COMING OF AGE DURING WAR BETWEEN THE DRUG PARASTATE AND THE GOVERNMENT

Danielle Allen, Cuz: The Life and Times of Michael A. (New York: Liveright, 2017) ("From 1790 to 1950 the number of mandatory minimums in the federal penal code rose form 7 to 38. From 1980 to 2000 their number rose from 77 to 238. These mandatory minimums have been a key driver in increases in penal severity. "In these years, twenty-five years after the Jets and the Sharks stormed Broadway, the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department created its first gang database. In 1988, after a high-profile drive-by shooting of a bystander near UCLA, the Los Angeles police used that database to round up no fewer than 1,400 African American youth in the L.A. Coliseum and to jail over 18,000 people in six months. One year later, the Los Angles police chief, Daryl Gates, testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee that ' the casual drug user should be taken out and shot.' The African American prison population in California alone grew from 12,470 to 42,296 between 1982 and 1995; the Latino prison population soared from 9,006 60 46,080. This was the city ready to explode when the four police officers who had been captured on video beating Rodney King were acquitted. This was the City of Angeles. Karen and her brood came home to a war between two sovereigns: the parastate of a drug world increasingly linked to gangs on one side, and the California and federal government on the other." Id. at 196. "The historian's backward gaze capture the life-altering convergence of the drug business, gangs, and a newly unforgiving criminal justice system, but while you're living through it, only the smallest fragments--like news reports about crime--are visible. Fragments like police willing to round up 1,400 black men at one time. "Like the Los Angeles riots or, as some call them, rebellions. "Like miles of graffiti. "But what exactly do the fragments amount to? How can we know when we're living though it? What is the name of the problem? As Karen navigated these turbulent waters . . . she could see only a bit of the whale's tail here, a flash of fin there, and now and then the arching crest of the back breaking from the waves. But the whole beast? Never."  Id. at 197.).