The US prison population has tripled since 1980, to 1.6 million inmates. Prisons are literally filled to overflowing but not with murderers and rapists. The growth in prisoners is overwhelmingly due to people serving time for simple drug possession and small time drug dealing. In 1983 a total of 57,975 drug offenders were in prison. By 1993 that total had jumped to 353,564 nearly a sixfold increase. There is therefore a direct relationship between the US government's so called `war on drugs' and its teeming prison population. Meanwhile, the war on drugs seems to have had little effect on the biggest drug suppliers, who continue to operate unhindered. And 90 percent of those in state prisons for drug possession are black or Latino, who are a minority of drug users.
Now it has come to light that the US government may be one of the biggest drug dealers of all. In August a Californian newspaper, the San Jose Mercury News, printed an article showing that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) ran a drug ring that supplied crack cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs in the 1980s and used the profits to fund the Nicaraguan Contras trying to overthrow the Sandinista government. The Iran-Contra scandal in the late 1980s already revealed that the US government ran an elaborate weapons network which sold guns to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. And while investigating Iran-Contra in 1987, reporters discovered that US pilots who flew weapons to Contra base camps in Honduras returned to the US with shipments of cocaine and marijuana.
Until now, however, the mainstream media didn't bother to investigate the CIA's connection with drug running. But the new scandal, which is being called `Cocaine-Contra' has exposed the CIA's role in supplying thousands of kilos of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs between 1982 and 1986. Danilo Blandon, a former Nicaraguan government official, ran the drug ring which brought in the cocaine and then converted it to crack. Blandon pleaded guilty to charges of drug trafficking in 1992, but he is not in prison he went to work for the US government's Drug Enforcement Administration.
The Cocaine-Contra scandal has ignited a growing controversy over the CIA's role in promoting drug use among poor blacks and Latinos. More than 1,500 black political leaders met in Washington DC at a hastily called meeting by the Congressional Black Caucus last month to demand a Congressional investigation of the CIA's Los Angeles drug ring. Representative Mel Watt, a Democrat from North Carolina, said, `If you have a government that is planting drugs in our communities, and you have a prison population that is disproportionately represented by drug sellers or people trying to support their habit, then you have a massive conspiracy.'
The San Jose Mercury News was not exaggerating when it reported that in Los Angeles `thousands of young black men are serving long prison sentences for selling cocaine a drug that was virtually unobtainable in black neighbourhoods before members of the CIA's army brought it into South Central in the 1980s at bargain basement prices.' Crack cocaine is a cheaper, smokable and highly addictive form of cocaine. Competition over selling crack played a large part in the gang wars that have taken the lives of thousands of young black and Latino men in cities all over the US since the 1980s. Moreover, overtly racist US laws punish possessors of crack cocaine at a rate which is 100 times more severe than those who possess powder cocaine. Possession of five grams of crack cocaine, costing about ú125, gets the same sentence as 500g of cocaine in its powdered form, worth about $50,000. Most of those arrested for powder cocaine are more affluent whites, while 96 percent of those arrested for crack are young blacks or Latinos.
A 1993 report by the Justice Department argued that this disparity in sentencing was `the single most important difference accounting for the overall longer sentences imposed on blacks, relative to other groups'. And last year a survey by the Los Angeles Times of federal courts serving the Los Angeles area showed that since 1986 not a single white person had been convicted for a crack cocaine offence, even though whites make up a majority of crack users.
The war on drugs is a barely concealed excuse to arrest and imprison young black men. California arrest statistics show that one in every four blacks, and one in every five Latino men aged 18 to 24 is arrested for a felony or serious crime every year. This then allows politicians who wish to appear `tough on crime' to scapegoat blacks and Latinos by citing those same statistics.
Presidential candidate Robert Dole growled last month that prisoners `had better pray that I lose this election. Because if I win, the lives of violent criminals are going to be hell.' Attempting to outdo the Republicans, Clinton expanded the federal death penalty to cover 50 offences, and issued a `one strike, you're out' law, which evicts entire families from public housing if a family member is charged with a drug offence.
And if most of the prisoners are not hardened and violent when they enter prison, politicians are doing their best to ensure they will leave prison that way. In most states new laws have been passed which take away prisoners' most basic rights, such as the right to watch television. For example, at Alabama's Limestone Correctional Facility the first prison to reintroduce chain gangs prisoners are allowed no visitors, and no leave for births or funerals.
They are allowed no games, such as checkers or basketball. Nor can they have any snacks or any coffee, except on Sunday morning. They cannot watch television or lift weights. Soap and toothpaste must be purchased. And all over the country most prisoners are stuffed into overcrowded cells. In California, for example, eight new prisons built to hold 16,000 prisoners now hold 28,000.
Last month prisoners at the Pontiac prison near Chicago rebelled when prison officials restricted their phone privileges. The prison had been in a state of `lockdown' for most of this year, with prisoners confined in their cells for 23 hours a day. The government keeps no statistics on prison uprisings, but experts at the American Civil Liberties Union believe they are on the rise. Last month marked the 25th anniversary of the Attica prison uprising, which sparked a movement for prison reform in the 1970s. As National Prison Project director Alvin Bronstein said recently, today's prison conditions `ensure another Attica'.