The Pros And Cons Of Forfeiture Laws

Laws such as the forfeiture laws allows law enforcement agencies to take valuable items with as little evidence and putt the weight on the suspect to prove their own innocence. Depending on the number of drug arrest the funding for drug force will increase, so the police intentionally target low level drug dealers versus violent offenders which then results in over drug arrests and invade poor African American neighborhoods with lack of evidence ( Distorted, 2015).
The CIA was responsible for the crack cocaine epidemic in the 1980s. The CIA used African Americans to sell drugs to fund their secret war in Nicaragua (Delaval, 2014) “ The CIA admitted in 1998 that the guerilla armies it actively supported in Nicaragua were smuggling illegal drugs
The prison population and the incarceration rate both increased in the mid 1970s largely due to violent and property crimes and drug policies would thereby have little effect. Drug offenders only made up about a quarter of the prison population while violent offenders made up half of the prison population. In general only about 17 percent of prisoners are serving time for drug related offences, which is only about 22 percent of the prisons growth (Bradley, 2016). James Forman Jr. explains how the prisons began to grow after street crime quadrupled from 1959 and 1971 and homicide doubled between 1963 and 1974 as robbery tripled. In the 1960s black Harlem residents wanted more police officers in their neighborhoods and many black advocates supported minimum sentencing, especially drug offenders. (Forman, 2012). In 2006, 50 percent were in prison for violent offences, 21 percent for property offences, and 20 percent for drug crimes, consequently violent criminals constitute the majority of the prisoners and not drug offenders (Bradley, 2016). Forman concludes that even if every prisoner who committed drug related offences were released, the United States would still have the largest incarceration rate in the