The Vice President of the United States, kamala harris, demanded “immediate release & rdquor; of Brittney Grinerand assured that both she and the president, Joe Bidenthey would work to reunite the athlete with her family as soon as possible.
There is no doubt that Britney Griner’s sentence of no less than nine years in prison for carrying a small amount of cannabis oil in her luggage is totally abusive and that it may just be a perfidious attempt to exchange it for a Russian citizen detained in the US.
But, as Cockburn points out, what about the confirmation by a Mississippi appeals court of the conviction by a popular jury to life in prison without parole of the African-American Allen Russellwho was seized 43.71 grams of marijuana?
In Mississippi, anyone who has spent at least two years in prison for other crimes such as robbery or possession of a firearm without a permit can be sentenced to life without review.
When Russell committed his first crime, burglary was not yet considered a “violent crime” there; if he had not mediated any violence, but the court did not take it into consideration and he will spend the rest of his life in jail.
It is estimated that there are 374,000 people detained daily in US prisons or police stations for crimes, many of them minor, related to drugs.
As he explained in his day John Ehrlichman, former adviser to Richard Nixonthis republican president decided to battle those he considered his main enemies, the pacifist left and African-Americans, using drugs as a pretext.
“We knew, confessed Ehrlichman, that we could not outlaw those who opposed the (Vietnam) war or blacks, but by associating ‘hippies’ with marijuana and blacks with heroin, criminalizing themwe could arrest their leaders, enter their homes, interrupt their meetings and denigrate them night after night on the news.”
The US judicial system imposes sentences on citizens for simple drug possession. And the convicts even if they manage to get out of jail one day, they encounter all kinds of difficulties to get a job or an educational loan in addition to losing the right to vote for life.
According to federal and state statistics cited by the AP agency, between 1975 and 2019 the prison population soared in the US, going from just over 240,000 inmates to 1.43 million, of which one in five had been convicted of drugs.
The incarceration rate for African Americans rose from 600 per 100,000 population in 1970 to 1,808 in 2000; that of Latin Americans did so from 208 to 615 while that of whites rose from 103 to 242.
Related news
Not only Nixon, but later presidents of both parties – the Republican and the Democrat – such as Ronald Reagan, George Bush father and son or Bill Clinton they used the war on drugs as an electoral weapon.
And among its consequences are not only the increase in the prison population in that country, which has the highest prison rate in the world -500 prisoners per 100,000 inhabitants- but also the system of private prisons and the militarization of local police.