End the Bail System!
By Tina Orlandini
Our families and communities need an immediate release of all those incarcerated for marijuana related offenses and an end to money bail as part of the broader movement toward prison abolition in this country.
Hundreds of thousands have been arrested and imprisoned for minor marijuana related offenses. In 2017, approximately 659,700 people were arrested in the United States for marijuana law violations and of that number, about 91 percent were charged with possession only. Unsurprisingly and in keeping with the discriminatory practices of the police through campaigns and policies like the War on Drugs, Stop and Frisk and Broken Windows theory, about 47 percent of the above-mentioned arrests were of Black or Latinx people (drugpolicy.org), and the rest were poor whites. The rich are not arrested.
Louisiana has its own fraught history with strict marijuana laws, criminalizing the use and possession of the drug in nearly every occurrence with the exception of medical marijuana, which was legalized in 2017. While 11 states in the U.S. have legalized recreational use of marijuana, Louisiana continues to lock up its people for the same activity. As Louisiana’s marijuana laws currently stand, penalties include up to 15 days in parish jail and/or up to $300 in fines for possession of up to 14g; up to 6 months in jail and/or $500 in fines for over 14g; and the time and fines go up from there to double-digit-year prison sentences and hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines (findlaw.com).
Here in New Orleans, in 2016 the city passed ordinance 31,148, decriminalizing marijuana possession and allowing for ticketing rather than arrests, but police can still make arrests for possession under state law (Marijuana Policy Project). On top of all this, New Orleans’ antebellum money bail system keeps the accused in jail without the ability to “buy their freedom” even before a trial. This system with clear roots in slavery is now employed as modern-day institutionalized bondage for people of color, poor whites, immigrant and queer folks.
The history of these laws clearly shows the intent was to push mass incarceration and slave labor in prison. In 1971, President Nixon held a press conference announcing the War on Drugs and declaring drug abuse “public enemy number one.” Painted as a “law and order” stance on the proliferation of drug activity in the United States, the media frenzy that followed—as well as related policies and carceral tactics—at their core were simply strategies to neutralize and destroy radical movements burgeoning at the time, in particular those lead by Black revolutionaries. These policies and the War on Drugs were expanded by Ronald Reagan in 1982, and again, validated and proliferated by mainstream media which elevated racist stereotypes in poor Black communities.
Bill Clinton carried the torch with the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, most famous for its implementation of habitual offender laws or three-strikes laws which require a person found guilty of a violent felony and two other offenses (such as drug possession) to serve a mandatory life prison sentence. This law led to bottlenecked courts, the overcrowding of prisons and our current state of mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex. Many of these policies were inherited and maintained by the Obama Administration and the current, outwardly racist administration bares no signs of reform, so here we are today, in the most incarcerated country in the world and the second most incarcerated state, with a large percentage of arrests due to minor offenses like marijuana possession.
