User:Bradenwells/sandbox

I want to add a link to Black Lives Matter in my article.

Here is a new heading

Here is a new sub-heading

Here I am adding a citation to a journal.

Under "Statistics":

Growth in incarceration is largely "concentrated among young black males from impoverished inner-city neighborhoods". Incarceration rates are at least five times higher for black males than for white males across every age group. One in five black males face incarceration at some point in their adult life. Since these numbers have shown that the prison industrial system disproportionately targets these communities, it is impossible to talk about mass incarceration without talking about its impact on minority communities.

The War on Drugs

Around the mid 1980s, the United States' entered a phase of extreme prison population growth which was largely driven by policies that aligned with the War on Drugs. Several federal legislative initiatives passed during this period of time targeting drug offenders. "Not only did the likelihood of receiving a sentence to imprisonment increase dramatically for drug offenders over this period, but so too did the length of sentence they could expect to serve". Before this period, American President Richard Nixon started the War on Drugs by working to criminalize the possession and use of drugs.

Graph showing a growth in incarceration rates

Former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum: "The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people ... We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin, and then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities". War on Drugs measures were later reinstated and expanded during the presidency of Ronald Reagan. President Reagan established the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986 through Congress. According to the Human Rights Watch, legislation like this led to the extreme increase in drug offense imprisonment and "increasing racial disproportions among the arrestees".