Social Consequences of the War on Drugs - Essay Example

Criminal justice system in America is currently struggling to deal with the criminal cases with respect to drug abuse. Majority of the jail inmates in America at present are related to drug crimes. Reported drug crimes are increasing at a rate of approximately 1300% every year. In fact officials in criminal justice system have no time to look into matters related to crimes related to other areas because of the flooding of drug crimes. Drug crime penalties and punishments should be increased drastically to prevent people from repeating the same drug crime again and again.

Law enforcement agencies are partly self-financed in America and as a result of that they are less accountable to the public. In other words, drug war has been spread into civilian societies and drugs worth billions have been seized every year. Since drug abuse is more common among teenagers, public schools students in America need to undertake periodical drug tests inside their school campuses even if the school doesn’t have the previous history of drug abuse cases. Even without search warrants, officials can conduct periodical checking in schools and school parking lots as a result of the current drug war policy.

America is confined drug war in its territories alone. They know very well that collective efforts are necessary to counter drug abuse related problems in an extremely globalized world. So, they are trying to persuade other countries, especially neighbouring countries to take strong actions against drug abuse. Some criminologists argue that the creation of more prison capacity may create more crimes whereas limited prison capacity may force the people to stay away from criminal activities. It is a fact that correctional officials may refuse to accept new inmates of the facilities are not enough to accommodate more prisoners.

In such cases, criminal justice system may force to reduce the imprisonment punishments and may focus more on providing other types of penalties. Such punishments need not be as effective as the jail terms. In short, construction of additional prison spaces to accommodate more drug criminals is necessary for the successful implementation of drug war. African Americans are more vulnerable towards drug related crimes compared to Whites. If the drug war continues in its present form for the next 10 years, 6 in 10 African American males in the age group of 18-34 will be in prisons.

In other words, a substantial portion of governmental expenditure will be for increasing the prison capacities and therefore adequate funding may not be received by education and other social programs in future. Thus, construction of the healthy generation will become impossible in future as a result of the shortage of funds used for social activities and infrastructure developments. United States is one of the worst countries in the world as far as labour shortage is concerned. Increased imprisonment of teenagers for drug abuses may increase the labour shortage problem further.

Majority of the drug related prisoners are sentenced for non-violent crimes. Sentences of drug related crimes are comparatively longer than that of other types of crimes. As a result of the long sentencing, drug criminals will become unemployed and marginalization in the society once they were released from