Private prison companies are now listed on the New York Stock exchange and are doing quite well in a time of economic recession (and depression in some communities). But that's just the tip of the iceberg.

Plenty of drug dealing does happen in the 'hood, but it happens everywhere else in America as well. In fact, some studies suggest that where significant differences in the data can be found, white youth are more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth.

The mass criminalization of white men would disturb us to the core.

Defenders of the system will counter by saying this drug war has been aimed at violent crime. But that is not the case. The overwhelming majority of people arrested in the drug war have been arrested for relatively minor, non-violent drug offenses.

As a criminal you have scarcely more rights, and arguably less respect, than a black man living in Alabama at the height of Jim Crow. We have not ended racial caste in America; we have merely redesigned it.

Nothing has contributed more to the systematic mass incarceration of people of color in the United States than the War on Drugs

Now that's hard for many people to believe, given that the media image of a drug dealer is a black kid standing on the street corner with his pants sagging down.