Response to Daniel Kato’s review of <i>Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment</i>

Fortner, Michael Javen

doi:10.1017/s1537592716002759

Cited by 3 publications

(6 citation statements)

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“…The Rockefeller Drug Laws, to take an important example, emerged following a series of failed efforts to deal with the crime and disorder generated by widespread heroin use in neighbourhoods like Harlem in New York City (Fortner 2015;KohlerHausmann 2015). In response to community demands for action to alleviate these problems, New York authorities initially put in place a public health, penal-welfare approach, providing non-penal treatment to addicts and reserving criminal penalties for 'pushers'.…”

Section: Phase 2: the War On Drugsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Rockefeller's decision was no doubt a political one, shaped by his presidential ambitions and his wish to be seen as a 'law and order' conservative. But it is striking that his tough approach attracted vocal support from African-American community leaders (Fortner 2015)-just as the Federal Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of the mid-1980s would garner strong support from the Congressional Black Caucus (Forman f.c.). Whatever its subsequent history, the War on Drugs was initially viewed by some of its proponents as a necessary, good faith effort to relieve poor urban communities of the blight of street drugs and the neighbourhood crime and violence associated with them.…”

Section: Phase 2: the War On Drugsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…And on those occasions where non-penal approaches have been tried-e.g. public health approaches to drug abuse in New York in the early 1960s or social welfare approaches to crime control during the federal 'war on poverty'-these initiatives have foundered for lack of experience, support, and resources (Fortner 2015;Hinton 2016). Before long, these more positive efforts were judged to have been ill-conceived failures and political opinion quickly reverted to the default of a penal approach.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Recall that in the 1970s and 1980s, communities of colour and their political representatives were deeply concerned about drug-related crime and violence in their neighbourhoods, which is why they called for tough punishments and supported legislation such as the Rockefeller Drug laws of 1973 and the Federal Anti-Drug Abuse Acts of 1986 and 1988 (Fortner 2015;Forman 2012). As we have seen, the War on Drugs was, at least in part, a 'proxy war' strategy for apprehending and convicting violent offenders by other means.…”

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confidence: 99%

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Penal power in America: Forms, functions and foundations

Garland¹

2017

JBA

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Abstract:In this article I discuss the exercise of penal power in contemporary America with a view to explaining its historical causes, its contemporary forms and functions, and its social foundations. I argue that the leading characteristic of American penality today is not degradation, retribution, racial caste-making, or neoliberal discipline but instead the imposition of penal controls. The remainder of the article develops some hypotheses about the social and political roots of that distinctive form of punishment. Re-connecting penal controls with patterns of crime and violence, I highlight the deficits of social control and social capital that set America off from comparable nations and I trace the sources of these deficits to the structure and operation of certain American institutions as well as the limited capacities and patterned dispositions of the American state.

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Section: Phase 2: the War On Drugsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Phase 2: the War On Drugsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

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confidence: 99%

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Penal power in America: Forms, functions and foundations

Garland¹

2017

JBA

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“…Finally, there is scant work in political science on drug policy development (Fortner 2015), and none that takes a critical discursive approach. Most recent political analyses of drug policy describe it as a tool used to fuel mass incarceration, expand the carceral state, or maintain racial domination (Alexander 2012;Murakawa 2014;Weaver 2007).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Is There “Hope for Every Addicted American”? The New U.S. War on Drugs

Stone

2017

Social Sciences

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The U.S. has been waging a War on Drugs for the last forty years. But in the mid-2010s, a series of reforms have rejected this militant approach. How did these policies manage to break through a gridlocked Congress? What is the nature of these reforms, and what are their political implications? Using critical discourse analysis, I demonstrate that a new policy framework of "addiction recovery" defines the political crises of the opioid epidemic, the failure of the War on Drugs, and mass incarceration in terms of disease, attributing Drug War injustices to prejudice against "addiction," rather than a constellation of institutional racism, sexism, nativism, and economic exploitation enacted through drug policy. I conclude that characterizing recent reforms as a decisive break with the War on Drugs obscures the ways in which drug policy continues to perpetuate injustice by offering a personal, rather than political, solution in the "hope" of recovery.

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Public Opinion about Police Weapons and Equipment: An Exploratory Analysis

Wozniak,

Drakulich,

Calfano

2021

Preprint

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Despite debates about the "material militarization" of the police, relatively little information on mass public opinion about police weapons, equipment, and gear currently exists. We analyze data from a national, opt-in panel of survey participants to assess public opinion regarding police use of ten different types of weapons and equipment for use in confrontations with citizens. We find that public opinion defies easy classification into "militarized" vs. "routine" equipment categories. Multivariate analyses indicate that perceptions of 1) police efficacy and 2) the frequency with which officers experience physical assaults on the job are the most consistent predictors of support for a range of weapons and gear, while perceptions of police misconduct and bias predict opposition to some types of tools. Partisan differences in attitudes between Democrats, Republicans, and Independents are less consistent predictors than broader perceptions about policing, but the effects of partisanship that are evident are substantively large.

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Response to Daniel Kato’s review of Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

Penal power in America: Forms, functions and foundations

Penal power in America: Forms, functions and foundations

Is There “Hope for Every Addicted American”? The New U.S. War on Drugs

Public Opinion about Police Weapons and Equipment: An Exploratory Analysis

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