The Rangel Factor

Brad Plumer mentions an underappreciated point:

The War on Drugs, which has contributed more to our mass-incarceration orgy than anything else, strikes me as more than just Jim Crow for the 21st century. After all, as Lazare notes, in 1989 even Jesse Jackson was talking about applying "antiterrorist policies" on drug users and traffickers. Charlie Rangel was attacking Reagan for being soft on the drug menace.

Indeed, when I read Randall Kennedy's Race, Crime, and the Law a few years ago, I was surprised to learn that Rangel was one of the movers behind creating the powder-crack sentencing gap. Not that he specifically wanted to create a gap, as such, but in the 1980s he was head of a Select Committee on narcotics and favored super-harsh sentences for crack as a way to try to protect inner city neighborhoods.

Comments

It's important to keep in mind that they weren't coming to this issue as tabulae rasae. If you'll remember your blaxploitation classics, you'll recall that heroin had a substantial ghetto presence in the '60s and the '70s, and this experience shaped a generation's worth of urban black leaders.

The problem is that the heroin and crack experiences weren't exactly the same. The heroin importation network was heavily centralized - the feds were able to roll up the whole French Connection pretty much at once - and sellers were largely freelancers, coming in at the tail of the operation, after the Mafia had taken the biggest chunk of profit for itself. This was exactly the kind of drug network that *was* vulnerable to a combination of smart interdiction and crackdowns on pushers, and the failure to do so harder and earlier read almost as a willful neglect towards the ghetto.

So, then crack came along, and everyone who'd seen what heroin did to the inner city wanted to stop it in its tracks. Except the cartels were a lot more amorphous and spread out, and interdiction was like nailing jello. And by cooking up powder cocaine into rock and then dividing it for resale, the end-retailer could capture more of the final value, and gangs, many of which had their origins in attempts to clean up the ghetto and kick the pushers out, stepped in, giving the crack sales network a strategic depth heroin never had.

Posted by Senescent | August 19, 2007 4:44 AM

How old were you in 1989, Matt?

Hard drugs were a catastrophe for black neighborhoods. Heroin spread, among much else, AIDS. And cocaine pushes people to act horribly toward each other. Black neighborhoods are a lot better off today with more residents smoking marijuana than crack.

Posted by Steve Sailer | August 19, 2007 6:00 AM

You read that book and you still have no idea how bad NYC for one had it crime-wise during the crack years? The "move to the other side of the street thing when you see several black youths," even if you were black, that was not an urban legend, it was real. What they call a ghetto now, that is like a picnic compared to the way things looked for Afro-Americans then. It was very bleak, nightmarish even; there was death, death, death of young males. (I am really curious whether your parents kept you locked in the house as a child?)

And despite any ideas some might get from Fox News, I have never thought of Rangel as a flaming liberal. He's big pals with Bill Clinton, loves Rubinomics, cottons to a lot of dlc ideas, including rewarding those who "play by the rules," and is very proud of his Army service during the Korean war.

Posted by artappraiser | August 19, 2007 6:25 AM

and is very proud of his Army service during the Korean war.

You sold me! After all, no liberal could possibly be proud of his military service.

Posted by Glenn | August 19, 2007 7:17 AM

oops... shoulda used preview.

Posted by Glenn | August 19, 2007 7:18 AM

Charlie Rangel is a great guy, very old school and like my Dad a PROUD Korea combat vet Democrat (unless your a Kim Il Sung leftist who can't understand that kind of pride)

Though 1 Rangel is better than 10 Jerry Nadlers, he's far from a libertarian and would take a harsh "law man" attitude towards hard drugs

Crack was a scourge in the 80's - crack gangs especially. Hate to distill this down to economics and race but powder coke was a rich (white) man's drug, and crack enabled the poor (usually black) man to get a coke high.

It is the absurdity of drug laws that create these rent-seeking opportunities, particularly for gangs that can arbitrage the profit of cooking coke down into crack forms. It is simply too radical a notion for a 70ish Charlie Rangle that drug laws are THE problem, even as probably thousands of his constituents languish in NY jails under the insane Rockefeller laws. (Nelson Rockefeller was also an old school lib)

Posted by Jozef | August 19, 2007 2:15 PM

With Democrats like Rangel, who needs Republicans? His solution to the "crack epidemic" was to put every black man in prison. Way to go, Charlie!

Posted by ghen | August 21, 2007 12:46 AM

Rangel was simply doing what most American politicians do when faced with drug war demagoguery, he thumped his chest and tried hard to look more intolerant than the next guy. This has been the model since Richard Nixon started the modern drug war in order to reimpose Jim Crow and demagogue a phony right-wing morals platform just five years after the Voting Rights Act was passed.

Last year Ira Glasser, the former head of the ACLU, wrote: "Drug Busts=Jim Crow"

"The fact is, just as Jim Crow laws were a successor system to slavery, so drug prohibition has been a successor to Jim Crow laws in targeting blacks, removing them from civil society and then denying them the right to vote while using their bodies to enhance white political power. Drug prohibition is now the last significant instance of legalized racial discrimination in America.

That many liberals have been at best timid in opposing the drug war and at worst accomplices to its continued escalation is, in light of the racial politics of drug prohibition, a special outrage. It is also politically self-destructive, serving to keep in power white conservatives opposed to everything liberals stand for. Liberals especially, therefore, need to consider attacking the premises upon which this edifice of racial subjugation is based. If they do not, who will?"

Indeed. Who will?

I am saddened the there is no reference on this blog to the Sunday Washington Post column "The Lost War".

The Lost War
Washington Post
By Misha Glenny
Sunday, August 19, 2007; B01
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/08/17/AR2007081701716.html

But then this is America. As the author noted:

"The trade in illegal narcotics begets violence, poverty and tragedy. And wherever I went around the world, gangsters, cops, victims, academics and politicians delivered the same message: The war on drugs is the underlying cause of the misery. Everywhere, that is, except Washington, where a powerful bipartisan consensus has turned the issue into a political third rail."

American politicians are too intersted in getting and holding power than in doing the right thing for the national security, public safety and children of America.

"Sources close to the (kucinich) appointment, who asked not to be named, say that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and other members of the Democratic leadership have effectively embargoed major crime or drug policy legislation for the next two years, to avoid looking soft on crime in the 2008 election. " http://www.mapinc.org/drugnews/v07/n169/a03.html?76820

No matter what national security and public safety threat is posed by the drug war responsible elected Democrats, and it seems their blogerati too, are not permitted, by the Jim Crow leadership of the Democratic Party, to address these vital concerns.

Posted by Pat | August 21, 2007 4:17 PM