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The Real Cost of the War on Drugs Workshop
Sheriff's Car from Kern County, California.
There are seven Community Correction Facilities run
by corporations or municipalities in Kern County,
incarcerating an average of 500 state prisoners each.
Kern County is also home to seven prisons with average
populations of 5,000 people each. Delano, located in
Kern County, has one CCF facility, two prisons and one
prison - Delano II, scheduled to be in opened in April
2005, unless it can be stopped. Not included in these
numbers are state camps, juvenile facilities and
municipal jails.
It was in Delano that Cesar Chavez and Dolores
Huerta organized Mexican-American grape pickers into
the National Farm Workers Association in 1962.
This workshop is a political/economic analysis of
the direct and indirect costs of the War on Drugs,
including:
- Background and history
- Race/class/gender/locality and the war on drugs
- Mandatory minimums and other sentencing issues
- Consequences of targeting the poor and communities of color
- Sentences that never end: disenfranchisement, public housing, education
- Alternatives: harm reduction strategies, de-criminalization, sentencing reform, community-based organizing and others
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