A systematic study24 of drug war coverage in the New York Times, USA Today, the Washington Post, Time, and Newsweek from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s revealed that the print media consistently identified African Americans as the “enemies” that the drug war intended to target. Network television was no different. In a study of network television news in 1990 and 1991,25 it was shown that reporters regularly stressed the theme of “us against them” in news stories, with the “us” referring to White middle-class Americans and the demonized other being typically reserved for African Americans and a few corrupted White individuals.26 In addition to the images on the covers of newspapers and leading the evening news, the War on Drugs generally and crack cocaine in particular allowed the media to link drugs with race, and African Americans with deviance.27 This focus on race and crime fed the public’s fears and helped to embed the impression that most dangerous criminals were people of color. Newsweek boldly declared the threat that White Americans secretly feared: “Crack ha[d] captured the ghetto” and was “inching its way into the suburbs.”28 The media exacerbated White concern by warning of the potential for crack to seep out of the inner city and into their neighborhoods.29 By 1986, the media had labeled crack the most dangerous drug and had decried the outbreak of a national “crack epidemic.”30
At the same time, popular culture adopted the images of people of color as drug dealers and leaders of violent criminal drug syndicates. Prime-time television featured an increasing number of police shows with drug themes and people of color in the role of kingpin or petty criminal. This attached a certain stigma to all people of color. Because of the profound segregation in housing patterns in this country, research suggests that opinions about people of color held by Whites are often based upon images on television.31 Dorothy Roberts argues that the dominant society is not appalled at the racial disparities in arrests and prison sentences because they believe that African American people are dangerous.32 The media portrays the drug problem as one that primarily exists in communities of color, and the racial disparities in the prison system are viewed, if noticed at all, as reflecting reality rather than reflecting overenforcement or discrimination. The media’s barrage of coverage and images of urban youths involved in drug dealing, coupled with high-profile events such as the death of the Boston Celtics basketball team’s number one college draft pick in 1986, Len Bias, caused politicians to enter the fray.33
Politicians came into the criminal justice debate riding the “tough on crime” bandwagon. They used images that the media had provided. They focused on urban youth, with thinly veiled racial attacks. Using terms like “super-predators,” both Democratic and Republican politicians used front-page and television evening news stories to support their political agendas. Politicians focused on a number of areas, but drug laws and drug convictions were the primary targets. According to the Sentencing Project, one in three Black men between the ages of twenty and twenty-nine is under correctional supervision or control, and approximately 14 percent of Black men have lost their right to vote due to felony convictions.34 These crusades created a range of unrelated sanctions, such as the mandatory suspension of the driver’s license of anyone convicted of a drug offense (even if no car was involved in the crime), but not of rapists, robbers, or murderers. This not only seems illogical but further exemplifies the unbalanced focus on drugs. Politicians also embraced mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenders, adding to the incarceration explosion that took place in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A. The Politics of Race, Crime, and Reentry
The media’s intense focus on race and crime and its interpretation of the “tough on crime” electoral messages of the 1980s and 1990s helped forge a new political direction for the country.35 This direction focused on increasingly punitive sanctions for people of color. A number of researchers have examined the mass media’s role in creating and fueling the focus on crime and the ensuing response of overincarceration,36 and a number of leading theorists, including David Garland, have grappled with the process by which this punitive approach has crept into popular and political language.37 Particularly during the Reagan/Bush administrations, crime and crime control became the political capital through which politicians assumed and maintained electoral power. When this political focus was coupled with media attention on state and local crime issues, the public became willing and vocal supporters of policies that provided some semblance of controlling the crime problem. The expansion of imprisonment became a primary vehicle to accomplish that, especially at the federal level.38
The rush to embrace crime control as a model occurred as the public clamored for answers to the recurring crime problem and as the perception grew that nothing could be done to change the behavior of offenders. Research in the 1970s began to suggest that rehabilitation was limited in its effectiveness as a treatment for addressing criminal behavior. Although first used in relation to prison-based treatment, this research was later used to characterize probation, parole, and other aspects of the criminal justice system.39 Increasingly, sanctions focused on prison as the primary punishment for drug offenses.40 In the directional shift toward custody, we find the seeds for the current crisis in reentry. The 1980s marked the declaration of the War on Drugs and its intensification.41 In fear of being perceived as soft on crime, politicians moved to increase penalties, incarceration, and collateral sanctions with little or no research as to the long-term consequences of these policies.42
Until the 1970s, the focus of criminal justice intervention seemed to be rehabilitation. But in the ‘70s, an array of news stories, features, and research followed up on Robert Martinson’s suggestion in 1974 that “nothing works” in penal rehabilitation efforts.43 This sparked a major retreat from rehabilitation and treatment in prison settings, both in policy work and by therapists themselves. Although recent studies suggest that prison-based treatment can be effective, we have not witnessed an expansion of substance-abuse services.44 The constant barrage by the media of stories detailing—sometimes graphically—the crimes committed by ex-felons fueled the public perception that the crime problem was spiraling dangerously out of control. This intense coverage by the media and conservative public officials led to the ratcheting up of enforcement policies. Criminologist Jonathan Simon has suggested that “governing through crime,” a process by which policy makers substitute punitive crime-control rhetoric for substantive governance, accounts in large part for the fundamental shift in penal practices.45
The 1988 presidential election witnessed Republican propaganda focusing on Willie Horton to call the nation’s attention to race and parole. The Bush campaign used Willie Horton, who had committed murder and rape while on work furlough, both to characterize opponent Michael Dukakis as soft on crime and simultaneously to capitalize on the threat, allegedly posed by Black males generally, that had been steadily cemented in the public mind by a decade of media spin.46 More specifically, the campaign centered on Black parolees and work release, furloughs, and other programs aiding in the reentry of all ex-offenders.47 The political force and persuasiveness of the images, however, paralyzed those who might otherwise have taken a more principled position.48 There was no opposition to this particular issue in the campaign.
The primary political fallout from the combined media and political blitzkrieg of the 1980s was the creation of the Federal Sentencing Guidelines and an array of state mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses. In 1986, Congress created the Federal Sentencing Guidelines, essentially a sentencing grid that maintained a dramatic sentencing differential between crack and powder cocaine. Powder cocaine was widely viewed as the drug of choice for Whites, while crack was demonized and largely associated with people of color in urban communities.49 This sentencing disparity was reinforced in