J. R. Woodgates
New York’s Seventies-era “Rockefeller Drug Laws” were among the most punitive anti-crime, anti-drug legislation ever passed.
Today in many parts of the USA, civil rights advocates condemn overly-aggressive practices used by police to enforce similar laws, saying they too often target poor and inner-city blacks for punishment.
In his book, Black Silent Majority: The Rockefeller Drug Laws and the Politics of Punishment, political scientist Michael Javen Fortner uncovers the inconvenient truth that the impetus behind the adoption of those harsh Rockefeller laws came mostly from black residents, themselves, in Harlem and other black and minority inner-city neighborhoods where rehabilitation-oriented policies of the day were often seen as being too soft on drug pushers and other neighborhood criminals.
Fortner…is hoping to complicate the story that the Rockefeller laws, and others like them, were foisted on black people by white people.
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