizing the Banks (2012): For brazen criminality,
no one tops the bankers. But a banker in jail is as rare as a honest senator. He reports on the criminal history of Wachovia Bank before its takeover by
Wells Fargo with the assistance of billions of dollars in federal funding. That bank was found guilty of having laundered at least $378 billion in drug
money from 2004-07 for Mexican drug cartels. To buy planes for the transport of cocaine, these cartels also funneled through Bank of America, which
is described as notorious for the practice of face-lifting money-laundering with a posture of legitimacy. So, the Wachovia executives, who
admitted their guilt, must have gotten really long sentences for their $378 billion drug business, right? Becker cuts to the chase: Not one Wachovia
executive spent a night or even an hour in jail, although the value of their crime was 1 billion times greater than the average street dealer. His

point is that while the government rules over the people under capitalism, the banks rule
over the government and the entire system. This will only change when the people take
power and put an end to a system of, by and for the super rich. Nothing like this is
accomplished by the liberalism of The New Jim Crow, which never thinks to challenge the
establishment definition of crime or criminality.

Wont Reduce the stress on Prison System- No Data on Sole Marijuana Charges,
Estimates are too high, and it would represent 4%
Austin 05
*James Austin, Ph.D., Rethinking the Consequences of Decriminalizing Marijuana, 11/2/2005,
http://norml.org/component/zoo/category/rethinking-the-consequences-of-decriminalizingmarijuana, The JFA Institute, \\wyo-bb]
The remaining portion of the criminal justice system where marijuana may be a significant
cost factor is in the corrections system, which includes people in jail and prison or placed on probation or parole. As
shown in Table 3, this a very large system that includes over 7 million people on any given day. The difficulty is in
establishing the number of persons who are under correctional supervision on any give day or
have been touched by the system during a calendar or fiscal year solely due to a marijuana
charge. Such data do not exist, making it somewhat speculative in terms of what proportion of
the correctional system is allocated to the control, punishment and treatment of marijuana
offenders. It is known that within the state and federal prison systems, there are approximately 250,000 state and another
70,000 federal inmates incarcerated for drug crimes. It is not known what numbers of prisoners are incarcerated solely for marijuana
crimes. But if

one were to assume that the marijuana cases would reflect the number of persons
arrested and convicted for such crimes, one would have to assume that at best no more than 1/5th of
the drug convicted and defendants (or about 64,000 prisoners) are marijuana cases. This would represent
about 4% of the entire US prisoner population. King and Mauer estimated that 27,900 state and federal prisoners
are incarcerated solely for marijuana crimes.12 But even this estimate is probably too high as it does not take
into account that persons convicted of marijuana possession or even low level sale of the drug
rarely receive prison terms. Once again there are no national data to test this hypothesis, but we can look at Californias
state correctional data to see how significant the marijuana conviction cases are with respect to the parole and prisoner
populations. Table 4 summarizes the results of analysis made by the author based on detailed data files provided by the California
Department of Corrections. This table reports the number of prisoners and parolees who are either incarcerated or are on parole for
the crimes of marijuana possession or sale. For both the prisoner and parole populations the numbers of such cases reflect less than
1% of the total.

This is specifically true for marijuana policing harder drugs fills in

Simon 13 [David, American author, journalist, and a writer/producer of television series, 11-113, Lost in a symptom: The Nation on marijuana reform, davidsimon.com/lost-in-a-symptomthe-nation-on-marijuana-reform/]
But the least that people of goodwill can do is to stop pretending that forward movement on
marijuana alone is anything less than an accommodation with an existing war of social control
that is being waged disproportionately on the urban poor and is utilizing the prohibitions
against harder drugs for the greater share of its incarcerative dynamic. Marijuana is not the
core reason for our crowded prisons , and the reform of marijuana laws is, at best, triage for
a failed and dystopic system that will be given another lease on life once the politically
relevant portion of white America is given a pass. Removing weed from the overall equation
will, in the end, consign increasingly-isolated poor people of color to the brutalities of the
drug war for the foreseeable future . The game will still be the game for them, and a cruel
and rigged game it will remain .