A kinder, gentler drug war? Race, drugs, and punishment in 21st century America

DOI10.1177/1462474520925145
Date01 October 2020
Published date01 October 2020
Subject MatterArticles
Article
A kinder, gentler drug
war? Race, drugs, and
punishment in 21st
century America
Katherine Beckett and
Marco Brydolf-Horwitz
University of Washington, USA
Abstract
This article assesses whether the kinder, gentler rhetoric through which the dispro-
portionately white opiate crisis has been framed has been accompanied by changes in
drug sentencing policy and drug law enforcement that mirror this sympathetic dis-
course. Toward these ends, state-level drug sentencing policies enacted from 2010
to 2016 as well as recent trends in drug law enforcement and drug-related imprison-
ment are analyzed. The legislative findings show that policymakers are not singling out
opiate violations for particularly lenient treatment. Instead, it is the user/dealer distinc-
tion that animates recent shifts in drug policy: While state lawmakers are re-thinking
their approach to drug possession, they are more likely to have enhanced penalties for
drug distribution than to have reduced them. In addition, although significant racial
disparities in arrests and incarceration persist, the main change that has occurred is
a decline in the black share of arrests and imprisonments. The discussion explores
possible explanations for these unexpected findings, including the possibility that polit-
ical dynamics help explain the decline of the drug war in many urban areas and, as a
result, the diminution of racial disparities in it.
Keywords
drugs, mass incarceration, opioids, policing, prison, race, sentencing
Corresponding author:
Katherine Beckett, University of Washington, Box 353530, Seattle, WA 98195, USA.
Email: kbeckett@uw.edu
Punishment & Society
2020, Vol. 22(4) 509–533
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/1462474520925145
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Introduction
Although the use of consciousness-altering substances has been the subject of
intense governmental attention for over a century, the most recent U.S. war on
drugs is characterized by an unprecedented number of arrests, record levels of
incarceration, and massive racial disparities. A number of factors that help explain
the unparalleled intensity of law enforcement’s crackdown on those who use and/
or sell drugs over the past few decades. These include bi-partisan competition
among elected off‌icials seeking to establish their tough-on-drug credentials in the
1980s and 1990s (Beckett, 1997), the provision of federal funding and the enact-
ment of asset forfeiture laws that incentivize and/or fund drug law enforcement
(Alexander, 2010), the complicity of the news media in the reproduction of infor-
mation and images that engendered support for punitive drug policies (Beckett,
1997; Reinarman and Levine, 1997a), and the creation and enhancement of
bureaucracies with a vested interest in the perpetuation of the drug war
(Reinarman and Levine, 1997b).
Although the intensity of the most recent drug war has many causes, the most
consistent theme in scholarly investigations of its causes and consequences has
been the centrality of race. Studies show that the discourse surrounding the drug
issue in the 1980s and 1990s was highly racialized (Beckett, 1997; Reeves and
Campbell, 1994; Reinarman and Levine, 1997a). This racialization took many
forms: the proliferation of media images of black and brown crack users in hand-
cuffs under the (ostensibly necessary) control of law enforcement; the absence of
any serious discussion of the need for treatment and the possibility of recovery; the
lack of attention to the structural conditions that fueled the spread of crack
cocaine; factually incorrect stories about the ostensibly permanent damage
caused to fetuses and children as a result of in-utero exposure to drugs, and espe-
cially crack cocaine; and misleading assertions of the necessity of heightened law
enforcement. Policy developments mirrored this racialized rhetoric, as criminal
sanctions for those who used or sold crack cocaine were ratcheted up at the federal
level and in many states (Alexander, 2010; Lynch, 2011, 2016; Provine, 2007;
Reinarman and Levine,1997b). In this context, black people bore the brunt of
law enforcement’s intensif‌ied campaign to punish those who used and/or sold
controlled substances (Alexander, 2010; Beckett et al., 2005, 2006; Duster, 1997;
Lynch, 2016; Lynch and Omori, 2018; Provine, 2007).
Although the scale and impact of the most recent war on drugs has been unique,
the centrality of race to it is hardly novel (Courtwright, 2001). In fact, scholars
have shown that anti-drug campaigns are often bound up with, and reinforce,
efforts to control and/or denigrate non-white populations. In the 1870s, for exam-
ple, concern about opiate addiction was expressed mainly through discourse
and imagery that conf‌lated that problem with the smoking of opium by Chinese
immigrants. These images not only led to the adoption of laws criminalizing this
particular form of opium consumption but also fueled support for anti-Chinese
immigration laws, including, ultimately, the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882
510 Punishment & Society 22(4)

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